The audience as mass
The key ideas about media audiences that you should remember 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.
As you will see from what follows, both of these ideas have been questioned. 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.
If you look at the early history off the media, it is fairly easy to see where the idea of a mass audience came from. Within less than a hundred years photography, Film, radio and television were all invented. Each one of them allowed works of art or pieces of entertainment that might once have been restricted to the number of people who could fit into an art gallery or a theatre to be transmitted in exactly the same form to enormous numbers of people in different parts of the world. It can be very easy, living in this media saturated world to forget how strange this might once have seemed. These media quickly became extremely popular and at the same time there was an important difference between them and older forms of entertainment. Whereas in the past, many forms of entertainment were only available to those who could afford them, now suddenly films and radio particularly were available to all. Early media theorists struggled to understand this and found it easiest to compare the media audiences with the kinds of crowds they were used to from the world before the media- they came up with the ideas of the mass audience. Here is how the sociologist Herbert Blumer described it in 1950:
First, its membership may come from all walks of life, and from all distinguishable social strata; it may include people of different class position, of different vocation, of different cultural attainment, and of different wealth. ….. Secondly, the mass is an anonymous group, or more exactly is composed of anonymous individuals [Blumer means anonymous in the sense that unlike the citizens of earlier communities, the people who are members of the mass audience for the media do not know each other]. Third, there exists little interaction or change of experience between members of the mass. They are usually physically separated from one another, and, being anonymous, do not have the opportunity to mill as do members of the crowd. Fourth, the mass is very loosely organised and is not able to act with the concertedness or unity of a crowd.
Blumer was writing about the media in 1950, five years after the Second World War. During the war and before it, Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia had attempted to use the media as propaganda- through films, radio and poster art they had attempted to persuade mass audiences to follow their policies- to the critics of the time it is not surprising that the media must have seemed like a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands, capable of persuading millions to follow evil men. In the recent general election, you will have found it difficult to avoid seeing similar, if less offensive propaganda. How much influence do you think the posters that covered Britain’s roadsides might have had on the final outcome of the election? It is impossible to give a certain answer to this, but the different political parties obviously believe in their power, if you consider the millions of pounds they spend on them.
Key Theory 1: The hypodermic syringe
There have been a number of theories over the years about how exactly the media work on the mass audience. Perhaps the most simple to understand is the hypodermic syringe. This has been very popular down the years with many people who fear the effects of the media.
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 T.V. 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. There have been films such as Straw Dogs and The Evil Dead which have been banned partly because of a belief that they might encourage people to copy the crimes within them but on the other hand no-one has ever really claimed that every-one will be affected by these texts in the same way. Many people have therefore seen the theory as simplistic because it doesn’t take any account of people’s individuality and yet it is still very popular in society particularly for politicians looking for reasons why society has become more violent which can’t be blamed on them. A good example of this is Dumblane- there has never been a real suggestion that Thomas Hamilton watched a lot of violent films but a kind of woolly thinking has allowed newspapers and MPs to link his dreadful crime to video violence.
Another interesting example of the theory in action is the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Before every one of his murders, he watched a clip from his favourite film in order to get himself excited. This is the kind of fact that might seem toi prove the hypodermic syringe theory but the film was Star Wars and no-one has ever suggested that that should be banned- clearly the film meant very different things to him to what it means for us.
Key Theory 2: The Culmination Theory
Because of the difficulty of proving the effects of individual media texts on their audience a more refined version of the theory has been created called the culmination mode. 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.
One difficulty with both of these ways of looking at the media is that they are very difficult to prove either way. 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. In fact researchers have spent enormous amounts of time and effort trying to prove the validity of the culmination theory with no success- this of course does not mean that there is no truth in it as an idea.
Criticisms of mass audience theory
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. Critics of the idea often claim that it is elitist- in other words that it suggests a value judgement about these masses- that they are easily led and not so perceptive and self- aware as the theorists who are analysing them. Here for example is a 1930′s advertising executive talking about the radio audience of his day:
The typical listening audience for a radio program is a tired, bored, middle-aged man and woman whose lives are empty and who have exhausted their sources of outside amusement when they have taken a quick look at an evening paper…. Radio provides a vast source of delight and entertainment for the barren lives of the millions.
The chances are that you have heard similar comments about the viewers of soaps or quiz shows or even that you have made them yourself. The phrase couch potato has this kind of idea behind it- that watching the television is in some way brain numbing compared with other possible forms of entertainment.
One problem that people have suggested with mass audience theory is that it relies on the assumptions of the people analysing the masses. The early theorists who came up with the idea were generally lovers of classical music and hated television and so they tended to look down at the viewers of television who they saw as “the mass.” There is obviously a problem with this if any theory ends up as just being a chance for people to air their prejudices.
To try to make a final judgement about mass audience theory, you really need to carefully question its main assumptions.
Lets look at these in turn. 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 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? Some of the critics of the idea of the mass audience have pointed out the many ways that individuals who watch programmes alone will then share their experience with others in conversations about what they have seen. One argument is that these kind of conversations have much more influence on potential behaviour than the programme from which they may have sprung.
Key Theory 3: The two step flow
A theory that springs from this idea is called the two step flow. The idea of this is that whatever our experience of the media we will be likely to discuss it with others and if we respect their opinion, the chances are that we will be more likely to be affected by it. (The theory calls these people opinion leaders.)
Further criticisms of mass audience theory
The second major idea of the mass audience theory was that the mass were all watching the same text. This suggests that a single film will be the same for every person who watches it.
We are all individuals with different views and opinions. Our interpretation of a media text is influenced by our individual world view. In other words one viewer might interpret Fatal Attraction as being a sexist film but others have a perfect right to argue an opposite case- they could experience the same text in very different ways- so different, in fact that viewer 1′s Fatal Attraction could almost be another text to the one that viewer 2 saw.
The Mass Market
Before going on to look at some more recent approaches to audiences, it is worth considering one last use of mass audience theory. The idea of the mass market. It wasn’t just academic theorists who were interested in audiences and their relationship with the media texts they encountered. The producers of media texts and the advertisers who used them were if anything even more interested in these audiences who they could contact through the new media. To investigate exactly how large their share of the mass market was, television companies and advertisers pioneered new techniques of market research which involved quantitative surveys where they attempted to count how many people they reached. The most obvious example of this is the system of television ratings which still has enormous effect on the workings of TV stations. You may be able to think of a show that you enjoyed which was taken off because it did not achieve high enough ratings. If so you may agree with the thinking of Todd Gitlin:
The numbers only sample sets tuned in, not necessarily shows watched, let alone grasped, remembered, loved, learned from, deeply anticipated, or mildly tolerated
Quantitative and qualitative research
Many of the people who use mass audience theory tend to back it up with quantitative research. This kind of research is based around counting the number of people who watch certain kinds of programmes and making simple judgements about these quantities. The criticisms of mass audience theory are made equally about quantitative research- that it fails to take into account the differences in peoples’ experiences of the same texts. The opposite of quantitative research is qualitative research. This involves the researchers looking not just at the numbers of people watching a certain programme but also at the ways that they watch it and what they are doing while it is on. The idea of this is that it gives them a clearer idea of what exactly the programme means to its audience and how important it is to them.
We will now examine some theories of audiences which have used qualitative research to look for a more subtle view of the audience and then look at the ways the advertisers and media producers themselves have changed their methods to go beyond the idea of a mass audience.
Key Theory 4: Uses and Gratifications
This is probably the most important theory for you to know. 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.
But what does this actually mean? What kinds of gratification can we be getting? Researchers have found quite a few, but there are four main ones:
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.
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.
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.
Entertainment- sometimes we simply use the media for enjoyment, relaxation or just to fill time.
You can probably recognise yourself in some of these descriptions and not surprisingly uses and gratification theory has become quite popular amongst media critics. It is important to remember with this theory that it is likely that with any media text you enjoy, you will be getting a number of Gratifications from it and not just one
However, despite this popularity amongst critics, there have also been criticisms made of some features of the theory. First of all, it ignores the fact that we do not always have complete choice as to what we receive from the media. Think, for example, about your family who may end up having to listen to the same music as you sometimes. Similarly, you don’t have that much choice about the posters that you see on your way to college however objectionable you may find some of them.
A second problem relates to this last example. The poster that you see on a billboard, may be extremely sexist. However, you clearly cannot choose a different poster that you want to see that you might find more pleasant. If you think about it, this problem also affects us in our other encounters with the media- we are generally having to choose the media that we consume from what is available. This undermines the idea of uses and gratifications- we may not all have the same potential to use and enjoy the media products that we want. in society there are in fact plenty of minorities who feel that the media does not provide for them the texts that they want to use.
One of the difficulties of assessing uses and gratifications like this is that people won’t often be aware of the real uses of a text in their lives- how many people would admit for example that they watched a certain program because they were lonely even if that were the truth.
Key Theory 5: Reception analysis
In a sense, this is an extension of uses and gratifications theory. Once you have come up with the idea that people are using the media in different ways, it is just one stage on to actually look in more detail at how this happens. Reception analysis does this and it concentrates on the audience themselves and how they come to a text.
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. We all decode the texts that we encounter in individual ways which may be a result of our upbringing, the mood that we are in, the place where we are at the time or in fact any combination of these and all kinds of other factors. So viewer 1 may watch a television programme and enjoy every minute of it and viewer 2 may hate the same show. But of course, it goes way beyond just how much we enjoy the text. We will actually create a different meaning for it as well.
Reception analysis is all about trying to look at these kinds of differences and to understand them. What reception analysts have found is that factors such as a gender, our place inside society, and the context of the time we are living in can be enormously important when we make the meaning or a text.
Take the example of a performance by S Club 7 on Top of the Pops. A 12 year old girl watching this may find it very meaningful for her personally – she may feel that the image the group project has important things to say to her about how she might behave. Her father, on the other hand, may create different meanings for the text – he may disapprove of their clothing or behaviour and so the same performance that the girl finds so inspiring may be disgusting to him.
Often when our views of the media differ, it can say as much about us as it does about the media text itself. In this example, the most important factor is probably how S Club 7 trigger off in the two people’s minds ideas that they have about their own lives. The girl may relate to the female members of the group because they are of the same gender as her and because, while they are not the same age as she is, they are probably more like the age she would like to be. For the father, his views of the group are probably influenced by the fact that his daughter likes them so much – the idea that she might want to become like them, may make their performance seem more frightening.
Of course this kind of thing is often closer to psychology- the study of personality- than Media Studies and can be very difficult to research. While quantitative researchers simply count the number of people watching a programme, reception analysts have to make use of interviews in order to get some kind of idea of the meanings that people attach to texts. This can be very time consuming- a simple questionnaire is rarely enough and often the researchers will have to ask quite detailed and spontaneous questions.
The ideas that reception theorists come up with are also not so neat and straightforward as those of other approaches. If you remember, Uses and Gratifications made up a simple list of four types of use for the media. Because reception theory concentrates on the individual it can never do this – we are all different and no one theory can comprehend that.
This can be seen as a strength of the theory – that it takes into account the complexity of our response to the media. At the same time the theory has a weakness which has been pointed out. This will be clearer if we return to our example of S Club 7. The girl’s reaction to the programme may also have been affected by the day that she had had at school – the way that her teacher shouted at her may have made her particularly excited about the idea of being someone else. Similarly, an encounter with a strong woman who he was not keen on, may have affected the father’s reactions to the programme. Reception analysis takes none of this into account it ignores the context of everyday life, something which we will turn to in the final theory concerning audiences.
The media in everyday life.
Uses and gratifications theory looked at why we make use of the media, Reception analysis looked at what we see when we watch a media text- what both of them leave out is the question of how the media fits in with our everyday lives – how do we live with the media?
One researcher who has looked at this is David Morley. He has come up with the idea of the “politics of the living room”- the idea that the media is just part of all the different things that may be going on in your home, that a television can become more than just a form of entertainment but in a typical family can be a subject of argument or a symbol of power. This may be a concept that you will find quite familiar. Imagine a situation where a man comes home from a terrible day at work. He is in a bad mood and does not want to talk to anybody in his family so he switches on the TV. Anyone doing quantitative research would simply see him as the another viewer of whatever programme is on but in fact he is probably barely watching it – the television is simply a way of shutting the rest of the world out. This is one simple example of the media in everyday life – here are some more general principles.
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 S Club 7 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 college 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 text fits in with the pattern of your day are almost as important as what the media text actually is.
It is very rare for us to be completely alone when we encounter a media text. If you think back to the mass audience theorists, they talked about the media audience being isolated like atoms, but in fact, even when you are reading a newspaper, you are often surrounded by other people – even when you are in your room watching the TV, your family are close at hand.
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 eg 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.
Of course, this does not necessarily mean that there are fundamental differences between men and women. What it does relate to is the kinds of lives they are often leading – for a man, working during the day outside of the home, television is seen as a form of relaxation. For women, on the other hand, the home is often a place of work and so it is likely that that work will have to continue during the evening’s television as well. Of course, the account given of typical lifestyles of men and women is now becoming quite out of date and so it is very likely that research such as Morley’s, if carried out today, would come up with quite different conclusions.
New ideas about the audience
What you have been reading about up to now are very much the classic ideas about audiences. You need to be familiar with these theories if you are to answer questions in the media studies exam successfully. However, there are other ways of looking at the audience which are a bit stranger, but maybe even more up to date. The rest of this page will cover these weirder ideas.
A lot of what follows deals with the relationship between advertisers and the programmes that you watch on the television. Obviously, the vast majority of the programmes that you watch (with the single exception of those produced by the B.B.C) are made with money raised from advertising but it can be easy to ignore the effect that this might have on what you end up seeing. The theories that follow look at the relationship between advertisers, media producers and audiences in more detail.
Audience Surveillance
While you were reading about Morley’s ideas about the politics of the living room, you may well have thought that it was all very different from your own family life at home. The truth is that the traditional idea of a family sitting down together to watch the same programmes on the TV is very much out of date. Many of you will have your own televisions, stereos and game consoles in your bedrooms. The result of this is that the mass audience is even more divided than ever before. This is a problem for us when we try to analyse the media, but it is even more difficult for the people who produce media texts. It has always been very important for media producers to have some kind of idea about the people who are consuming their texts. This was confusing enough in the old days when they might have been trying to analyse a cinema audience – it is well nigh impossible today.
But advertisers do not give up easily and their need to find out exactly who is consuming what and how is resulting in some new techniques of surveillance. Our media use is being watched more than ever before. One recent example can demonstrate how easy this kind of thing is becoming – your parents may have recently got a loyalty card from the supermarket, the idea of this is not just to give away lots of free goodies, but it also allows the supermarkets to keep an exact track of what you are buying week by week. They can build up a profile of you as a consumer and then, by buying up advertising space in the magazines which they sell and which they can see from your receipts that you buy, target you more directly. As Cable, Satellite and the Internet become more commonplace, this kind of direct individual advertising will become much more common and will affect us all as audiences.
Of course all of this is only possible now because of computers. In the past it might have been feasible to look in detail at the buying behaviour of people, but it would have been impossible to come to any useful conclusions. Today, on the other hand, a simple computer program could be written which would analyse your shopping receipts in detail and then produce a list of suitable adverts which could be sent to you alone during your evening’s T V viewing. This would mean that in the future, you could end up watching the same programme as your friends, but seeing different adverts in the middle of it.
Audiences as products
Audience surveillance in extreme form is probably still a few years away, but something that is very much with us already is the idea of audiences being the products of television companies. This is a strange way of looking at the media – but quite a useful one. It is usual to think of media texts as being made for the audience – so, for example, Match of the Day is a show that has been made for football fans – a group of people who already exists. The idea of the audiences as products theory is that the process works the opposite way round: the media producers will create a text in such a way that it will produce an audience which they can then sell to advertisers.
A good example of how this works is Friends. It might be normal to think of this as just being a funny program that happens to be on on a Friday night. According to the theory, though, Friends is actually a way of selling beauty products. In America where the series started, the producers would have been looking for advertising revenue and so they came up with the idea of a show which would feature beautiful people in funny situations with happy endings. They would have seen this as a great way of selling beauty products as the show would attract an audience of young people who would want to follow the fashions of the main characters particularly as the feel good endings would make this audience want to lead the same lives as the beautifully manicured main characters. To help them to attract this audience they would have scheduled the programme at a time when they could catch these people.
We have been talking about the producers attracting this audience as if the bunch of people who watch the show were already there beforehand as a recognisable group in society, but in fact, by assembling such a group of people to watch the show, in a very real sense they have produced this audience, and the same pattern has been repeated in Britain where the programme was at first sponsored by a hair products manufacturer.
You can probably think of almost any media text in the same way. It is rare today for texts to be created just for fun – much more often, commercial companies are trying to produce a certain audience. This would be fine if we were all as attractive to the advertisers – we would all get the programmes that we want. Unfortunately, some types of people have more money and are therefore more attractive to advertisers- they therefore will get more programmes tailored for them. Strangely enough, as teenagers, you are one of these groups. You may not feel as if you have a lot of money, but as a group, compared to older people who have their money tied up in mortgages and buying essentials, you spend a much higher proportion of your money on consumer products.. This has meant that in recent years, media producers have been bending over backwards in order to try to produce teenage audiences. The most recent example of this has been Channel 5 who have geared a lot of their programmes around the kinds of things they think you are interested in – with not much success so far!
This theory was first thought up by American theorists and does not fit British Television quite so much because of the existence of the BBC. This channel is different because since it was first set up by the government it has been funded by public money in the form of the license fee and therefore does not have the same kind of need to produce specific types of audiences. This allows it to make programmes to attract different kinds of audience who may be left out by other stations and also allows it to follow its stated aim of “informing and entertaining”
However, the BBC is now quite competitive for audiences and so will try to produce similar audiences to ITV which is commercial. The BBC now sells a lot of it programmes abroad, particularly to America and it therefore is in the business of producing audiences in different countries. Many of the famous costume dramas that fill up Sunday afternoons are full of are partly intended to produce a certain kind of audience on American television.
Niche marketing
All of this is happening at the same time as the number of different media products available to us is increasing constantly. So we have a situation where there are more and more media texts and they are being targeted more and more precisely at certain groups. this process can involve something called niche marketing. A niche is a small part of the market and advertisers have found that they can get a greater return on their investment if they produce an audience who although smaller can more easily be targeted. A good example of this is the specialist hobby magazines that you might see in W H Smith’s. There can’t be that many people who are interested in Carp Monthly, but the producers of the magazine can be fairly sure that they will attract a large proportion of them. So although profits will not be large, they will probably be secure. Another good example of this is computer magazines: one company, Future Publishing, produce dozens of different magazines each aimed at one particular niche of computer users – there are magazines for people who use the Internet, for those who are new to computers, or those who are experts and for those who just play games on them. Once again, no single one of these magazines has a large enough niche to make lots of money, but the company has become very successful with all the magazines combined.
All off this might help to explain why programmes with quite high ratings can be inexplicably taken off the air and why at the same time a minority show might flourish. The high rating texts might well have been popular with a part of society with little buying power- for example the elderly, while the niche for the minority show might be much more attractive to the advertisers.
An example of this is the enormous success of the various types of Star Trek over the years. The American producers of these programmes discovered a long time ago that although they did not produce large audiences, the particular niche they attracted included a high proportion of intelligent single men in quite well paid jobs- a niche that was very attractive to advertisers.
The opposite of this can be seen in the case of Hello magazine which has had financial difficulties in the past because of this – although it has produced a large audience, the kinds of people it attracts like the working class and the elderly, are not those that advertisers are interested in.
Audiences as Labour
In a sense this next theory takes things a little bit further. The idea of audiences as Labour is that rather than the media producers working for us when they make shows, we are working for them. The advertisers who put up the money for the programmes that we watch are clearly trying to make money out of us. You could see us, therefore, as working for them by watching their adverts. This might seem even more important, when you think about all the other work that you have been doing during a typical day – after a hard day at college, the last thing that you want is to have to sit through a load of adverts – you simply want to be entertained and the adverts sometimes get in the way of that. In America, the work that audiences have to do in order to be able to watch their favourite programmes has increased as adverts have become more and more frequent. In Britain, you can see this same process in action if you compare satellite television with ITV – the massive amount of advertising on satellite means that you have to work harder for your entertainment.
