Audience

When making any piece of media, the audience of the piece will always need to be considered and addressed. In my case, I will need to consider the target audience of my short film, and tailor the content toward them. To broaden my understanding and awareness of this, I will need to further understand some theories and ideologies behind how the audience receive my final product.

The audience for a media piece could be anyone from a mass group of people to a person sat on their own.

The Effects Model
----------------------
The effects model is associated with quantitive research methods - collating results (e.g examples in answers to questionnaires) and drawing conclusion.

• In 1923 The Frankfurt School theorised (instead of quantity-surveyed) the possible effects of social media. In their case, the response to German fascism's use of radio and film for propaganda purposes. They explored the power of US media, including advertising and entertainment forms. The members developed a variant of Marxism (a method of socio-economic inquiry based upon a materialistic interpretation of historical development, a dialectical view of social change.)  known as Critical Theory. Emphasising the power of corporate capitalism, owning and controlling new media, to restrict and control cultural life in unprecedented ways, creating what they called a 'mass culture' of stupefying conformity, allowing no room for innovation or originality. 

• An altered approach was developed into the theory by researchers into what was then the new phenomenon of television in the 50's & 60's. Alarmed by a perceived in violent acts and their possible relation to the violence represented on the television. Again, they focused on the power of television and the effect it can have on people. Contemporary self-styled 'moral majority' movements tried to have television and other media closely censored, on the assumption that they are the most important cause of a society perceived as increasingly violent. 

• Other researchers from the 40's onwards were interested in issues such as whether or not television affected peoples political attitudes.

Within the effects model the influence of the media, especially television, is often looked upon in a negative way - never positive.  e.g. looking at the kinds of writing (tabloid editorials) that urge censorship, often fall into one or two apparently contradictory positions, further contributing to moral panics:
      • The media produce inactivity, making us look like 'couch potatoes', 'box-watchers' who make no effort to get a job.
      • When the media do produce activity, it is of a bad kind, such as 'copycat' behaviour, or mindless shopping in response to advertising.
      • With these views, in 1976, Gerbner and Gross produced work which suggested that the more television you watch, the more likely you are to have a fearful attitude and perception to the world outside the home.
    

Uses & Gratification Theory
----------------------------------
The uses and gratification model was first introduced in the US in the 40's and is commonly associated with television and socio-pshycological approaches to media. Researchers(often well funded and sometimes associated with advertisers) began to question why people watched television, and later concluded that 'personality types' in the audience gave rise to 'certain needs, some of which are directed to the mass media for satisfaction' (Morley 1991). These needs were grouped into categories: cognitive (learning); affective (emotional satisfaction); tension release (relaxation); personal integrative (help with  issues of personal identity); social integrative (help with issues of social identity).
Unlike the Frankfurt School's theory, this model is clearly not interested in critiquing capitalist mass culture.
Author, Arthur Asa Berger, gave a list of what the media offer to do, and what the audience take from media products:
1. To be amused
2. To see authority figures exalted or deflated
3. To experience the beautiful
4. To have shared experiences with others
5. To satisfy curiosity and be informed
6. To identify with the deity and the divine plan
7. To find distraction and diversion
8. To experience empathy (sharing in the joys and sorrows of others)
9. To experience, in a guilt-free and controlled situation, extreme emotions such as love and hate, the horrible and the terrible, and similar phenomena
10. To find models to imitate
11. To gain an identity
12. To gain information about the world
13. To reinforce our belief in justice
14. To believe in romantic love
15. To believe in magic, the marvelous and the miraculous
16. To see others make mistakes
17. To see order imposed upon the world
18. To participate in history (vicariously)
19. To be purged of unpleasant emotions
20. To obtain outlets for our sexual drives in a guilt-free context
21. To explore taboo subjects with impunity and without risk
22. To experience the ugly
23. To affirm moral, spiritual and cultural values
24. To see villains in action.

Semiotics and Audiences
----------------------------
Semiotic and structuralist approaches to meaning were explored in Britain from the 60's onwards. They promised to understand the making of meaning as a much more mediated, active and social process than a simple counting of elements within media texts. However, the theories, along with speculation from psychoanalytic approaches, were often applied in text-isolated ways. One example was the emphasis of the assumed powers of the Hollywood editing system to stitch or position 'the spectator' in certain ways, making only one reading possible, however unconscious readers were of that position.

One of the most influential arguments was Laura Mulvey's in 1975. Heavily couched in psychoanalytic terms (fetishism, voyeurism, scopophilia), that audiences were masculine, and therefore inevitably voyeuristic positions by Hollywood films, through the ways in which women on screen are portrayed (through lighting, editing, positioning as well as narrative placement) while it is usually the male characters who are doing the looking and have the control over it, therefore allowing them to have control over the narrative. This aroused key questions such as:
• How do female audiences respond to such moments?
• Do lesbian viewers feel reluctant to go along with such attacks on taking pleasure in the female image?
• What happens in genres which try to address a female audience directly?
• Can this theory be applied to television?

The Encoding/Decoding Model
-----------------------------------
In the 70's media theorist Stuart Hall worked with a combination of of semiotic, structuralist and more sociological approaches. Hall's position paper 'the television discourse - encoding and decoding' opposed several previous media approaches. It was written in opposition to 'content analysis' and other approaches assuming an easily measurable, if not transparent, relation between text and audience.
Hall's position went beyond then current uses and gratifications approaches, insisting instead that, far from being  utterly individualised, audience members share certain frameworks of interpretation. That they worked at decoding media texts, rather than being 'affected' in a passive way. The theory tried to focus on:
     • power structures outside the text which shape audience members: class, gender, ethnicity, age etc.
     • power structures within the text and media institutions. These mean that such programmes are often under pressure, or try to promote a preferred reading.

Hall had three types of audience within his theory:
• Dominant, where the reader recognises what a programme's preferred or offered meaning is and broadly agrees with it.
• Oppositional, where the dominant meaning is recognised but rejected for cultural, political or ideological reasons.
• Negotiated: where the reader accepts, rejects or refines elements of the programme in light of perviously held views.
   

Sources:
     Book - The Media Student's Book Third Edition by Gill Branston & Roy Stafford