How Audience Consume Media

Split into two: Passive and Active

Passive → 1920s - 1970s

    ↳ Hypodermic Needle Theory, Desensitisation

         Passive Audience - more likely to accept the messages encoded in media text without challenge

                                          hence to be more directly affected.

Active → 1970s onward

    ↳ Uses and Gratification Theory, Reception Theory

         Active Audience - engages, interprets and respond to a media text in different ways and may modify

                                        the idea behind.

Hypodermic Needle Theory

Model of communication suggesting an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver.

    ↳ Audience believe everything media says but it is not really considered accurate

Example:

Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds

    ↳ This program talks about an alien invasion; where this program was clearly clarified fictional

         (drama), many people actually believed the news announcement of alien invasion

Desensitisation

Occurs when an audience is repeatedly exposed to shocking or violent content which would numb the effect.

    ↳ Can be both in fiction or factual

         - fictional: children being exposed to violence in family movies (e.g violence in Marvel movies).

         - factual: constant exposure of cases (usually negative) making it less surprising and making

                        audience lose empathy towards victims.

Example:

Repeated news of school shooting news in different years, making it more normalized and less shocking when it’s not supposed to.

Reception Theory

This is when the media creates a message and delivers it to audience (e.g Buy our product) then media producers encode the message with meaning (e.g lighting, costumes fonts) and finally audience decodes the text to understand the producers message.

Everyone may consume media in various ways

Some factors that may affect

    ↳ social class, education, gender, race, age, politics, sexual orientation, religion

Types of readings that can be made by audience:

- Preferred Reading: where audience decodes the text exactly as the producer aims.

- Negotiated Reading: where audience understand the meaning and message but may disagree with

                                     producer’s opinions and/or elements.

- Oppositional Reading: where audience completely reject the texts’ meaning, they may not even engage with the media.

Uses & Gratification Theory

Using media to satisfy base social needs:

- Diversion: form of escapism from stress and strain of everyday life → maybe a type of entertaining

                     media to divert attention from the real world

- Personal Identity: some sort of role models → way to understand our own place in society, to compare

                                  their life experiences with those represented in it

- Social Relationship: can be expressed in two ways → when people make personal connection with the

                                     performer roles or when people connect with others through the media

- Surveillance: people using media to update themselves about the world around them → keeping

                          updated, satisfies curiosity

Classwork Activity (focusing in active theories)

MEDIA EXAMPLE: The Greatest Showman (2017)

Reception theory:

- preferred reading: the whole plot and the meaning of the story where it focus on the greatness of those

who are deemed to be “freaks”. I also specially liked the mise-en-scene of the movie, for example the costumes, the setting, the shots and compositions, and the soundtracks stood out a lot and was really enjoyable.

- negotiated reading: some characters where they may be very judgmental and even racist, but considering the time setting of the movie which was around 1860s, it’s understandable as people during that era was not accepting of anything other than normal and it became one of the thing that drive the plot.

- oppositional reading: - (I liked every aspect of the movie, there were no factors

                                        that I hated especially)

Uses & Gratification theory:

- diversion: as a movie with the really nice aesthetics, it brought me out and it even gave me a slight imagination of if I was one of those performers, it gave me a lot of creative ideas for future use as well.

- personal identity: I especially relate towards Lettie Lutz (played by Keala Settle), this is because I really like her character to begin with, her musicality and confidence but it took me out even more as I was able to understand her in another level, this made me feel like I wanna be someone like her.

- social relationship: As I watch this with my family members, I talk about this movie a lot with them. I also followed some of the actors’ social media from this movie.

- surveillance: This movie was hyped a lot which became one of the reason why I watched the movie, one of the song also went viral in the media platform, Tiktok.