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Media & Society: 05

Audience and Reception Theories

Society pre-exists the individualSociety pre-exists the individual

This session looks at approaches to Audiences’ and media consumption’by audiences. How do we define an audience? Does everyone involved think of audiences in the same way? How have attitudes towards the mass audience’ changed over time?

We also look at the idea of media effects’, that is, the idea that the media’ has an effect on the audience’.

Tasks

Prepare by reading McQuail chapter 15, download pdf below.

Slides

Download slides - PDF

Reading

Ch15 Audience Theory and Research Traditions”, McQuail, D. (2010) Mass Communication Theory. SAGE, London.

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Extra Material

If you’re interested in a shorter summary of some of the important ideas connected to audience research, this paper might be useful!

Hirzalla, F. and van Zoonen, L. (2017). Media effects: Methods of critical audience studies. In Rössler, P., Hoffner, C. A., and van Zoonen, L., editors, The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects. Wiley.

PDF DOWNLOAD

Some organisations mentioned this week

JABC - Japan Audit Bureau of Circulations

International Fed. of ABCs

BARB - British TV and Radio ratings

Bandura et al - TV & Violence’ Experiments

A recent study on audiences in the US

According to this (mildly terrifying) study of the pre-election US media audience by by Pew Research:

Republicans are now nearly as likely to trust the information that comes from social media sites as they are to trust information from national news organizations […] The same pattern appears among young adults.

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