Audience Theory

I shall do some research into key elements of Audience Theory in order to gain a better

understanding of what affects an audience in modern society; so that I may apply some

more thought into my target audience when creating my Ancillary 1, 2 and main project.

Hypodermic needle:

People being directly influenced by Media Texts.

Here are some examples, from history as well as in more recent

times, where this theory could be applied.

-Need For Speed Video game- Encourages speeding and

dangerous driving. We can see this effect in young drivers

where all childhood experiences involving cars have been in

these types of video games.

-Batman Films – Famous shooting at the Dark Knight Rises Premiere. A young man

killed many people at a Batman Premiere, some would say that this was somewhat

inspired by the films violent theme as killing, shooting, stabbing is a predominant

feature of the films.

-Counterstrike (Online Shooter) - Story reads below:

A 15 year old boy stabbed his mother due to a severe addiction to

the video game “Counterstrike”. Being severely addicted to the

internet can have its consequences and it was those consequences

that his mother wanted to stop by refusing to pay the bills for his

internet. To paraphrase the article, it was these bills that she’d end

up paying for…WITH HER LIFE!

Ionut stabbed his adoptive mother a total of 17 times (which is

usually indicative of some considerable instability) before heading out into town to a

local internet cafe, where he proceeded to play the popular online shooter Counter-

Strike for four hours.

-Hitlers Regime – Let’s not forget how propaganda affected

the German Nation, Hitler employed Joseph Goebbels as

head of propaganda in order to somewhat brain-wash

nearly an entire nation into killing and hating Jews.This lead

up to around 10,000,000 deaths after the war was finished.

As we can see there can be very dire consequences when

propaganda or an addiction to violent media texts takes over

Two-step Flow Theory:

Opinion leaders in modern society:

Some of the major opinion leaders of today are Newspapers, Politicians and Televisions

Stations. They are always throwing their opinions and interpretations on particular

matters in any way they see fit to the masses;virtually controlling the masses thoughts

and opinions.

All of us can be opinion leaders in today’s world due to the advances in modern

technology such as Social Networking, Video Blogs, internet Forums etc…

An example of this working is how a celebrity with a strong opinion may express it via

social media such as Twitter, and thousands of others can re-iterate that same opinion

via their personal accounts; which can in turn be re-posted by their followers and so on.

Uses and Gratifications – My media Experiences:

Media Experience example – Facebook:

Diversion - It is always available, laptops, mobile phones, television (smart tv’s)

which makes it easily accessible 24/7. Diversion in the form of entertainment and basic emotions, eg horror films divert us from the world by entertaining us, also by changing the way we think at night if we are scared by a “monster” we have seen on a scary movie that night.

Personal Relationships- With relationship statuses, tagging in photos, Instant Messaging and posting on each other’s walls the way in which two people can interact is expanded, therefore gratifying the user into allowing their social relationships to be more intense in the way of communicating 24/7.

Personal Identity- You can have your own personal page, information, profile pictures and thoughts all in one. Games like The Sims allow the user to create their own brand new change in personal identity and lifestyle choices.

Surveillance- You can see other peoples personal pages, videos, pictures, relationships, thoughts etc Reality TV shows and documentaries also follow this.

Encoding and Decoding Media Texts – My experiences - Movies:

Preferred reading:Django Unchained/Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino. I have read

into some of his methods, one of these methods is that he will use many vinyl versions

of songs in his movies rather than re-mastered versions. He does this so that the

audience will have the same/similar experience that he feels when he listens to the

music that he will put in his movies. I feel this is a good method of encoding particular

feelings/energy/flow of a song into the movies soundtrack.

Negotiated reading: The Hunger Games – I felt the concept of the film was very good,

yet the way in which it was made with the limits of it being an “Age 12” really ruined the

movie. It made things such as the camerawork just awful; they tried to cram too much

information from the books into the movie leaving questions unanswered. This is a good

example where I think that the producers could not quite encode their messages into

the movie well enough for the audience to decode in a preferred way. I say this because

the movie just lacked emotion and detail; the feelings were there however they were

not very strong.

Oppositional reading: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy- Too little action in the way of

literally no dialogue, music or anything interesting being shown on-screen at many

points in the film. Perhaps I am not the producers’ target audience however I felt

literally no connection to the movie. I thought that there was next to no emotion

brought through possibly due myself not being able to decode some complicated

encoding that was implicated throughout the movie.