RESEARCH: Audience

Films can attract many different types of audiences; audiences are a group of people who can be identified by gender, age, ethnicity, social group, region of the film and sexual orientation.

  Makers of film treat you as an individual and uses cumulative single shots which when put together creates frames. This gives the illusion of a moving picture to the members of the audience. Demographic audience variables such as their gender, age and ethnicity are what are identified by the film institutions in order to target a specific audience. This means that they presume the audience which will find the film enjoyable.

Many different theorists have studied ‘audience’ in media, more specifically film. 

An extremely successful and known theory is the ‘The Hypodermic Syringe’. The theory produces the idea that the media is similar to a syringe which gets injected into the mind, releasing and forcing ideas, beliefs and attitudes into individuals of that audience. This reflects the idea that the audience is extremely easily influenced. For example if a teenager gets involved in violence; the audience member if he/she is a teenager will go and involve themselves in violence. Another example if a woman is seen to do the washing and ironing, the audience member if she is a woman will go and do the same because it is represented as the right thing to do. The audience in this theory are seen as a powerless sponge which soaks up this information and re-produces it in their everyday actions and life. 

An American sex offender and serial killer ‘Jeffrey Dahmer’ is an example of ‘The Hypodermic Syringe’ at its most extreme. Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen men and boys, before every one of his murdered he would watch  media clips in order to excite and amp himself up in preparation for the murders.

The hypodermic syringe theory is extremely difficult to prove; therefore another more refined theory was made called ‘The Culmination Mode’. The Culmination mode releases the idea that one media text does not have a massive effect however; many years of media text representing the same idea’s waters down the initial idea’s making them seem the ‘norm’. For example; a woman in a media text being portrayed as a housewife and only a house wife whilst the male goes out and has a good time will cause less of an uproar to the audience members the more it is shown, the effect of this is that the audience becomes less bothered about how women are portrayed in the media which reflects society.

Critics argue that it is not the initial media text which causes influence, it is when an individual member watches the film, then conversates with other people and share the experiences from the film and this then sparks up the actions of the individuals.

This leads us to the ‘Two-Step Flow Theory’.   This theory means that the individual members of the audience watch a piece of media text these are known as the ‘opinion leaders’. They receive a message which the media shows to them and then interpreted it in the way they choose to acknowledge it. The term ‘personal influence’ plays a part between the initial media text and the journey of the message received by the opinion leader. The opinion leader have had their own personal experiences and interpret the text the either disagree with the message or respect the actors/actresses part in the media text. The next step of the two-step flow theory is that the opinion leader re-tells what they have seen in the media however in their own perception. The opinion leader works in a way in which convinces the people that he/she re-tell the story too.

The ‘uses and gratification’ approach is the idea that as an individual audience member we all have a use for different types of media text. We all intend on getting some gratification out of the media. This approach was proven by research through qualitative and quantitative questionnaires and observations amongst individual media users. Other methods such as; demographics, usage patterns and rating scales of gratifications and needs were used to conduct the research for this theory.

Information: As an audience we are curious about what is going on in the world and our society, although what we may find is not pleasurable to us we still get a sense of gratification and fulfilment.  The news and documentaries are all media texts which satisfy our needs to learn about what is happening in the world.  

Personal Identity:  We watch media text and analyse each character, we watch how they act and what they say in situations and decide for ourselves if we agree or disagree and create a personal view on the character. We do this to seek guidance on how we want to be and copy the actions of the characters, meaning the fictional characters are highly influential.

Integration and Social Interaction: By watching sitcoms and other media texts we create a bond with them and a relationship although it is a one way ‘friendship’ we use the media to understand and sympathise with the character. We use the knowledge which we have gathered and use it with our real friends and family, creating a sense of understanding with them and a ‘head start’.

Entertainment: Although the above subjects are what have been suggested by a theorist, it is hard to calculate this because we do not watch the media because we directly want to seek guidance. Even if we did directly want to seek guidance, then it is extremely rare that anyone would admit it. We all say that we watch the media text just due to entertainment purposes.

Reception analysis is a theory which suggests that no different person can watch one piece of text and receive the same thing out of it.  We all get different meanings out of texts meaning one piece of media cannot have the same meaning due to the individuals decoding of the text. A reception analyst has proven that the meaning which we get from the different media texts are influenced by our upbringing, gender, ethnicity, age, our status in society and even the time which we are living in. The combination of all the attributes means that we will have a different outcome, meaning of the media text in comparison to another person.