Target Audience Theory

1. Why do audiences choose to consume certain texts?
2. How do they consume texts?
3. What happens when they consume texts?

• There are three theories of audience that we can apply to help us come to a better understanding about the relationship between texts and audience.

1. The Effects Model or the Hypodermic Model
2. The Uses and Gratifications Model
3. Reception Theory

The Effects Model

• The consumption of media texts has an effect or influence upon the audience
• It is normally considered that this effect is negative
• Audiences are passive and powerless to prevent the influence
• The power lies with the message of the text

Also called the Hypodermic Model

• Here, the messages in media texts are injected into the audience by the powerful, syringe-like, media
• The audience is powerless to resist
• Therefore, the media works like a drug and the audience is drugged, addicted, doped or duped.

Key evidence for the Effects Model:

1. The Frankfurt School theorised in the 1920s and 30s that the mass media acted to restrict and control audiences to the benefit of corporate capitalism and governments
2. The Bobo Doll experiment (Conducted by Abert Bandura 1961) - This is a very controversial piece of research that apparently proved that chaildren are prone to copying acts of violent behaviour. Children watched a video where an adult violently attacked a clown toy called a Bobo Doll. The children were then taken to a room with attractive toys that they were not permitted to touch. The children were then led to another room with Bobo Dolls. 88% of the children imitated the violent behaviour that they had earlier views. 8 months later, 40% of the children reproduced the same violent behaviour.

• The Effects Model (backed up by the Bobo Doll experiment) is still the dominant theory used by politicians, some parts of the media and some religious organisations in attributing violence to the consumption of media texts.

Key examples sited as causing or being contributory factors are:

• The film Child's Play 3 in the murder of James Bulger in 1993
• The game Manhunt in the murder of DStefan Pakeerah in 2004 by his friend, Warren LeBlanc
• The film A Clockwork Orange (1971) in a number of rapes and violent acts
• The film Severance (2006) in the murder of Simon Everitt.

• In each case there was a media and political outcry for the texts to be banned
• In some cases laws were changed, films banned and newspapers demanded the burning of films
• Subsequently, in each case it was found that no case could be proven to demonstrate a link between the text and violent acts

• Is is still unlcear that there is any link between the consumption of violent media texts and violent imitative beahviour
• It is also clear the theory is flawed in that many people do watch violent texts and appear not to be influenced
• Therefore a new theory is necessary...

Uses and Gratifications Model

• The Uses and Gratifications Model is the oppostie of the Effects Model
• The audience is active
• The audience uses the text and is not used by it
• The audience uses the text for its own gratification or pleasure

• Here, power lies with the audience not the producers
• This theory emphasises what audiences do with media texts - how and why they use them
• Far from being duped by the media, the audience is free to reject, use or play with media meanings as they see fit
• Audiences therefore use media texts to gratify neds for:
• Diversion
• Escapism
• Information
• Pleasure
• Comparing relationships and lifestyles with one's own
• Sexual stimulation

• Controversially, the theory suggests the consumption of violent images can be helpful rather than harmful
• The theory suggests that audiences act out their violent impulses through the consumption of media violence
• The audience's inclination towards violence is therefore sublimated, and they are less likely to commit violent acts.

Reception Theory

• Given that the Effects Model and the Uses and Gratifications have their problems and limitations a different approach to audiences was developed by the acadmeic Stuart Hall at Birmingham University in the 1970s.
• This considered how texts were encoded with meaning by producers and then decoded (understood) by audiences.
• The theory suggests that:
• When a producer constructs a text it is encoded with a meaning or a message that the producer wishes to convey to the audience
• In some instances audiences will correctly decode the message or meaning and understand what the producer was trying to say
• In some instances the audience will either reject or fail to correctly understand the message.

• Stuart Hall identified three types of audience readings (or decoding) of the text:

1. Dominant or preferred
2. Negotiated
3. Oppositional

1. Dominant

• Where the audience decodes the message as a producer wants them to do and broadly agrees with it
• E.g. watching a political speech and agreeing with it

2. Negotiated

• Where the audience accepts, rejects or refines elements of the text in light of previously held views
• e.g. neither agreeing or disagreeing with the political speech or being disinterested.

3. Oppositional

• Where the dominant meaning is recognised but rejected for cultural, political or ideological reasons
• E.g total rejection of the political speech and active opposition.