Audience Theory

Audience Theory

Audience theory relates to how audiences interpret and respond to any given media product. Audiences can be defined by location, size and subjectivity.

Different audiences will have contrasting views on ‘Eighteen’ as it is about a teenage girl’s struggles with depression and addiction. Someone who is a fan of social realism films would be classed into a niche audience due to narrowcasting because of the genre, someone in this audience would react to the trailer very differently to someone who is a fan of international commercial films.

In the active and passive audience theory, a passive audience receive unmediated messages from the media they consume and are heavily influenced by it, in relation to ‘Eighteen’, the audience may see the mise-en-scene of the heroin and begin taking drugs. An active audience have control over the media they consume and their perceptions of it.

The cultivation theory is a passive audience theory. Cultivation theorists, such as Gerbner, argue that television has long-term effects, which are small, gradual and indirect but cumulative and significant. The media maintain and propagate values within a society, also known as ‘mainstreaming’. ‘First order’ effects include the encouragement of a general belief about the everyday world i.e. the prevalence of violence, whereas ‘second order’ effects encourage specific attitudes towards topics i.e. personal safety and law. The main focus of this theory is on ‘heavy viewers’, who are people that watch a lot of television and are therefore more likely to be influenced by the media than ‘light viewers’ who have more sources of information.

In regards to ‘Eighteen’, drugs are becoming more common in our society, for example, shown in TV shows and films, as well as marijuana becoming legalised in many US states, our society has become desensitised to the idea of drugs being ‘inaccessible’. The use of class A drugs in ‘Eighteen’ may not have the same disturbing effect to ‘heavy viewers’ as it would to ‘light viewers’.  

  

The Reception Analysis developed by David Morley links to Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory. This active audience theory explains that every producer has their own social/moral/political views in which they encode into their media products. From this, the audience will decode the product but not necessarily in the way the producer intends. This links to Barthes codes, which states that media texts can be open to multiple interpretations.

As producers, we encoded various social issues, conforming to the social realism genre. Our main focus, besides drug taking, was teenage homelessness; the character being isolated and alone for most of the trailer showed this. The character is never seen in a ‘homely’ environment.

We wanted the audience to feel sympathy for the character, due to the plot being based on many real life stories. Although, an active audience could decode the product to be a bad example to teenage girls who may follow the same journey as the character due to the heroin being shown to take pain away. The character could also been seen as weak and self-destructive, creating a negative opinion of the girl.