Audience theories

Active Vs. Passive 

Academic theories of audience can be split between models which see the audience as passive and those which see it as aggressive. Passive means it is easily manipulated, weak willed, controlled, dominated, and is compliant. Active means being engaged, involved, responsive, in control and free willed. The passive audience: The Hypodermic Syringe/needle model - short term effect, this was developed in 1930s where all audience members react in the same way, they all passively receive messages, the audience are manipulated and the media affects thoughts and behaviour.

I think our thriller will appeal to the aggressive audience because it will probably get different reactions as some people will find it interesting and mysterious, but others might not get the concept so might not like it because they don't understand it. I think this because it isn't a conventional thriller, that might scare people but its a thriller that makes people think.

Uses and Gratification

The Uses and Gratification theory of audience suggest, unlike the hypodermic needle model, that the audience determines what to do with the media rather than the media influencing the audience directly. When an audience actively seeks media, they want to gratify them, they are choosing to interpret its message. The main idea is that media does not fully control a helpless audience, but rather the media is subjective per person as they use it to meet needs.

Reception theory

The Effects model (active vs. passive) and the uses and gratifications have some problems and limitations so a different approach was developed by the academic Stuart Hall at Birmingham University in the 1970s. This considered how text were encoded with meaning by producers and then decoded (understood) by audiences. This theory suggest that when a producer constructs a text it is encoded with the meaning or message that the producer wishes to convey to the audience. Sometimes audiences will correctly decode the message or meaning and understand what the producer is trying to say. However in some instances the audience will either reject or fail to correctly understand the message. Stuart Hall identified 3 types of audience decoding of the text: dominant or preferred which is where the audience decodes the message correctly and agrees with it, negotiated this is where the audience accepts, rejects or refines elements of the text in light of previously held views, and oppositional where the dominant meaning is recognised but rejected for cultural, political or ideological reasons.