1. The Imagined Reader
An introduction to Audience Theory

2. Audience Theories
Theories help you to create new ideas and new ways
of thinking about media audiences and should be
incorporated into your G325 response.
Some ideas:
 Effects.
 Uses and gratifications of the product.
 Reception theory.
 Ethnography.
 Postmodern theory.
 Media 2.0

3. Ideology and Interpellation*
Key example = gender based magazines
Nuts does four things:
1. Represents men to men.
2. Represents men to women.
3. Represents women to men.
4. Represents women to women.
* to identify with a particular idea or identity

4. Men’s magazine covers = women
Women’s magazine covers = women
Why?

5. Complicity* three theorists
 Althusser: interpellation misrecognition
 Winship: complicity and false belonging
 Gauntlett – irony / play
 *the state of being an accomplice
*

6. The active audience
 Marxist ideology theory presents the media as a
controlling force (Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams)
 Effects theories tend to assume a passive audience.
 Reception theory sees audiences as active makers of
meaning.
 Audiences may read the media as the producers intended
(preferred reading - hegemonic).
 They may partly share the preferred response (negotiated
reading)
 They may interpret the text in an alternative way
(oppositional, counter-hegemonic reading).

7. Ownership and Media Power
 A Marxist view of media will focus on the relationship
between the providers of media, broader power structures
and the messages in media products circulated by these
power-holding institutions. This is media hegemony /
ideology theory.
 Outfoxed is a key example.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w39FnpuMRfo
 In the postmodern world it is more complex – eg The
Simpsons mocking Fox, Murdoch buying Myspace.
 Whatever, we do we need to be aware of where media is
coming from and whose interests it might serve.

8. Identity and Locality
 Local Media
 National Media
 Public Service Media
 Commercial Media
 Deregulated Media
 Global Media
 Cultural Imperialism – eg Hollywood film
 Diaspora – eg Bollywood
 Postmodernity
 What happens to our identities?

9. Models of Mass Media
‘Classic’ (outdated or timeless?) models:
 Shannon and Weaver, 1949
 Galtung and Ruge, 1965
 Blumer and Katz,1974

10. Shannon and Weaver, 1949

11. Hypodermic Model
 ‘Effects’ theory is / was often limited to the
idea that the media ‘inject’ messages into
audiences who are seen as passive.
 The constant attempt to ‘prove’ that media
violence creates violent citizens (eg horror
films, video nasties in the 1980s, videogames
now) is based on this false premise.
Gauntlett on effects -
http://www.theory.org.uk/tenthings.htm

12. Galtung and Ruge, 1965
 Gatekeeping the flow of information
 Agents in gatekeeping are owners, editors,
journalists etc who create agendas (eg news
agendas) and then select and construct media
information to fit the agenda.

13. Two Step Flow Model
McQuail and Windahl, 1986
The stars are ‘opinion leaders’
The circles are everyone else

14. Uses and Gratifications
Blumer and Katz, 1974
We USE media (active, not passive) for:
 Diversion
 Personal Relationships
 Personal Identity
 Surveillance

15. Follow Up
 These are basic introductions to some key ‘classic’
audience theories but there are many more and
they are more complex.
 To avoid ‘parodic’ versions of the theories, read
this:
http://www.rdillman.com/HFCL/TUTOR/Media/medi
a2.html