Key Concepts - Audience

Introducing Audience

You may wake up to the sound of the radio, play a walkman on your way into
college, pass billboards in the street and watch television or go to a film in the evening.
Some people have seen media audiences as being easily manipulated masses of people
who can be persuaded to buy products through advertising, or to follow corrupt leaders
through propaganda.
There have also been fears that the contents of media texts can make
their audiences behave in different ways – become more violent for example. On the other
hand there have been other critics who have seen the media as having much less influence and working in more subtle ways.

Historical Background

All of the different media that we think of as “The Media” are actually quite recent
inventions. If you were living a hundred and fifty years ago photography, film, television,
radio and computers as we know them would all have seemed like fantasies.

The cliché about pre-media times is that people made their own entertainment and there is obviously some truth in this.

The kinds of things that people did in their leisure time were either likely to be
fairly independent things such as reading, or they would involve mixing with many other
people such as going to a play or musical.

The arrival of the media changed a lot of this: while films are often watched in theatre sized audiences.

The vast majority of our times with the media are spent on our own or in small groups so in one sense the media can seem to split people up – you have probably heard the worry from parents that since the arrival of video games and portable televisions, children don’t go out as much as they used to.

On the other hand, there is an opposite sense in which the media can be seen to bring us closer together: if you watch a soap or look at a picture in the paper of Mike Tyson, the chances are that millions of people across Britain or even the world will have experienced the
same media event.

This brings with it another fear – that because so many people are seeing the same things and because they are often experiencing them alone without anyone to explain what is good and bad about them, the media has an unprecedented power to affect us in negative ways.

The audience about ‘mass’

The key ideas about media audiences that you should remember from the last section are
these:

• The media are often experienced by people alone. (Some critics have talked about
media audiences as atomised – cut off from other people like separate atoms)

• Wherever they are in the world, the audience for a media text are all receiving exactly
the same thing.

Questioning both ideas

These points led some early critics of the media to come up with the idea of media audiences
as masses. According to many theorists, particularly in the early history of the subject, when
we listen to our CDs or sit in the cinema, we become part of a mass audience in many ways
like a crowd at a football match or a rock concert but at the same time very different because
separated from all the other members of this mass by space and sometimes time.

Media producers and institutions quickly identified that there was not just one audience, or
one market. The audience can be segmented, and marketed to in different ways depending on
they way they have been defined. We’ll cover this more closely in our study of advertising
and marketing. but it’s worth taking a quick look now.
Obvious ways to classify audiences are by age, gender, race and location (where they live).
Others include the following:

Income bracket/status

One way to classify audiences is by their class, which is normally judged on the kind of job
the main wage-earner of the householder has.

A Upper middle class
Top management, bankers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals

B Middle class
Middle management, teachers, many 'creatives' eg graphic designers
etc

C1 Lower middle class
Office supervisors, junior managers, nurses, specialist clerical staff etc

C2 Skilled working class
Skilled workers, tradespersons (white collar)

D Working class
Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers (blue collar)

E People at lowest level of income
Unemployed, students, pensioners, casual workers

5
Young and Rubicam’s Four
Consumers

As the concept of class became
less fashionable, advertisers
started thinking about audiences
in different ways. One of the
best-known was devised by the
advertising agency Young and
Rubicam.
Mainstreamers
Make up 40% of the population. They like security, and
belonging to a group.

Aspirers
Want status and the esteem of others. Like status symbols,
designer labels etc. Live off credit and cash
.
Succeeders People who have already got status and control.

Reformers Define themselves by their self-esteem and self-fulfilment.

LifeMatrix

One of the latest approaches to audience targeting has grown out of the field of Market
Research. The LifeMatrix tool, launched by MRI and RoperASW, defines ten audience
categories, centred around both values, attitudes and beliefs, and more fundamental,
demographic audience categories.

1. Tribe wired Digital, free-spirited, creative young singles
2. Fun/Atics Aspirational, fun-seeking, active young people
3. Dynamic Duos Hard-driving, high-involvement couples
4. Priority Parents Family values, activities, media strongly dominate
5. Home Soldiers Home-centric, family-oriented, materially ambitious
6. Renaissance Women Active, caring, affluent, influential mums
7. Rugged Traditionalists Traditional male values, love of outdoors
8. Struggling Singles High aspirations, low economic status
9. Settled elders Devout, older, sedentary lifestyles
10. Free Birds Vital, active, altruistic seniors

Audience reaction to even early versions of a media text is closely watched. Hollywood
studios routinely show a pre-release version of every movie they make to a test audience, and
will often make changes to the movie that are requested by that audience.
Different types of media texts measure their audiences in different ways.

Film Figures are based on box office receipts, rather than the number of
people who have actually seen the movie. Subtract the production costs
of a movie from the box office receipts to find out how much money it
made, and therefore how successful it has been in the profit-driven
movie business.

Print Magazines and newspapers measure their circulation (ie numbers of
copies sold). They are open about these figures - they have to be as these
are the numbers quoted to advertisers when negotiating the price of a
page.

Radio/TV Measuring the number of viewers and listeners for a TV/Radio
programme or whole station's output is a complex business. Generally,
an audience research agency (eg BARB) will select a sample of the
population and monitor their viewing and listening habits over the space
of 7 days.

If audience is a mass, it raises all kinds of questions about the power of the media to influence people – not just individuals, but whole sectors of society. There have been a number of theories over the years about how exactly the media work on the mass audience. Some of them are outlined below.

The effects/ hypodermic needle

According to the theory the media is like a syringe which injects ideas, attitudes and beliefs
into the audience who as a powerless mass have little choice but to be influenced – in other
words, you watch something violent, you may go and do something violent, you see a woman
washing up on TV and you will want to do the same yourself if you are a woman and if you
are a man you will expect women to do the washing up for you.

This theory has been particularly popular when people have been considering violence in films and indeed you will be spending longer later in the course considering this question. There have been films such as The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973 – see image, left) and A
Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971) which have been banned in the past, partly because of a belief that they might encourage people to copy the crimes within them.

The cultivation/ culmination theory

According to this, while any one media text does not have too much effect, years and years of
watching more violence will make you less sensitive to violence, years and years of watching
women being mistreated in soaps will make you less bothered about it in real life. We refer to
this process as desensitisation.

Many people have a general sense that the media do affect our behaviour
and advertisers certainly justify their fees by working on this assumption, but it can be
extraordinarily difficult to actually prove how much effect if any a text might have on an
audience.

The theory (1): Violence in the Media de-sensitises the audience to violence in
general.

According to this theory, violence in the media excites children but the more they see, the
more they need to excite them. The result being that they become less shocked by real life
violence. The first part is fine but it is very difficult to prove whether the second follows on
from it.

The theory (2): Violence in the media erodes inbuilt inhibitions against acting in certain ways.

This suggests that inhibitions about sexual and violent behaviour are broken down if it is seen
as normal on the screen, particularly if such behaviour is seen as being unpunished in films
etc. Worth thinking about here is the frequency of violence against women in the media.

Identification: Violence in the media releases tension and desires through
identification with fictional characters and events (catharsis)

Again all research on this is inconclusive but some psychiatrists claim to have successfully
used pornography to help sex offenders release their emotions.

Sensitisation: Violence in the media can sensitise people to the effects of
Violence

Obviously the opposite of 2 above. Again difficult to prove, but when filmed in a certain way, (e.g. Taxi Driver?) violence can be so shocking as to put people off violence and make them more aware of its consequences. Sensitisation to certain crimes, it is argued, could make
people more aware and more likely to report them.

Some critics of these kinds of theory have argued that the problem is not just with the idea
that the media has such obvious effects, but about the assumptions that mass audience theory
makes about the members of the audience.

One problem that people have suggested with mass audience theory is that it relies on the
assumptions of the people analysing the masses.

These key ideas are that:
• The media are often experienced by people alone. (Some critics have talked about
media audiences as atomised – cut off from other people like separate atoms)

• Wherever they are in the world, the audience for a media text are all receiving exactly
the same thing.

An atomised audience?

The first idea seems to be suggesting that because we often watch the media independently, it
has more chance of affecting us. Certainly many parents think this is true and will make a 12
point of sitting with their young children while they watch potentially disturbing programmes
so that they can have some influence on the way the children take in the messages and explain confusing issues, but do you feel adults need to be protected in the same ways.

The two step flow

As the mass media became an essential part of life in societies around the world and did not reduce populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation was sought.

Their findings suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm.

More versions of the effects model


The Frankfurt School

They articulated criticisms of a capitalist system which controlled media output, creating a stupefying mass culture that eliminated or marginalised opposition or alternatives.

Their approach to audience analysis ultimately fell out of favour because it suggested that
America would ultimately become a fascist state, in which people were controlled through
popular culture.

Moral Panic

This is where the idea of moral panics begins: a populist version of the effects model, which
makes direct connections between media messages and audience behaviour.

Uses and gratifications

According to uses and gratification theory, we all have different uses for the media and we make choices over what we want to watch. In other words, when we encounter a media text, it is not just some kind of mindless entertainment – we are expecting to get something from it: some kind of gratification.

In this model the individual has the power and she selects the media texts that best suit her
needs and her attempts to satisfy those needs. The psychological basis for this model is the
Hierarchy of Needs identified by Maslow. Among the chief exponents of this model are
McQuail and Katz.

1. Information: we want to find out about society and the world – we want to satisfy our
curiosity. This would fit the news and documentaries which both give us a sense that
we are learning about the world.

2. Personal Identity: we may watch the television in order to look for models for our
behaviour. So, for example, we may identify with characters that we see in a soap. The
characters help us to decide what feel about ourselves and if we agree with their
actions and they succeed we feel better about ourselves – think of the warm feeling
you get when you favourite character triumphs at the end of a programme.
3. Integration and Social Interaction: we use the media in order to find out more about
the circumstances of other people. Watching a show helps us to empathise and
sympathise with the lives of others so that we may even end up thinking of the
characters in programme as friends even though we might feel a bit sad admitting it!
At the same time television may help us to get on with our real friends as we are able
to talk about the media with them.

4. Entertainment: sometimes we simply use the media for enjoyment, relaxation or just
to fill time.

First of all, it ignores the fact that we do not always have complete choice as to what we receive from the media.

Reception analysis: audience as individuals

The most important thing about this that you should bear in mind is that reception analysis is
based on the idea that no text has one simple meaning. Instead, reception analysis suggests
that the audience themselves help to create the meaning of the text.

Preferred/dominant reading

The preferred reading is the reading media producers hope will take from the text. For
example, and advertisement for a McDonalds Big Mac is intended to encourage feelings of
hunger in the audience, and propensity to buy a McDonald’s burger the next time they’re
passing. Assuming the majority of the audience respond by salivating and rubbing their
tummies (!) this is also the dominant reading.

Oppositional reading

Audience members from outside the target audience may reject the preferred reading,
receiving their own alternative message. The health-conscious, anti-globalisation campaigners and vegetarians will most likely respond to the McDonald’s advert with frustration and annoyance.

Negotiated reading

The ‘third way’ is one in which audiences acknowledge the preferred reading, but modify it to suit their own values and opinions. A negotiated response to the McDonald’s advert might be “I love Big Macs – but one a month as a treat is all my figure can stand.” Morley's view of dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings of texts is a semiological approach because it recognises the importance of the analysis of signs, particularly visual signs, that shape so much of modern media output. It ties to our understanding of connotations, studied as part of media language.

Often when our views of the media differ, it can say as much about us as
it does about the media text itself.

We can never consider one example of the media on its own – we are always choosing
from many different alternatives and more confusingly our understanding of one text may be
affected by our knowledge of another – to go back to the earlier example the man watching
the Pussycat Dolls may have read about them in that morning’s Daily Mail.

It is very rare for us to concentrate fully on any media text – we may skim read through a
magazine or glance at various different channels while using the remote. Once again,
quantitative research cannot cope with this – it simply counts the number of texts encountered
but doesn’t consider whether the audience have taken them in.

The media can become an important part of the routines of our lives – you may want to
watch Neighbours when you get in from school or listen to the Chart Show every Sunday
when you do your homework. In these examples, the exact time and the way that the media
18 text fits in with the pattern of you day are almost as important as what the media text actually is.

Gender differences

One interesting thing that Morley found in his research was that there were clear differences in the uses that people made of the media in their everyday lives depending on their gender. He found that men tended to prefer factual programmes e.g. News and sports while women preferred fiction Soaps and other drama series. Also, men preferred watching the programmes
extensively while women tended to be doing something else at the same time. Another thing that he found was that if someone had control over what the family was watching, it was more likely to be the man – often with the remote control in his hand.