Relationship with audiences✅

The relationship between the media, their content and presentation, and audiences

  • Much of this chapter has suggested that the patterns of ownership and control of the media, the influence of the media market, the social construction of the news, and the various ways that social groups are represented in the media have some effect on audiences.

  • However, this cannot be taken for granted. People are conscious, thinking human beings, not mindless robots. They might not swallow everything they come across, and they might respond in a variety of ways to what they read, hear or watch on TV or see on the internet.

  • In most cases, a media text is polysemic, meaning that it can be interpreted in different ways by different individuals. For example they might dismiss, reject, ignore, forget, or criticise or give a different reading to a media text from that intended by the producer, and this is likely to be influenced by factors such as their own social experiences, their ethnic group, social class, gender and so on.

  • We also need to be aware that the media comprise only one influence on the way people might think and behave, and there is a wide range of other agencies involved in people socialisation. Families, friends, schools, workplaces, and workmates, churches, social class, ethnicity, gender, disability, age and so on may all influence individual and group behaviour and attitudes. It is therefore very important to weigh the influence of the media alongside these other factors.

Media text - Refers to any media product which describes, defines or represents something, such as a movie or video clip, TV or radio programme, a newspaper or magazine article, a book, a poster, a photo, a popular song etc

Polysemic - A media text can be interpreted in different ways by different people

Methodological problems of researching media effects

  1. It is difficult to establish whether it is actually the media, or other social factors, that cause any alleged effects. For example, if it is shown that those who watch more violence on TV are more aggressive than those who watch less, this might be because people whose social circumstances have made them moe aggressive choose to watch more violent programmes rather than because the media makes them aggressive.

  2. It is almost impossible to disentangle the effects of the media on audiences of things like violence, stereotypes, consumerism, prejudice or the influence of the dominant ideology, from the whole range of other factors influencing people, such as heir social circumstances, experiences and knowledge. Even people exposed to the same media texts do not interpret and react to them in the same way, so there must be some influences on audiences other than the media.

  3. It is hard to establish, with the spread of the new media, which particularly media cause any alleged effects. For example, it could be television, newspapers, movies, any of a vast range of websites, YouTube clips, texts and videos on mobiles and so on.

  4. It is practically impossible to establish what people’s beliefs, values and behaviour might have been without any media influence. For example, neo-Marxists like the GMG argue that the media encourages audiences to accept the cultural hegemony of the dominant class. But how can this media effect be proven? For example, might people have been racist or sexist or supported the dominant ideology anyway, even if they had never been exposed to media influences?

  5. In a media saturated society, everyone is exposed to some form of media, and for all their lives. This means it is almost impossible to compare different effects between those who have been exposed to the media and those who haven’t.

Media effects models

  • There is a range of media effects models, with the differences between them based around two key and related questions:

  1. How passive or active are the audiences? This concerns the extent to which media audiences actively interact or engage with the media they consume: are they passive ‘dopes’ mindlessly consuming media texts, who accept everything the media throws at them, or do they actively interpret and criticise media texts, giving them different meanings and interpretations from that intended, or simply ignore or reject them altogether?

  2. How powerful are the media in affecting audiences? How influential are the media, if at all, compared to other influences on audience behaviour, such as their own experiences or the influence of other agencies of socialisation, like family, peer groups, schools and their local community?