Audience Theory

Hypodermic Needle Theory

It dates from the 1920’s, and was the first method to attempt to explain how mass audiences react to mass media. It is a theory that audiences passively receive media text without challenging it, as if everyone thinks the same and has no opinion. This makes the hypodermic needle theory a very crude model, as you can think of it as text being injected into the brain.

Two-Step Flow

The hypodermic needle theory was starting to get old and prove to be wrong, and so a new theory was set up, called the two-step flow. It is thought that information does not feed into the audience directly; it is first filtered through ‘opinion leaders’. Opinion leaders can therefore have influence over everyone else, and therefore it is known as a two-step flow.

Uses and Gratifications

During the 1960’s, it became apparent that audiences make their own choices about what they do when consuming texts. Therefore audiences are made up of individuals who actively consume texts for different reasons in different ways. In 1948, Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions:

• Surveillance
• Correlation
• Entertainment
• Cultural Transmission 

Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory in 1974, with:

• Diversion
• Personal Relationships
• Personal Identity
• Surveillance

Reception Theory

In the 1980s and 1990s, more work was done to explain how individuals receive and interpret text, and how individual circumstances affect their reading, such as age and gender. The work is based on Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience. So the text is encoded by the producer and then decoded by the reader, and there may be different readings of the same code. Preferred reading is where the producer can position the audience and create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. This is done by using recognised codes and conventions that the reader prefers.