Audience Theory Part 2

Media texts which you engage with?

- Diversion; books, films, Tv
- Personal Identity; films
- Personal Relationships; TV

Class survey; most people use media texts for diversion, as a form of escapism

Reception Theory: Stuart Hall (70's)
- texts are encoded with meaning
- different audiences respond in different ways (decode)
- bother encode and decoded meaning will be understood in the context of social and cultural - background of the producer and audience.

dominant/ preferred reading - what the director/ producer intended the meaning of the product to be
negotiated - audience partly agrees with the preferred reading
oppositional - audience disagree completely

EXAMPLE : 'Royle family'
negotiated - placing bets on antiques road show, watching it for a different intended meaning of the show but bringing the family together.
personal relationships - the grandmother likes to watch it for the presenter

theories are outdated.

Morley's Nationwide Study
- Morley & Brundson 1978
- about a tv show form the 70's
- different responses to the tv show nationwide
- audiences brought a complex set of knowledge and experiences to text thet were consuming
- this experience and other factors is an important part in the way in which audiences 'consume' , 'understand' and 'create meaning'

Ang's Dallas Study (1985)
- dallas was a a 'mass culture' - everyone was talking about it
- she found three categories:
-the ideology of mass culture , for example the walking dead
- the ironic or 'detatched' position , watching t because it was bad but want to see what people are talking about
-  the ideology of popularism; got pleasure from watching it

Dyer (1977) Utopian Solutions
- entertainment genres fantasy element created with a text, as a form of escapism e.g westerns and musicals

'effects' debate and moral panics 
-Tales from the crypt ( was a series of stories then made into TV)
-1955 children and young persons (harmful publications act)
-panics in general can be related back to the 18th century e.g through folk tales

Moral Panics
Cohen - Folk Devil and Moral Panics (1972)
- a mass response to a group, a person or an attitude that becomes defined as a thread
- spread by the media , e.g dangerous dogs, 'staffies' now feared.

Audience Positioning
media 'address' the audience - mode of address
position; 'privileged' i.e sope opera

Gender Preferences;
Gray ( 1992 )
video playtime: the gendering of leisure Technology
Anne Geraghty (1991) 
women prefer to watch an open e.g soap opera