Audience Theory

1). why do audiences choose to consume certain texts?
2). how do they consume the texts?
3). what happens when they consume the texts?

There are three theories that we can appl to help us come to a better understanding about the relationship between text and audience:

• the effects model or the hypodermic model
• the uses and gratifications model
• reception theory

The effects model is the consumption of media texts that have an effect or that influence upon the audience. Audiences are passive and powerless to prevent the influence and the power lies with the message of the text. This is also known as the hypodermic model, where the message in media texts are injected in to the audience by a powerful "syring-like" media. The audience is powerless to resisit, therefore the media works like a drug and the audience is drugged and addicted.

Key evidence for the effects model includes: the frankfurt school theorised in the 1920's and 1930's that the mass media acted to restrict and control audiences to th benifit of corporate capitalism and governments. The Bobo Doll experiment is a very controversal piece of research that apparently proved that children copy violent behaviour.

Examples that are sited as causing or being contributory factors are:

• film child play is argued to be the influence of the murder of Jams Bulger in 1993
• game manhunt influenced the murder of Stefan Pakeerah in 2004
• film clockwork orange for a number of rapes and violent attacks in 1971
• film severance contributed to the influence for the murder of Simon Everitt in 2006