Audience Theories

The Magic Bullet Theory

• Berger 1995, Hoynes 1997

• Graphically assumes that the media's message is a bullet fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head“.

Audience Gratification Theory

• Blumer and Katz• This approach also takes account of people’s

personalities and personal needs and suggests that audience’s find different needs satisfied by different texts.

• Escapism - Escape from everyday problems and routine, Personal Identity - Seeing yourself reflected in texts Personal Relationships - Finding a connection with someone in a text Surveillance - Keeping up to date with news and current information

Two Step Flow Theory

• Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet 1994

• That informal, personal contacts were mentioned far more frequently than exposure to radio or newspaper as sources of influence on voting behaviour

• Word of Mouth

Encoding & Decoding Theory

• Stuart Hall

• The media encodes messages within texts for audiences to decode. The audience does not simply passively accept a text and decode these messages according to their lives and what is relevant to them to interpret it in the way they want

Genre Theories

http://www.slideshare.net/HeworthMedia/genre-theory-6920670

Genre may offer various emotional pleasures such as empathy and escapism.

Tom Ryall

• Genre provides a framework of structuring rules, in the shape of patterns/forms/styles/structures, which acts as a form of ‘supervision’ over the work of production of filmmakers and the work of reading by the audience.

• If we expect to see certain codes and conventions from certain genres then it is a way for producers meeting audience expectations.

• Genres follow certain structures and elements in creating a genre. Producers are known to be auteurs who are recognised for the type of products produced, therefore the elements to that genre remain unchanged.

Steve Neale

• Believes that genre is derived from 'repetition and difference‘• He believes there would be no pleasure without difference. • ‘genres are instances of repetition and difference’ and ‘difference

is absolutely essential to the economy of genre’ mere repetition would not attract an audience.

Here he is saying that if genres were the same, it would be boring however there are producers and companies who create the same type of film because it is expected of them and they can continue to be able to engage their audience every time. ‘Pleasure is derived from repetition and difference’Audiences like to enjoy the same type of film genre but also love an element of difference. Time changes and therefore so does genre.

David Buckingham

• “genre is not simply given by the culture: rather it is in a constant process of negotiation and change.

• He believes that we make our own decisions on what a genre is and we can always have a degree of difference.

Deborah Knight

• ‘satisfaction is guaranteed with genre; the deferral of the inevitable provides the additional pleasure of prolonged anticipation.’

David Bordwell

• 'any theme may appear in any genre'

• 'could argue that no set of necessary and sufficient conditions can mark off genres from other sorts of groupings in ways that all experts or film-goers would find acceptable'.

• He believes that genres have become unpredictable and it has become harder to define them.

Gill Branston & Roy Stafford

• Ideas derived from Neale. Believes that genres are 'no longer fixed elements but repertoires of elements'.

• Hybrid genres have come to change the way we view cinema.

• Genre is often known to have simple boundaries but there are always both repetition and difference in genre products.

• Elements of both Neale and Ryall.

Narrative Theories

Claude Levi Strauss

• Constant creation of conflict/opposition. Opposition can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic).

• Binary Oppositions.

Roland Barthes

• Enigma Code – The narrative will establish enigmas or mysteries as it goes along.

• Unravelling the narrative from different angles creating more than one meaning

Propp & Todorov

• Hero = protagonist

• Villain = antagonist

David Bordwell

• Audiences assume the film process within the narrative – familiar objects and concepts.

Representation Theories

Richard Dyer

• “How we are seen determines how we are treated, how we treat others is based on how we see them. How we see them comes from representation

Roland Barthes

• Semiotics theory explained that the use of signs and signifiers contribute towards representation

Collective Identity

Youth as rebels – morally accepted to act this way in society, as it isn't

expected for adults to act this way.

David Buckingham

• “A focus on identity requires us to pay closer attention to the ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequences for social groups”.

• “Identity is an ambiguous and slippery term”

Henri Jenkins

• Teens are constantly updating and customising their profiles online adding photos and songs and posting to each other’s virtual ‘walls’. While this could be interpreted as just playing around, these activities could also be a means to construct an experiment with their identity. In particular, it can be a space for exploring one’s gender identification and sexuality

Merleau Ponty

• We have an embodied experience and anything in which we use our bodies to create, we help builds our identity.

Post Modernism

• Our reality is constructed and led by the Mass Media

Strinati

• Post modernism is said to describe the emergence of a social order in which the importance and power of the mass Media and popular culture means that they govern and shape all other forms of social relationships. Popular culture signs and Media images increasingly dominate our sense of reality and the way we define ourselves in the world around us. Now reality can only be defined by surface reflections in a mirror

Michel Foucault

• We are born with a basic construction of identity. Our identity mediates as we get older and meet other people creating a collective identity. However, it can be limited because a stereotypical view is created and portrayed as assumptions are made.

Jacques Lacan

• - Mirror Stage

• “we try to gain an understanding of ourselves by looking through a mirror”

• Child begins to develop their identity by ‘mirroring’ what they see (media)

• ‘reflecting behaviour’ – the media being our mirror.

• David Gauntlett• Anthony Giddens• Merleau ponty• Michel foucault• marxism• Post Modernism• Stranti -

http://rwash.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/strinati-%E2%80%93-introduction-to-theories-of-popular-culture/

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