1. Key Concepts: Audiences By Hussain Rashid

2. The 3 Theories:

3. The effects theory is a rather outdated model of audience consumption. It places the power with the text and the institution that created the text. The audience is seen as a single mass that passively receive the messages of the text. It implies that the powerful media ‘inject’ messages into an unquestioning audience. Although, this is considered to be an oversimplified model, it is certainly true that the media can have an enormous effect on people, people can be ‘addicted’ to computer games and certain uses of the internet, governments use media propaganda to further their aims, and advertising is known to be so powerful that certain products, e.g. cigarettes, cannot be advertised on television. Effects Model (Hypodermic needle model)

6. Re-Mediating Audiences A new phase of media use has been entered – audience material (user generated content) is now common. Audiences can now help create the media that was previously only in the hands of institutions. News makers are keen for audiences to send usable material in the form of photos, videos and comments Entertainment formats, like talent shows, put audience members in the spotlight. They also allow audience members to shape the texts by voting on who stays and who goes. We are in the age of the ‘prosumer’ (consumers who produce media texts). The modern approach to studying the consumption of media texts is to refer to ‘audiences’ not the ‘audience’. The plural form suggests the many varied ways in which people may consume the same mass-distributed text.