Audience Theory

Audience = Demographic


A - Top Management, Bankers, Layers, Doctors, etc
B - Middle Management - Teachers, Graphic Designers and other creators
C - Office Supervisors, Junior Management, Nurses, Specialist etc
C2 - Skilled Workers,  Trades-person (White Collar)
D - Semi-Skilled and Unskilled manual workers (Blue Collar)
E - Unemployed, Students, Pensioners, Casual Workers



Blumar and Katz


Uses and Gratification theory

• To be informed or educated
• In order to identify with characters and situations 
• To be entertained 
• To enable themselves to socially interact with others (by watching, listening or reading together or through discussion of what they'd seem, read or heard)
• To escape from their daily troubles and woes 

Hypodermic Needle

• This theory was developed in the 1920's 
• Media was still relatively new
• It was very crude in it's opinion of the general public 

Suggests that media happens to people and they have no free choice in whether or not to interact with, and experience, intelligence and opinions of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text. As an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media text, and that are behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers.

Reception Theory

This theory looks at individual circumstances (Gender, Age, Ethnicity).

The text is encoded by the producer,meaning that the person who made it intended for it to be read and interpreted in a certain way. 

The text is therefore decoded by the audience, however, an audience consists of hundreds to thousands  or even millions of people who decode things in different ways.  

How will I us audeince theory in me media coursework?

I will use audeince theory for when I am analysing film trailers, when i'm analysing film posters. Like if I am analysing a film trailer I will look at the narrative theory to see how the story is told in the trailer as this theory explores the conventions of:

• Genre
• Character
• Form
• Time

I will also analyse the trailer by looking at the Linear Structure, which consists of looking at the Beginning, Middle and End of the trailer.I will also look at the Vladimir Propp theory to see who is the hero or the villain in the trailer because he believes you can classify characters and their actions into clearly defined roles.Lastly when I am analysing trailer I will refer to the Claude Levi-strauss theory which is about the Binary Oppositions.

I will use the Narrative Theory when analysing posters so I know what genre the poster is by just looking at the main image.