Audiences Theories

Texts are meaningless until they are read/decoded by an audience. The audience are the ones who watch the texts and therefore generate the revenue by doing so.

The first attempt to explain how audiences react to the mass media was the Hypodermic Needle Model, composed in the 1920's when media was first being understood. This model suggests that audiences are passive receivers to the information given out by these media texts. Governments thought then by the power of the media, they could create a proper gander to make people believe what they wanted. Of course, this model seems to be irrelevant these days, as we are active receivers. We receive the information but interpret it for our own. 


Extending on the idea of active receivers, the Reception Theory to explain how the mass media effected their lifestyles and how they receive and interpret their messages. This was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding of the relationship between a text and its audience. The text is encoded by the producer (me in my music video) and is decoded by the audience. There may be differences between these codings, showing that messages can be polysemic (have many meanings). Using recognised codes and conventions though the producer can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreeement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.