Audience TheoryA Major Tool in Understanding Media

Five Main Traditions of Audience Study

• Humanistic Approaches:

• Literary Criticism

• Cultural Studies

• Reception Analysis

• Social Science Approaches:

• Uses and Gratifications Research

• Effects Research

Humanistic Approaches stem from traditions of literary criticism and cultural studies

They are systems of thought but not formalized like scientific laws, with the goal to examine how media discourse come to carry specific meaning to participants, particularly in a social context.

Audiences Negotiate Meaning

If the media provides us with much of the material upon which we build our picture of reality, each of us finds or "negotiates" meaning according to individual factors:

personal needs and anxieties the pleasures or troubles of the day racial cultural/ethnic and gender sexual attitudes family and cultural background moral standpoint

• These ads could be interpreted very differently

Audiences Read Meaning

• Meanings shift and "reality" becomes a relative term, so that romance fiction, for example, can be simultaneously a racial discourse, a misogynistic conceit, and a tale of the working class.

• Lady Gaga has one meaning in North American Popular Culture and another in a strict Muslim family

Concepts of Audience

Fragmentation of audiences over the last 50 years Broadcasting vs. narrowcasting Large and small audiences, general and specialized audiences Part of a larger shift in terms of the break down of traditional notions of class

Questioning Audience Theory

• Some Critics Say:

• “while looking at very specific audiences may reveal the “truth” of individual response, it undermines the possibility of generalization about influence. This is the disadvantage of detailed ethnographic surveys. “Much audience theory remains over-concerned with the microscopic worldview of socially dispersed viewers, readers and listeners.”

The Story of Hush Puppies

found in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”

Commodified Audience

Audience desires are commodities to be bought and sold Desire for audience profile: VALS, demographics Is audience simply numbers, sales, hits, box office scores? Demographic –in terms of its age, sex, race, cultural background, and income. Psychographics – defining a group according to characteristics that describe their wants and desires. ‘Early adopters’ vs ‘Late adopters’

Reading Audience

Preferred reading: meaning intended by the producer Alternative reading: is one that produces meaning which were not intended by the producer but which do not seriously challenge the dominant meaning Oppositional reading is one which challenges the dominance and implies a degree of intellectual autonomy in the reader. This kind of analysis also tends to deal in ideology, so that dominant meanings are also about the dominant ideology

Two Theories on Audience

Uses and gratifications: Informational needs Personal needs such as maintenance of identity; Social needs, not least for forms of interaction; Entertainment needs, including the need for kinds of diversion

Ethnography - A Type of Reception Studies

• Active audiences, seeks to address the qualitative nature of audience, audience-hood as lived experience