How do we define an audience?

1
How do we define an audience?

• 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

2
How has communication theory looked at the
audience?

• Stimulus-response
• Functionalism
• Media effects
• Gerbners Media Cultivation
• Agenda Setting
• Uses Gratifications
• Empirical Approaches - measurement

3
Stimulus-Response Theory

• Audience is fragile, vulnerable, subject to
  influence
• Media must be strictly controlled
• Pavlovian response

4
Harold Lasswell

• Studied propaganda
• Concerned with attitude change
• Hypodermic model Why says what in which channel
  to whom with what effect?

5
Drawbacks of Lasswells Model

• Audience members passive message receivers
• Social factors that make up audiences not
  considered wheres the context?
• Results typically skewed inconsistent

6
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?

7
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?

8
Paul Lazarsfeld

• Effects of mass media
• Uses Gratifications approach
• Methods of research
• Two-step flow model

9
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

10
Media Effects

• Post WWII, effects studies become more
  sophisticated
• Concentrates on wider social context
• Twostep modelgt focus switched from individual to
  the individual as a member of one or more social
  groups
• Klappers phenomenistic approach

11
Gerbners Theory of Media Cultivation

• Part of cultural indicators theory
• Gs 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

12
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

13
Agenda-Setting

• McCombs and Shaw (1972)
• Used in context of studying election campaigns
• Advocacy public opinion

14
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
• Butwhat are the different agendas of the media,
  the public, and policy?

15
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

16
Empirical Approaches

• Market share rules!
• Print media measured by circulation figures
• Broadcast by viewership
• Internet by click-streams?
• People Meter
• Ethics of new Portable People Meter