Aice Media Studies

 Audience Theories 

    Audience theory is an element of thinking that developed within academic literary theory and cultural studies. An active audience engages, interprets and responds to a media text in different ways and is capable of challenging the ideas encoded in it. The audience accepts and believes all messages in any media text that they receive. This is the passive audience model. They accept the preferred reading and don't question it. Positive audience an audience that is informed about the speaker's topic and has a favorable view of the speaker's position. primacy effect. An audience is more likely to remember and recall what speaker's present at the beginning of the speech, as opposed to the body of the speech. 

Hypodermic Needle Theory

    The Hypodermic Needle Theory is a linear communication theory which suggests that media messages are injected directly into the brains of a passive audience. It suggests that we're all the same and we all respond to media messages in the same way. People believe that the mass media has a powerful effect. One of the main reasons that this theory was believed to be outdated was due to the fact that the reactions were based on human assumptions, giving no real basis to the theory. The hypodermic needle model is a model of communication suggesting that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver.