Audience Theories...

It is important that I explore the different audience theories as I need to consider who my target audience are and how the audience will respond/read my video.

Hypodermic Needle Theory is the idea that media can easily influence a large group of people without any opposition. It was believed that mass media can ‘inject’ messages directly into its audience, who will immediately be influenced by it. However this dates back to the 1920’s, and in contrast to this, Halloran stated ‘We must get away from the habit of thinking in terms of what the media do to people and substitute for it the idea of what people do to the media’.

This is suggesting that people nowadays get a lot more involved as to what they want in the media. It tells us that instead of just passively accepting the media we are now more involved and can interact with it. Nowadays, we have a choice as to what media we want to experience, whereas before people had no choice, we can be more selective about types of media, and people nowadays influence the media more, rather than before when the media was massively influencing us. 

The Two Step Flow Theory is the idea that media starts off with individuals (opinion leaders) who pass on their interpretations/ personal influences of the media to others. It states that the majority of people are influenced by the media second-hand, through the beliefs and personal experiences of the opinion leaders.

The Uses and Gratification Theory states that a mass audience is made up of individuals, who consume media for different reasons and in different ways. C.Wright Mills came up with four functions of the media for its audience:

- give individuals identity

- give people goals and aspiration

- give instructions on how to achieve these goals

- give people an alternative if they failed (escapism)

Bulmer and Katz then expanded this theory and stated that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes:

- diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine

- personal relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction

- personal identity - finding yourself reflected in text (learning behaviour and values)

- surveillance - information that could be useful for living

Reception Theory is based on Stuart Halls encoding/decoding of a text. It is the idea that the text is encoded by the producer and decoder by the audience, and there may be differences between peoples reading of the same text. This is due to people’s individual circumstances such as gender, class, age etc. By using recognised codes and conventions, and relating to audiences expectations of the genre, the producer is able to ‘position’ the audience and create an agreement on what the code means, this is known as preferred reading.

When creating my video, I have to take the different audience theories into consideration. It is clear from this that the target audience are not all going to passively consume the media, they will bring their own opinions and experience to the video, so will interpret the video in different ways I want my video to suit people’s genre expectation but to also stand out from other existing videos. I aim for the video to make viewers reflect in their past relationships, as well as create a sense of sympathy for the ex boyfriend, Jonny. It may encourage people to have a goal to possibly get into a new relationship or to reflect in relationships that they may be involved in.