Audience Theory: From Passive to Active

How do audiences “read”, interpret, and interact with media products?

A bit of history

When Media Studies first started as a “serious” discipline, the focus was very much with the effects that the media had on the audience. This approach saw the audience as a passive mass, being brainwashed by the messages that flooded them from TV, newspapers, films, the radio and so on.  In effects theory, the media are powerful, negative forces who control the masses.  The media is seen as a hypodermic needle , injecting our helpless minds with messages which we take on board fully.  The effects model is still in evidence today, particularly in tabloid newspapers who construct moral panics around the latest buzz in the media- rap music videos, horror movies, Facebook and so on. 

Moral Panics

Moral panics happen when members of a society and culture become outraged, fearful and upset by the challenges and menaces posed to 'their' accepted values and ways of life, by the activities of groups defined as deviant.  These could be violent extremists, teenagers, or an organisation / idea such as the internet, or facebook.

What recent examples can you think of moral panics?

A more active audience?

In more recent years in Media Studies, there has been an increasing acceptance that the audience didn’t just operate as a big “mass”.  This recognised that people from different types of backgrounds had varying “readings” or interpretations of the media.  This approach sees the audience as active, rather than passive, making their own meaning.  It is known as uses and gratifications theory. The audience has a set of needs which the media in one form or another meet.   Blumler and Katz in 1974 identified four broad needs that were fulfilled by television viewers:

• Diversion- a form of escape or release from everyday pressures
• Personal relationships- companionship through identifying with TV characters and sociability through discussion about TV with other people
• Personal identity- the ability to compare one’s own life with the characters and situations portrayed and explore individual problems and perspectives
• Surveillance- information about “what’s going on” in the world.

Modes of reception

As we have recognised that audiences are often active, rather than passive, there have been three modes of reception recognised.  These describe the ways in which we receive media messages:

Primary: The audience is fully absorbed with the media message, for example in a darkened cinema

Secondary: The audience is paying attention, but is also doing something else. For example eating their tea in front of the TV, whilst chatting to family

Tertiary: The audience has minimal engagement with the media, for example, barely noticing billboard advertisements whilst on the bus.

A 21^st century approach to audience: Media Studies 2.0?

You may have heard of the term Web 2.0 to refer to the internet in its most recent form as creative and highly interactive.  The Media writer David Gauntlett has suggested a possible parallel in Media Studies 2.0 (2006).  Gauntlett suggests that in today’s Media world, the lines between producers and audiences have become blurred, and that now all of us are media experts.  He recognises with the predominance of the internet and converging media industries, that YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and similar have potentially made all of us producers, active audiences, and sophisticated participators.  In these examples, it is the audience who has control over the message, not a big institution.  Even the larger, well-established institutions such as the BBC have picked up on this spirit of audience as participator, with the predominance of interactive services, blogs and the like.  The following quotation summarises Gauntlett’s Media Studies 2.0 very nicely:

“..the arrival of new media within the mainstream has had an impact, bringing  vitality and creativity to the whole area, as well as whole new areas for exploration (especially around the idea of “interactivity”).  In particular, the fact that it is quite easy for media students to be reasonably slick media producers in the online environment, means that we are all more actively engaged with questions of creation, distribution and audience.”