Audience Theory

Inorder to start my plans or sketches for my own media product, it is essential for me to research the audience. This serves a purpose as part of my production as I need to know what intrests the audiance and use it to my advantage in order to craete a media product that will attract them and make them want to buy my magazine. The following information was obtained from the media textbook.

Audience-consumers of media text

The ways in which the audience can 'read' texts:

• Preferred or dominant readings- that are easier to relate ot by those reading it. Mianstream, maost people can relate to it.
  


• Negotiated readings- the redaer is forced to idnetify with characters in a book/ TV.
  


• Oppostional or resistant readings- something that contrasts with the perspective of the viewers. opposite position to what point the program was trying to make.
  


• Postioning audiences and points of view- audience automatically assumes stereotypical views. They way this is done to make other people assume stereotypical views. (characters portrayed to the audience).
  


• Mode of address-can be quite a complex and subtle construction. At one level, it concerns the language the media organisation adopts to communicate with its audience. Beyond the actual words used, there is also aquestion of register: the manner, or tone, in which they are spoken. High culture stations, such as the drawn out form of speech used on the BBc's Radios 3 and 4. Popular stations use a much more abrupt and energetic manner of speaking.

Uses and gratifications of the first magzine I looked at:

• Diversion-an escape from the routines of daily life, from the burden of oyr problems, as an emotional release, as relation, fantasy.



• Personal Relationships-to help companionship and social intercation with others, discussion of shared experiences and interests.



• Personal identity-to explore new experiences and pionts of view, to reinforce our personal ideas, values and beliefs about life.



• Surviellance-to apply the need for information in our complex world, to keep up to date with events.



• I then started my primary research on the audience and audience research, this included looking at qualitative information, in regards to questionnaires(also used as an audience research method)-closed questions, for example, how old are you? and quantitative research-open questions, for example, which age were you happiest?

The audience research methods:

Qaulitative information: is usually based oin numbers, statistics or tbales/ graphs to 'measure' and produce hrda data. it ofetn involves working wiith large groups of people.


Qualitative reasearch: often attempts to explain or understand something and may involve more discussion and analysis of people's attitudes and behaviour. It usually invloves working with a small numbers of people of 'focus groups'.