Transcript How do we define an audience?

How do we define an audience?
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A particular grouping of people
Reflects reality of mass society
Agglomerations – many & various
Media one of the primary methods for reaching,
constructing, and influencing audiences
How has communication theory
looked at the audience?
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Stimulus-response
Functionalism
Media effects
Gerbner’s Media Cultivation
Agenda Setting
Uses & Gratifications
Empirical Approaches - measurement
Stimulus-Response Theory
• Audience is fragile, vulnerable, subject to
influence
• Media must be strictly controlled
• Pavlovian response
Harold Lasswell
• Studied propaganda
• Concerned with attitude change
• Hypodermic model” “Why says what in which
channel to whom with what effect?”
Drawbacks of Lasswell’s Model
• Audience members passive message receivers
• Social factors that make up audiences not
considered – where’s the context?
• Results typically skewed & inconsistent
Functionalism
• Sees audience as autonomous
• How do audiences use media content to meet
their psychological & social needs?
• Psychological approach: what impact do the
media have on the behavior of those that use
them?
Functionalist Analysis Applied to
Mass Communication
• Identifies or stipulated terms to be subject of
analysis
• Considers functions of particular way of
organizing mass communication & mass media
• Asks what are regular practices within mass
communication process?
Paul Lazarsfeld
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Effects of mass media
Uses & Gratifications approach
Methods of research
“Two-step flow model”
Criticisms of Functionalist Models
• Does everybody have ability to ‘personally
influence’ the mass media?
• Buying (consumerism) and politics cannot be
easily measured
• Preoccupation with opinion leaders distracts
from looking at media as a complex environment
• Administrative viewpoint
Media Effects
• Post WWII, effects studies become more
sophisticated
• Concentrates on wider social context
• Two—step model> focus switched from
individual to the individual as a member of one
or more social groups
• Klapper’s phenomenistic approach
Gerbner’s Theory of Media
Cultivation
• Part of cultural indicators theory
• G’s thesis is that because we live in such a
media-saturated world, the media dominates our
symbolic environment
• Years looking at television viewing, particularly
effects of media violence
Cultivation research….
• Tests assumptions about consistency & distortion of
television message system
• Tests (survey analysis) public beliefs about social reality
• Investigates institutional processes underlying
production of media content
• Images in media content
• Relationships between TV message + audience beliefs
and behaviors
Agenda-Setting
• McCombs and Shaw (1972)
• Used in context of studying election campaigns
• Advocacy & public opinion
Agenda-Setting Hypothesis
• Public debate represented by salient issues
• Agenda derives from public opinion + political
choice
• Mass media news reflect content & order of
priority of issues
• But…what are the different agendas of the
media, the public, and policy?
Uses & Gratifications Theory
• How do audiences choose their media content?
• How does the media satisfy their everyday
needs?
• Concerned with choice, reception and manner of
response of media audience
• Assumes that audiences make conscious
choices…
Empirical Approaches
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Market share rules!
Print media measured by circulation figures
Broadcast by viewership
Internet by click-streams?
People Meter
Ethics of new Portable People Meter