Audience theory

Hypodermic needle model
The hypodermic needle, developed in the early 20th Century, theory implied that mass media had an immediate and powerful effect on its audiences, and that it could influence a huge group of people directly and uniformly by "injecting" them with messages designed to trigger a desired response. The mass media during the 1940s and 1950s were seen to have a powerful influence on behaviour.
The video below goes into more detail.
credit: Brett Lamb

Two-step flow 
The two-step flow theory says that information from the media moves in two distinct stages. Firstly, individuals (opinion leaders) who pay close attention to the mass media receive the information. Opinion leaders then pass on their own interpretations in addition to the actual media content. Opinions leaders are quite influential, in getting people to change their own attitudes and feelings.

credit: Brett Lamb

Uses and gratifications theory
During the 1960s, it became increasingly apparent that audience made choices about what they did when consuming from the mass media. Rather than being a passive mass, audiences were formed of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons, and in different ways. In 1948, Harold Lasswell suggested that media texts' for individuals and society had the functions of:

  • surveillance
  • correlation
  • entertainment
  • cultural transmission
Researches Blulmer and Katz expanded on this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes:

  • Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine
  • Personal relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction
  • Personal identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts
  • Surveillance - information which could be useful for living e.g. weather reports
credit: Grant Abbitt

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