Audience Theories

Hyperdermic Needle Theory -
The Media 'Injects' audiences with its views and opinions without the audiences realising, like a doctors syringe injects drugs into the body.
- This draws attention to the power of the media producers over its audiences.
- It makes audiences seem 'passive' and 'powerless'

- Audiences are used to being familirased by seeing thier favourite celebrities and hollywood icons in films as they have been injected by their star power, which would refrain them from looking at newer different stars. such as south asian actors.

http://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20clusters/Mass%20Media/Hypodermic_Needle_Theory.doc/
''The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by ‘shooting’ or ‘injecting’ them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response.

Both images used to express this theory (a bullet and a needle) suggest a powerful and direct flow of information from the sender to the receiver. The bullet theory graphically suggests that the message is a bullet, fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head". With similarly emotive imagery the hypodermic needle model suggests that media messages are injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by the message. They express the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating an idea because the receiver or audience is powerless to resist the impact of the message. There is no escape from the effect of the message in these models. The population is seen as a sitting duck. People are seen as passive and are seen as having a lot media material "shot" at them. People end up thinking what they are told because there is no other source of information.''


http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Influence-Media-Society/76555?read_essay
The Influence Of Media On Society
One such theorist stated that the new found media was manipulating the mainstream masses and deliberately causing crime and violence for financial gain. Although this argument has been cast aside man times it always returns in modern society when there is a severe outbreak of violence on TV.

http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Does-Media-Shape-We-Are/146698?read_essay
Does The Media Shape Who We Are?
Introduction
The Mass Media is an important feature of modern society; its development has undoubtedly been a core factor to rapid social and technological change and also to the rise in personal income and standard of life as well as the decline of some social traditions. Mass media can be defined as venues for messages that are created for consumption by large numbers of people. It is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state.
The degree to which the mass media has influenced society today has been (and still is) debated upon for decades. It can be argued that the mass media is used as “an instrument”, both more powerful and more flexible than anything in previous existence, for influencing people into certain modes of belief and understanding within society.

Cultivation theory
- As audiences watch more and more TV and films they gain more opinions and views on the world. They follow the status quo and Hegemony.
Hegemony - a theory of ideologies and beleives that reiterate dominant ideologies.
- It draws attention to the fact that audiences gain a lot of thier knowledge from the media. Although it does encourage false measures.

The more audiences are used to seeing Hollywood films dominated by 'White' actors the more they will be used to and familiarised with this and would beleive this is the right choice.

http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Cultivation-Effect/394887?topic
Cultivation Effects
Cultivation theory is a social theory designed in the 1950s and '70s to examine the role of television on Americans. Another kind of cultivation effect is Computer Mediated Communication or (CMC) this kind of communication is done by email, list servers, use net groups and chat rooms. Steve Jobs labeled these “interpersonal computers” rather than” personal computers” because of all the different ways to communicate by way of computer (Walther & Burgoon, P.51). There are many factors that make this different from face to face communication, some aspects of CMC are absence of context cues, the record ability of conversation, the rate of exchange, the level of formality, the anonymity of the user.