Media Studies - Audience Theorists

Media Modelling Effects - Albert Bandura

Concept 1: Violent Behaviours are learned through modelling

• Humans learn much of their behaviour through social interaction

• Social learning can occur as a result of first-hand experience

• Social learning can also occur by ‘watching others’ experiences

Concept 2: Audiences can copy media representation of negative behaviour

• Representational modelling can have a powerful effect on the behaviours of media audiences

• Modelled behaviours by role models and the vivid visual encoding systems of media products further concentrate the effects of representational modelling

• Violence is an endemic feature of media content

Cultivation Theory - George Gerbner

Concept 1: Media products shape attitudes and perceptions of the world at large

• Storytelling performs an enculturation role helping to shape out attitudes and social values

• Mass media has replaced other institutions, most notable religion and education, as the principle constructor of symbolic storytelling

• Television has has a homogenising effect on society - we all watch or engage in the same symbolic stories as a result of mass media

• Television schedules are saturated with violent content that cultivates a widespread fear in society - ‘mean world syndrome’

• The media can produce resonance or mainstreaming effects on audiences

Concept 2: Media consumption leads audiences to accept established power structures and mainstream ideologies

• Mass media narratives create symbolic representations of power that affect out real-world view

• Mass media products over-exaggerate the power and scope of real-world authorities

• Mass media products marginalise alternative viewpoints as a result of middle-of-the-road reportage

Reception Theory - Stuart Hall

Concept 1: Encoding and Decoding

• Professional media encodes message using visual and aural cues

• Media encoding is affected by institutional context, media production processes and genre-driven routines

• Media products are polysemic as a result of their use of visual signs

• Audiences do not necessarily decode the meanings that media producers effect in a straightforward way

• Audiences can misread products if they are too complex or are untranslatable

Concept 2: Dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings

• Media products reinforce dominant ideologies and cultural hegemonies

• Dominant ideologies are subject to change - again, the media plays a crucial role in effecting those changes

• Audiences use ‘situated logics’ to decode media messages

• Audiences can produce readings of products that accept the dominant ideologies they construct

• Audiences can use their contextual knowledge to read against the grain of a media product and to this produce negotiated or oppositional decodings

Fandom - Henry Jenkins

Concept 1: Fans appropriate media texts, producing readings that are not fully authorized by media producers

• Jenkins suggests that audiences are able to use professional texts as ‘creative scaffolding’ on which they craft their own readings of products

• Textual poaching can be used by marginalised fans to explore alternative readings to mainstream culture

• Textual poaching in the digital age can take many forms, including fanfiction, remix culture, fan art, or video parodies

Concept 2: Fans and media makers have converged as a result of digital technology

• Digital technologies have brought audiences and producers together

• The digital revolution has expanded the scope of fandoms

• Producers use their fans’ digital labour to promote and market media

• Contemporary media producers deliberately construct material to engage fan interest

Concept 3: Fan use patriarchy culture to effect wider social change

• Participatory culture is distinctly different from the commercial activities of Web 2.0

• Participatory culture allows individuals to share and develop ideas with a like-minded community

• Participatory culture can create social change

The End of Audience - Clay Shirky

Concept 1: Everybody makes the media

• Shirky highlights the revolutionary impact of digital technology in speeding up media production processes

• Media consumerism patterns have changed from a broadcast model that involves one sender and many recipients to a many-to-many model

• Traditional media, Shirky argues, uses a ‘filter then publish’ model to provide quality content

• Shirky suggests that the internet has resulted in a ‘publish now, filter later’ model due to lower production costs and reduced entry barriers to media production

Concept 2: Everyday communities of practice

• Audiences actively shape their own rules of engagement with professional media products

• Digital technologies have resulted in an explosion of what Shirky calls ‘communities of practice’