MCC1040 05/05/25 - Week 9 Media Audiences
Media and Decolonization
Last week's discussion on media and decolonization, particularly the debate over welcomes and acknowledgements of country, relates to the process of restorative justice. Decolonization addresses historical and contemporary issues of colonialism.
The media is a double-edged sword, acting as both a vehicle for colonialism and a weapon for decolonization. The mediascape serves as both a battlefield and a weapon. Decolonization involves representation, industry, and knowledge, which are interconnected.
Decolonization rejects the notion that Western ideas are universally superior to those from other cultures. This week will focus on the problem of studying the audience.
The Problem of Studying Audiences
Studying audiences can be challenging compared to studying texts, industries, institutions, or markets. The lecture is divided into two parts: the first views the audience as a passive sponge, vulnerable to manipulation. The second sees the audience as active, playing a role in creating meaning, and communication is not a one-way process.
Ideas about audiences have become more complex over the last twenty years.
What is an Audience?
An audience is a key concept in media studies. Media texts are produced with an audience in mind, a group of people who will read, watch, buy, and use the media. Audiences are important to industry, the state, and academics.
Businesses are interested in audiences as their market, and audiences can be commodified through surveillance capitalism. The state seeks to control the media, believing the audience is susceptible to messaging, and regulates the media to influence what people see.
Academics are interested because industry and the state are interested, and because understanding the media is social, cultural, and political; academics want to understand the media's role in shaping the present and future.
Academic studies approach capturing moments of consumption using different theoretical perspectives and methodologies. This research focuses on:
Media content: stories, narratives, images, genres.
Organizations: the relationship between organizations and consumers.
Technologies: how technology shapes the audience.
Most of the time, the audience is imagined and theorized. Understanding what the media does to consumers requires imagining the audience to some extent. Debates continue over the extent of the audience's ability to engage in alternative or oppositional interpretations of the media.
Cultural institutions, bureaucracies, government departments, and businesses use academic ideas about the audience in their operations.
Four Poles of Audience Theory
There are four poles: positive or negative views of the media, and passive or active audience. Theories about the audience generally fall into one of these four categories. Each new medium may create a new audience, with different forms of media offering different ways of being an audience.
Audiences are often divided into two camps: passive, vulnerable, weak or active cultural actors who use the media to create their own meanings and satisfy their own desires.
Passive Audience Theories
Early thinking about the media audience saw them as passive consumers of messages. This idea still persists. Ideas become additive, remaining in the mix even if they are no longer dominant.
Magic Bullet Theory/Hypodermic Model
Harold Lasswell's ideas, known as the magic bullet theory or the hypodermic model, originated in the 1920s and 1930s due to growing fears about the power of mass media. The theory suggests that media meanings are injected into audiences like a hypodermic needle.
This idea gained prominence after World War II, recognizing the media's power but also influenced by the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. The mass media could have deleterious effects, coupled with fears about advertising. There was concern that people would be duped into buying unnecessary products or brainwashed by totalitarian political ideas.
The media's ability to inject itself meant it was dangerous and inescapable, giving the audience no credit for resisting messaging. Violent, antisocial messages would produce violent, antisocial behavior. The media is involved in brainwashing.
One example is the idea that children who watch the Lorax will vote Democrat, highlighting the belief that media can influence political views.
Problems with the Hypodermic Model
The hypodermic model is one-dimensional and born out of fear. It assumes one-way communication, that the audience will all react in the same way, and that a single meaning is imposed on the audience. Even when this theory was popular, it's unlikely people thought everyone took the same message from a film.
However, sometimes people are brainwashed. The problem is that it's not all the time, and not all of us.
Cultivation Theory
Cultivation theory, developed in the late 1960s and 1970s by George Gerbner, examines the impact of common media images on the audience and how the media frame people's attitudes and beliefs. High exposure to media influences our perceptions of the real world. The more we see a version of reality depicted on screen, the more we assume it is accurate.
Viewers may accept the media's point of view over their own experience. Television shapes our view of the world through common, repetitive images. Watching a lot of crime shows may lead to the belief that violence is increasing, even if statistics show cities are becoming safer.
Heavy exposure to television cultivates exaggerated perceptions of violence. The more violence we see, the more we consider it a threat. This bias is called mean world syndrome. Television creates a common ideology and point of view for the audience, and despite different backgrounds, people will start to believe the same things if they consume the same stories.
Mainstreaming and Resonance
This process, called mainstreaming, means that the more we see the same stories, the more we will all start to believe them, shaping our view of the world. Resonance occurs when these stories ring true, and we use them to understand our interactions, internalizing values and accepting them as truth.
We tend to gravitate toward a single point of view if we are told enough by a television station, which we then use to frame our interactions with the world. Moral panics relate to these ideas, with the media focusing on certain issues and values.
Examples include moral panics over pedophiles, video games, and video nasties. There are fears that watching certain movies, like Frozen, will influence children's sexuality. Moral panics are based on the idea that the audience is passive, the victim, and unable to think for itself.
Past moral panics include concerns over crossword puzzles leading to family breakdown and the bicycle making people passive. These are predicated on the idea that the audience is passive, vulnerable, a dupe, stupid, and ignorant.
These theories are still present, with some advocating censorship to protect the audience, believing they cannot make decisions for themselves.
Active Audience Theories
Contrary to passive audience theories, there is a move to argue that the audience is more active than previously theorized.
Uses and Gratifications Theory
Uses and gratifications theory, which has been around since the 1940s, is a reaction against the hypodermic model. It stems from the idea that audiences are complex and select media texts that best suit their needs.
The model suggests that media audiences are active and make decisions about what they consume in relation to their social and cultural settings and their needs. It stresses the agency of the audience, which can use or resist the media, giving the audience a lot of control.
Five Needs Satisfied by Media
Cognitive needs: audiences go to the media to learn, understand the world, explore, and satisfy curiosity.
Affective needs: media appeals to pleasurable experiences and satisfies emotional needs, such as watching football for excitement.
Personal needs: media helps negotiate self-esteem and self-confidence, allowing us to touch our inner feelings. The media helps me negotiate my self esteem, adds to my self confidence.
Social interaction and integration: media forms the basis of families and is a way of doing sociality. Books can be a way of doing friendship. Books become a way of doing friendship. Books may become an index of intimacy.
Psychological needs: media can be an escape from unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and situations, serving as a coping strategy.
According to the Economist, spikes in certain types of watching on Netflix relate to specific events, with people using programs to cope with stress and vulnerability following stressful scenarios and natural disasters.. Spikes in watching programs occur because people are using the program to cope with their sense of their feelings of stress and vulnerability.
Criticisms of Uses and Gratifications Theory
This theory forgets how powerful the media is. If people simply selected whatever media they wanted and used it in whatever way they liked, advertising wouldn't work. It potentially swings the pendulum back too far, overcorrecting the limited perspective proposed by the hypodermic model and cultivation theory. It assumes complete knowledge and awareness of needs, making choices irrational. Also it does not factor in media forms and content. In the view implied in this approach, there's no real differentiation between me watching Paw Patrol or me watching some sort of horror movie.
Psychological depth is lacking, with the theory assuming that the audience consciously satisfies psychological needs. As Sigmund Freud noted, what motivates us is often opaque, driven by desires and drives not present in our rational minds. However, it's an important move away from the idea of the audience being passive.
Reception Theory
Reception theory, linked to Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding ideas, is a 1970s UK theory influenced by European philosophy. Reception analysis is an active audience theory that looks at how audiences interact with media, taking into account their situated culture.
This theory suggests that social experience affects how an audience reads and reacts to media. Reception analysis considers demographic markers, such as gender, and how they influence media engagement. The key theoretical understanding is that women engage with media in a different way from men.
The same text can have different meanings depending on who is reading it and where they are reading it, relying on shared social and cultural resources. Hall argues that the audience's agency depends on their social position. This results in texts having multiple meanings.
David Morley used Shilpaugh's ideas to study a BBC news magazine program called Nationwide, interviewing people who watched it. He found that white, male, middle-class viewers tended to believe the program, while black, single mothers in social housing were more critical. This idea is called structured in dominance.
Those with more social, economic, political, and cultural power are more likely to agree with the view because it reflects their own. Dominant views are not necessarily held by the most people but by those with the most power.
Texts have multiple meanings, and what Nationwide means depends on who is reading it. One can't say in advance whether an audience is passive or active because it depends on their relationship with the text. The text does have a preferred meaning, but how that meaning is communicated depends on who is reading, listening, or watching. There's a marvelously complicated diagram which explains this complex reading relationship.
Three Ways to Read a Text
Accept the dominant meaning: using the same code to decode the text as the coders.
Oppositional reading: rejecting the intended message.
Negotiated reading: accepting some aspects of the preferred meaning, but not totally.
Within negotiated and oppositional readings, there are different positions. The dominant reading is one reading, while there are different negotiated and oppositional readings.
Tomb Raider Example
Dominant reading: celebrates strong, independent women, giving a female character the dominant role and empowering women.
Negotiated reading: questions if it's a diverse representation of femininity and if one can be strong without violence, judging Lara Croft's success by patriarchal models.
Oppositional reading: rejects the girl power message and sees the representations of Croft as a gross exaggeration and oversexualized creation appealing to adolescent straight male fantasies, inducing body shaming and glorifying violence.
It is crucial to consider 'who' reads it in these particular ways. Resistance readings can have deleterious effects. A study of COVID messaging in Nigeria found that resistant readings of the government's messaging led to ignoring public health measures and exacerbated the outbreak. It's inaccurate to think of resistance as perhaps a generally good thing and a dominant reading as an inherently bad one.
Fandom
Fans form parts of communities that have their own regulations of membership. Fan communities themselves sort of authorize certain meanings and understandings of the media of the of their objects of adoration. A good place to see active and engaged readings.
Originally, fandom had often been pathologized as something bad and manipulatable. Increasingly, though, fandom is a more and more common activity that sees individuals engaging with and consuming media. And a particularly telling factor, fans will often break down the consumer producer binary.
Participatory Media and Culture
As media changes, so do audiences. Since the arrival of digital media, especially Web two, there's been a rise in participatory media and culture, blurring the lines between audiences and producers.
There are a lot of people who are consuming the media in ways that are incredibly passive. Doom scrolling represents this act of passively flicking through things one does not even want. As this approach continues, it prompts academics to question to what degree is the idea of audiences necessary.
Detailed Dot Points
Media and Decolonization
Last week's discussion on media and decolonization, particularly the debate over welcomes and acknowledgements of country, relates to the process of restorative justice.
Decolonization addresses historical and contemporary issues of colonialism.
The media is a double-edged sword, acting as both a vehicle for colonialism and a weapon for decolonization.
The mediascape serves as both a battlefield and a weapon.
Decolonization involves:
Representation
Industry
Knowledge
These are interconnected.
Decolonization rejects the notion that Western ideas are universally superior to those from other cultures.
This week will focus on the problem of studying the audience.
The Problem of Studying Audiences
Studying audiences can be challenging compared to studying texts, industries, institutions, or markets.
The lecture is divided into two parts:
The first views the audience as a passive sponge, vulnerable to manipulation.
The second sees the audience as active, playing a role in creating meaning, and communication is not a one-way process.
Ideas about audiences have become more complex over the last twenty years.
What is an Audience?
An audience is a key concept in media studies.
Media texts are produced with an audience in mind, a group of people who will read, watch, buy, and use the media.
Audiences are important to:
Industry
The state
Academics
Businesses are interested in audiences as their market, and audiences can be commodified through surveillance capitalism.
The state seeks to control the media, believing the audience is susceptible to messaging, and regulates the media to influence what people see.
Academics are interested because:
Industry and the state are interested.
Understanding the media is social, cultural, and political.
Academics want to understand the media's role in shaping the present and future.
Academic studies approach capturing moments of consumption using different theoretical perspectives and methodologies.
This research focuses on:
Media content: stories, narratives, images, genres.
Organizations: the relationship between organizations and consumers.
Technologies: how technology shapes the audience.
Most of the time, the audience is imagined and theorized.
Understanding what the media does to consumers requires imagining the audience to some extent.
Debates continue over the extent of the audience's ability to engage in alternative or oppositional interpretations of the media.
Cultural institutions, bureaucracies, government departments, and businesses use academic ideas about the audience in their operations.
Four Poles of Audience Theory
There are four poles:
Positive or negative views of the media
Passive or active audience
Theories about the audience generally fall into one of these four categories.
Each new medium may create a new audience, with different forms of media offering different ways of being an audience.
Audiences are often divided into two camps:
Passive, vulnerable, weak
Active cultural actors who use the media to create their own meanings and satisfy their own desires.
Passive Audience Theories
Early thinking about the media audience saw them as passive consumers of messages.
This idea still persists.
Ideas become additive, remaining in the mix even if they are no longer dominant.
Magic Bullet Theory/Hypodermic Model
Harold Lasswell's ideas, known as the magic bullet theory or the hypodermic model, originated in the 1920s and 1930s due to growing fears about the power of mass media.
The theory suggests that media meanings are injected into audiences like a hypodermic needle.
This idea gained prominence after World War II, recognizing the media's power but also influenced by the rise of totalitarianism in Europe.
The mass media could have deleterious effects, coupled with fears about advertising.
There was concern that people would be duped into buying unnecessary products or brainwashed by totalitarian political ideas.
The media's ability to inject itself meant it was dangerous and inescapable, giving the audience no credit for resisting messaging.
Violent, antisocial messages would produce violent, antisocial behavior.
The media is involved in brainwashing.
One example is the idea that children who watch the Lorax will vote Democrat, highlighting the belief that media can influence political views.
Problems with the Hypodermic Model
The hypodermic model is one-dimensional and born out of fear.
It assumes:
One-way communication
The audience will all react in the same way
A single meaning is imposed on the audience
Even when this theory was popular, it's unlikely people thought everyone took the same message from a film.
However, sometimes people are brainwashed. The problem is that it's not all the time, and not all of us.
Cultivation Theory
Cultivation theory, developed in the late 1960s and 1970s by George Gerbner, examines the impact of common media images on the audience and how the media frame people's attitudes and beliefs.
High exposure to media influences our perceptions of the real world.
The more we see a version of reality depicted on screen, the more we assume it is accurate.
Viewers may accept the media's point of view over their own experience.
Television shapes our view of the world through common, repetitive images.
Watching a lot of crime shows may lead to the belief that violence is increasing, even if statistics show cities are becoming safer.
Heavy exposure to television cultivates exaggerated perceptions of violence.
The more violence we see, the more we consider it a threat. This bias is called mean world syndrome.
Television creates a common ideology and point of view for the audience, and despite different backgrounds, people will start to believe the same things if they consume the same stories.
Mainstreaming and Resonance
This process, called mainstreaming, means that the more we see the same stories, the more we will all start to believe them, shaping our view of the world.
Resonance occurs when these stories ring true, and we use them to understand our interactions, internalizing values and accepting them as truth.
We tend to gravitate toward a single point of view if we are told enough by a television station, which we then use to frame our interactions with the world.
Moral panics relate to these ideas, with the media focusing on certain issues and values.
Examples include moral panics over pedophiles, video games, and video nasties.
There are fears that watching certain movies, like Frozen, will influence children's sexuality.
Moral panics are based on the idea that the audience is passive, the victim, and unable to think for itself.
Past moral panics include concerns over crossword puzzles leading to family breakdown and the bicycle making people passive.
These are predicated on the idea that the audience is passive, vulnerable, a dupe, stupid, and ignorant.
These theories are still present, with some advocating censorship to protect the audience, believing they cannot make decisions for themselves.
Active Audience Theories
Contrary to passive audience theories, there is a move to argue that the audience is more active than previously theorized.
Uses and Gratifications Theory
Uses and gratifications theory, which has been around since the 1940s, is a reaction against the hypodermic model.
It stems from the idea that audiences are complex and select media texts that best suit their needs.
The model suggests that media audiences are active and make decisions about what they consume in relation to their social and cultural settings and their needs.
It stresses the agency of the audience, which can use or resist the media, giving the audience a lot of control.
Five Needs Satisfied by Media
Cognitive needs: audiences go to the media to learn, understand the world, explore, and satisfy curiosity.
Affective needs: media appeals to pleasurable experiences and satisfies emotional needs, such as watching football for excitement.
Personal needs: media helps negotiate self-esteem and self-confidence, allowing us to touch our inner feelings. The media helps me negotiate my self esteem, adds to my self confidence.
Social interaction and integration: media forms the basis of families and is a way of doing sociality. Books can be a way of doing friendship. Books become a way of doing friendship. Books may become an index of intimacy.
Psychological needs: media can be an escape from unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and situations, serving as a coping strategy.
According to the Economist, spikes in certain types of watching on Netflix relate to specific events, with people using programs to cope with stress and vulnerability following stressful scenarios and natural disasters..
Spikes in watching programs occur because people are using the program to cope with their sense of their feelings of stress and vulnerability.
Criticisms of Uses and Gratifications Theory
This theory forgets how powerful the media is.
If people simply selected whatever media they wanted and used it in whatever way they liked, advertising wouldn't work.
It potentially swings the pendulum back too far, overcorrecting the limited perspective proposed by the hypodermic model and cultivation theory.
It assumes complete knowledge and awareness of needs, making choices irrational.
Also it does not factor in media forms and content. In the view implied in this approach, there's no real differentiation between me watching Paw Patrol or me watching some sort of horror movie.
Psychological depth is lacking, with the theory assuming that the audience consciously satisfies psychological needs.
As Sigmund Freud noted, what motivates us is often opaque, driven by desires and drives not present in our rational minds.
However, it's an important move away from the idea of the audience being passive.
Reception Theory
Reception theory, linked to Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding ideas, is a 1970s UK theory influenced by European philosophy.
Reception analysis is an active audience theory that looks at how audiences interact with media, taking into account their situated culture.
This theory suggests that social experience affects how an audience reads and reacts to media.
Reception analysis considers demographic markers, such as gender, and how they influence media engagement.
The key theoretical understanding is that women engage with media in a different way from men.
The same text can have different meanings depending on who is reading it and where they are reading it, relying on shared social and cultural resources.
Hall argues that the audience's agency depends on their social position.
This results in texts having multiple meanings.
David Morley used Shilpaugh's ideas to study a BBC news magazine program called Nationwide, interviewing people who watched it.
He found that white, male, middle-class viewers tended to believe the program, while black, single mothers in social housing were more critical.
This idea is called structured in dominance.
Those with more social, economic, political, and cultural power are more likely to agree with the view because it reflects their own.
Dominant views are not necessarily held by the most people but by those with the most power.
Texts have multiple meanings, and what Nationwide means depends on who is reading it.
One can't say in advance whether an audience is passive or active because it depends on their relationship with the text.
The text does have a preferred meaning, but how that meaning is communicated depends on who is reading, listening, or watching.
There's a marvelously complicated diagram which explains this complex reading relationship.
Three Ways to Read a Text
Accept the dominant meaning: using the same code to decode the text as the coders.
Oppositional reading: rejecting the intended message.
Negotiated reading: accepting some aspects of the preferred meaning, but not totally.
Within negotiated and oppositional readings, there are different positions. The dominant reading is one reading, while there are different negotiated and oppositional readings.
Tomb Raider Example
Dominant reading: celebrates strong, independent women, giving a female character the dominant role and empowering women.
Negotiated reading: questions if it's a diverse representation of femininity and if one can be strong without violence, judging Lara Croft's success by patriarchal models.
Oppositional reading: rejects the girl power message and sees the representations of Croft as a gross exaggeration and oversexualized creation appealing to adolescent straight male fantasies, inducing body shaming and glorifying violence.
It is crucial to consider 'who' reads it in these particular ways. Resistance readings can have deleterious effects.
A study of COVID messaging in Nigeria found that resistant readings of the government's messaging led to ignoring public health measures and exacerbated the outbreak.
It's inaccurate to think of resistance as perhaps a generally good thing and a dominant reading as an inherently bad one.
Fandom
Fans form parts of communities that have their own regulations of membership.
Fan communities themselves sort of authorize certain meanings and understandings of the media of the of their objects of adoration.
A good place to see active and engaged readings.
Originally, fandom had often been pathologized as something bad and manipulatable.
Increasingly, though, fandom is a more and more common activity that sees individuals engaging with and consuming media.
And a particularly telling factor, fans will often break down the consumer producer binary.
Participatory Media and Culture
As media changes, so do audiences.
Since the arrival of digital media, especially Web two, there's been a rise in participatory media and culture, blurring the lines between audiences and producers.
There are a lot of people who are consuming content not just as passive viewers but as active participants, contributing their own creations and influencing the media landscape. (producers + consumers = prosumer?)