Audience Theories

Theorist	Theory
Berger (1995) and Hoynes (1997)	Magic Bullet- The media acts like a needle injected drug into the passive audience.
Blumler and Katz (1974)	Audience Gratification Theory- -          Escapism: Escape from everyday problems and routine. -          Personal identity- seeing yourself reflected in a text. -          Personal Relationships- Feeling a connection with someone within the text. -          Surveillance- keeping up to date with current events.
AUDIENCE THEORIES Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet (1994)	Two Step Flow- Instead of receiving information directly the leaders send out the information they want to hear us through the media and we hear about it through others, this is then passed on through the audiences then the audience will mediate what they have.
Abraham Maslow	Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs- -          Self actualization- morality, creativity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts.  -          Esteem- self esteem, confidence, achievement respect of others, respect by others. -          Love/belonging- friendship, family, sexual intimacy. -          Safety- security of: body, employment, resources, morality, family and health. -          Physiological- breathing, food, water, sex and excretion.
Denis McQuail, James Lull and Richard Kilborn	Uses and Gratifications- Similar to audience gratification theory. An approach to understand why people actively seek out specific media outlets and content for gratification purposes.
Hans Robert Jauss	Reception Theory- Based on Stuart Halls work of encoding/decoding but by using recognised codes and conventions the producer can position the audience somewhat and create a general agreement.
David Morley (1980)	Nationwide Audience- Three positions of a member of the audience might take when watching a program: Dominant (hegemonic reading): The reader shares the programmes code and fully accepts the programmes preferred reading. Negotiated Reading: The reader partly shares the programmes code and broadly accepts the preferred reading but modifies it to their own interests and position. Oppositional Reading: The reader does not share the programmes code and rejects the preferred reading bringing to bear an alternative frame of interpretation.
John Fiske	Genre Structure- Defines genre as attempts to structure some order into the wide range of texts and meanings that circulate in our culture. Recognisable to both the audience and the producer.
Stuart Hall	Encoding/Decoding- Challenged all three components of the mass communications model. It argued that one meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender, secondly that the message is never transparent and finally the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning.