Media Audience Theories & Theorists

Bandura
- the media can influence people directly
- media representations of aggression or violent behaviour can lead to imitation
- due to social networks, people can be influence by media messages without being exposed to them
- different media have different effects e.g., the 'new' media offers opportunities for self-directness
- This is shown through the Bobo Doll in which a child was shown a video of an adult punching a bobo doll and then when the child was given one,

Effects Debate

Gerbner
- exposure to television over long periods of time cultivates standard roles and behaviour
- mean world syndrome (a cynical mistrusting attitude towards others following prolonged exposure to TV violence)
- heavy TV viewing led to mainstreaming (a common outlook on the world based on TV)

Cultivation Theory

Stuart Hall
- encoding-decoding model argues media producers encode preferred meanings into text that the audiences reads in different ways:
- dominant-hegemonic (a preferred reading - accepts messages and the ideas behind it)
- negotiated (accepts the ideas and understands them but disagrees with the message conveyed and negotiates the meaning to fit with their values)
- oppositional (reader reject both the overt message and the underlying ideologies)

Reception Theory

Henry Jenkins
- fans acts as textual poachers (taking elements from media texts to create their own culture)
- the development of 'new' media has accelerated participatory culture in which audiences are active participants rather than passive consumers
- an audience will create online communities, produce new creations, collaborate to solve problems and shape the flow of media which generates collective intelligence
- this therefore implies convergence is a cultural process rather than a technological one

Fandom Theory

Clay Shirky
- due to technological changes, every consumer is now a producer
- traditional media producers would 'filter then publish' whereas new media 'publishes then filters'
- amateur producers have different motivations to professional producers (more emotional, passionate and creative)
this creates a cognitive surplus which means that there is a project which some much time and talent that no traditional media could compare
- the mass audience's predictable behaviour is gone, and it varies across different sites, with some creating, some synthesising and some consuming
- the old media created a mass audience whereas the new media provides a platform for people to produce for each other

End Of Audience Theory