Audience Theorists

Question 1

Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory

Answer 1

• States that media texts are encoded by producers then decoded by audiences.
• Different spectators will decode the text the text in separate ways:
• Dominant reading the consumer decodes encoded message and widely agrees with. (Passive audience)
• Negotiated reading- The producers encode a message which the audience can decode but can see what the producers want them to be able to think and form their own opinions combining the one the producers want them to have and their own view.
  Oppositional reading- The audience completely reject the message the producers have coded within the media product.

Question 1

Four Needs Theory/ Uses and Gratification

Answer 1

• Involves the reason people chose and use certain media products. There are 4 reasons:
• Personal identity: Relating to the content, seeing yourself in a character for example.
• Entertainment and diversion: Escapism, to distract yourself from your own life.
• Surveillance and information:To gain knowledge of certain topic or interest.
• Personal companionship: Getting to know the media product as though it is a friend.

Question 2

Dyer’s Utopian Solutions Theory

Answer 2

Suggested that the media fulfils our needs and compensates for what we lack in our own lives:
- Transparency: finding out what is really happening, seeing behind the scenes, seeing into hidden or private places.
- Energy: seeing people involved in very energetic activities, including sports.
- Intensity: the emotional drama and excitement of conflict, arguments, tension and suspense, life, and death situations.
- Community: working as a team, having a group of friends, neighbours, a community who need you.
- Abundance: the plentiful supply of money or material goods such as clothes, technology, cars.

Question 3

Clay Shirky’s End of Audiences Theory

Answer 3

• Audience members as passive consumers of mass media content is no longer possible in the age of the Internet. Media consumers have become prosumers who ‘speak back to’ the media in various ways, creating and sharing content with one another.

End of passive audiences

Question 4

Henry Jenkins Fandom Theory

Answer 4

• Believes that fans plays a key role in the media.
• His theory involves a key phrase which is
  “Textual Poaching”
• Textual Poaching = audiences taking a media product and remaking or reworking it to create their own meaning