Relation between mass media and audience Essay Example

of media. Researchers in the fifties also supported the Effects model when exploring the potential of the new medium of television. Researchers were particularly concerned over increases in the representation of violent acts on television, which correlated with increases in violent acts in society. In the nineties, there was considerable concern over what were called "video nasties".

The tabloid papers created a moral panic over whether particular violet films could influence child behaviour – and whether Childs Play 3 influenced the child killers of Jamie Bulger. However, theorists since have thought that media could not have such direct effects on the audiences they serve, and consider the media as a comparatively weak influence in moulding individual beliefs, opinions and attitudes. Other factors present in society, such as personal contact and religion, are more likely to influence people.

The Effects model is considered to be an inadequate representation of the communication between media and the public, as it does not take into account the audience as individuals with their own beliefs, opinions, ideals and attitudes: Audiences are not blank sheets of paper on which media messages can be written; members of an audience will have prior attitudes and beliefs which will determine how effective media messages are. (Abercrombie 1996, 140) Supporters of the Effects model assume the audience is passive in the receiving and interpretation of media texts. Great emphasis is placed on the text itself and its power to directly influence the audience.

Meanings in the text are readily available and easy to find. The impossibility to measure media effects is as a result of not being able to isolate the media from

all the other potential influences at work in society. This leads to the Effects model generally being disregarded when considering the audiences response to the media. A new approach to the dynamics of audience/text relationship was suggested in the Uses and Gratification model. In this model, theorists were not asking how the media effects audiences, but how were the audiences using the media.

They suggested that audiences had specific needs and actively turned to the media to consume various texts to a satisfaction of these needs. The audience in Uses and Gratifications were seen as active, as opposed to passive audience in the Effects model. Uses and Gratifications acknowledged that the audience had a choice of texts from which to chose from and satisfy their needs. Blumler and Katz (1974) suggested that there were four main needs of television audiences that are satisfied by television.

These included – Diversion (a form of escaping from the pressures of every day), Personal Relationships (where the viewer gains companionship, either with the television characters, or through conversations with others about television), Personal Identity (where the viewer is able to compare their life with the lives of characters and situations on television, to explore, re-affirm or question their personal identity) and Surveillance (where the media are looked upon for a supply of information about what is happening in the world).

While acknowledging that the audience are active and chose what to watch, the Uses and Gratifications model as a model for understanding audiences also has its limitations. The model still implies that messages are packages of information that all the audience will read as the same.

It does not consider how the messages are interpreted or any other factors affecting the audience’s interpretation. Another criticism is that of the tendency to concentrate solely on why audiences consume the media rather than extending the investigation to discover what meanings and interpretations are produced and in what circumstances, i.e. how the media are received. (O’Sullivan, Dutton & Rayner 1994, 131)

The Uses and Gratification model assumes that the audience’s wish for satisfaction results in a media output to fulfil their desire, rather than acknowledging that audiences have to enjoy whatever is produced by the media. Both the Effects and the Uses and Gratifications model ignore to some extent the audience and their social backgrounds, how they form their interpretations of the media messages and their specific relationship with the media text. In the 70s, the academic journal Screen suggested that audiences were positioned by the media text.

Theorists started to take an approach influenced by semiotics and structuralism, to discover what meanings were made from texts and how this meaning was achieved. Great emphasis was placed on the text, particularly film. Screen thought that the position of the viewer of Hollywood film was determined for them through the use of camera shots. For example, the shot/reverse shot commonly used during dialogue enabled the viewer to position themselves as one of the characters. Another example is a close up of somebody who then looks offscreen.

The next shot of the object that the character is looking at is shown, again placing the viewer in the position of the character. Writers, such as Laura Mulvey considered the "gaze" in Hollywood film to

be a masculine gaze, where the camera shots adopt the male gaze and constructing the female as the object of that gaze. Screen theory suggested that all media texts have a "mode of address" – a term used by semioticians which proposes that media texts address its intended audience in a particular way, establishing a relationship between the producer of the text and the media’s audience.

The mode of address is dependant on the particular medium. For instance, cinema rarely addresses the audience directly. Films are usually shot to suggest the film is reality. In comedy characters occasionally look into the camera. Recently there has be a trend in which films have become self-reflexive, drawing on and manipulating the conventions of the audience’s expectations of the medium. The "Scream" films are a good example of this. Television differs from cinema, as the audience are not expected to pay the attention which cinema demands, so television has to work to attain and maintain the audience’s attention.