Analysis- Audience- Theories

How the audience responds to a given text.

Hypodermic Needle Theory- Media texts are like a drug- they directly influence the audience and alter their opinions, attitude and values- (Ideology) - Propaganda.

Effects Debate- Does it actually make the audience at in certain ways? - Children act in certain ways that characters they see in films and on their video games.

In both of these debates they assume the audience is passive (letting themselves influenced by the media text they are taking in).

Encoding and Decoding- The producer encodes the text so the audience can decode it and get what the producer of the text is trying to get across through the codes.  However the audience can decode the text incorrectly; this is called oppositional reading.

-For example:

I have encoded my text with facial expressions and body language within this image as a means of conveying certain ideas to the target audience- however; I do appreciate that the process of decoding from the audience may result in the intended meaning being decoded differently.  (Oppositional reading).

There are a number of ways the audience can go when they de-code a text:

Preferred reading- This is what the producer has intended to get across to the audience and that the audience have decoded it correctly.

Negotiated Reading- Audience agrees with certain elements but not all of the text.

Oppositional Reading- This is when the audience disagree with the ideology or text or de-code it in a manner that was not intended.

Uses and Gratification- In this theory the audience do have an active role in choosing which text to engage with and what aspects of those texts.

With reference to the uses and gratification theory, target audience may well use my text as a means of discovering the latest fashion in clothing/ music/ technology, etc.

Roland Barthes- He was a semiotics professor around the 1950-1960’s. He used to analyse texts.  He said that texts can be either open or closed.  Open texts can be unravelled in a numbers of ways and can have many codes.  Closed texts can only really have one main code that you can derive from the text.

Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author” this links into post modern theory.

Reception Theory-  The audience are actively creative in the construction of meanings from the text.  They control the actual interpretation of the text (de-coding) the producer does not have the final word on what the text actually means to the audience.