Two step flow model (active) ✅

Active audiences

Active audience models of media effects see the media as less influential than the passive audience approach of the hypodermic syringe model. They believe that audiences are not homogenous, and that they vary in terms of social characteristics like age, social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, education and personal experiences. These factors will influence their choices in the way they use the media, what they use them for, and the ways they interpret media texts.

Two-step flow model

• The weaknesses of the hypodermic syringe model are tackled by what is known as the two-step flow model, developed by Katz and Lazarsfeld. This model of media influence suggests that the media still have quite strong effects on audiences, but they do not simply passively and directly react to media content, and will reposed in a variety of ways to it.

• They key factor affecting these responses is the influence of ‘opinion leaders’ in the social networks (like contacts and friends in the family, at work, school or college) to which audiences belong.

• Opinion leaders are those respected members of any social group who get information and form views from the media, who lead opinion and discussion in their social groups, and whom others listen to and take notice of. It might, for example, be a sociology teacher or an assertive and popular student whose views others tend to take notice of.

• The model suggests that opinion leaders select, interpret and filter media texts before they reach mass audiences, and form their own opinions and interpretations of them (the 1st step). Opinion leaders then selectively pass on these messages, which contain their own opinions and interpretations, to others in their social groups (the 2nd step).

• Audiences therefore receive and are influenced by mediated - or altered and interpreted - messages received from opinion leaders whose views and opinions they respect. Members of these groups may then, in turn, pass on their opinions to others, in a kind of chain reaction leading from one person or group to another.

• This model recognises that media audiences are not a mass of isolated individuals, but that the social groups to which people belong influence the opinions they hold and how they respond to and interpret media content.

Limitations of the two-step flow model

1. There are probably more than two steps in the media’s influence. Media content could be selected and interpreted by many different individuals in different groups. For example, parents (as opinion leaders) may have one view, and opinion leading workmate another view, and a sociology teacher still another. This might mean ideas and interpretations of media content can get bounced around in discussions in a variety of groups, creating many steps in the flow of media influence.

2. It still rests on the basic assumption that the influence of the media flows from the media to the audience, and assumes that media audiences are more or less victims of media content, even if media messages are mediated first by opinion leaders.

3. It suggests that people are very vulnerable to influence and manipulation by opinion leaders. It does not recognise that people may have views, opinions and experiences of their own on which to base their views of media content.

4. It suggests the audience is divided into ‘active’ viewers/readers (the opinion leaders) and ‘passive’ viewers/readers who are influenced by the opinion leaders. It doesn’t explain why opinion leaders are directly influenced by media content when others in the audience are not.

5. With the rise of the new media and social networking sites, the role of opinion leaders may be less influential, or replaced by a huge and diverse range of opinion leaders, as people receive a diversity of mediated messages from Facebook contacts, blogs, YouTube, and so on.