Audience Theories

Passive Audiences

Reception Theory

• preferred / target audiences --> see: audience profiles
• opposed audiences (complain --> censor [age, religion, sex, politics etc.])
• negotiated audiences (move opinion)

Uses & Gratifications

• how we use media & the pleasures we get from that use
• company --> media characters become our friends (informal address)
• social needs --> friends associate with the same products (voyeurism)
• relax --> leisure
• structure & order --> reassurance
• PLEASURE --> scopophilia, reinfication GAZING
• Surveillance, spying (CUs) 
• Escapism (reality) - ASPIRATIONS (Baudrillard + Lyotard) 
• HYPERREALITY - simulacrum, -a (obsession)

Active Audiences

Two-step flow

• criticism of Capitalist media (Marx) 
• influential media --> consider DEGREE OF INFLUENCE
• command words --> Moving audiences from A to B (eg.: shopping)
• Influence (Gramsci) 
• Quantity vs. Quality (Althusser) 
• INTERPELLATION

Hypodermic needle (~ magic bullet)

• injecting an idea --> medical analogy : 'addiction'
• brainwashing / propaganda
• visual violence --> violent behaviour (dismissed!!)
• SHOCK --> horror
• see: Orson Welles radio broadcast  1938 (War of the Worlds) --> people believed they were actually being attacked by aliens
• charity ads: try to make us feel guilty (poverty, maltreated animals, illnesses etc.)