Radio and Audience Theory
Example Radio Questions:
Explain some reasons why people might listen to the radio? Refer to the Uses and Gratification theory in your answer.(8)
Explain some of the threats facing the radio industry and how the industry is responding to these threats.(12)
Audience Gratifications
To understand the impact of meaning encoded, you must be able to identifyaudience gratifications/pleasures as well as apply audience theories when deconstructing a media text.
Audience Pleasures:
Uses and Gratifications Theory
Users and Gratifications theory as developed by Blulmer and Katz suggests that media users play an active role in choosing and using the media. Blulmer and Katz believed that the user seeks out the media source that best fulfils their needs.
The uses and gratifications theory assumes the audience chooses what it wants to watch for five different reasons:
There are 5 solutions that consuming media texts can offer us:
Richard Dyer's Utopian Solutions Theory
Richard Dyer states that people will respond to a media text if it offers them compensation for the inadequacies in their own lives. Through the media audiences can vicarioucly live their lives and fulfil their wants and needs, leading them to strive to a utopian life.
Inadequacy: Isolation
Solution: Community - Playing online community games
Inadequacy: Confusion
Solution: Clarity - Looking at a documentary or at the news
Inadequacy: Boredom
Solution: Exitement - Computer games and action films
Inadequacy: Loneliness
Solution: Social Networking - Message and talk to someone online
Explain some reasons why people might listen to the radio? Refer to the Uses and Gratification theory in your answer.(8)
Explain some of the threats facing the radio industry and how the industry is responding to these threats.(12)
Audience Gratifications
To understand the impact of meaning encoded, you must be able to identifyaudience gratifications/pleasures as well as apply audience theories when deconstructing a media text.
Audience Pleasures:
- Aesthetic Pleasure - The appreciation of experiencing something beautiful. It could be the pleasure of listening to music perfectly matched to visual images in a film or video.
- Cerebral Pleasures - The intellectual satisfaction that may come, for example from solving the problems set by a video game or following a perfectly constructed narrative.
- Visceral Pleasures - These are of the body more than the mind; the sort of thing that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, or makes you want to punch the air. Representations of revenge, triumph, horror, 'come-uppance' and violence all provide visceral pleasure.
- Voyeuristic Pleasure - The satisfaction drawn from spying, prying, or knowing something unknown to others. Audiences are often positioned as voyeurs as, for example, when we discover intimate secrets of a character in drama.
- Vicarious Pleasure - The pleasure enjoyed at second hand through the experiences of others. In sport, we can identify with the skills and triumphs of competitors. As above, dramas often position the audience to share the experiences and feelings of a character.
- Catharsis - This is the idea that our own pent up emotions can be relieved by experiences like witnessing drama or music. Crying at the romantic comedy or enjoying the violent destruction of a villain would be cathartic.
Uses and Gratifications Theory
Users and Gratifications theory as developed by Blulmer and Katz suggests that media users play an active role in choosing and using the media. Blulmer and Katz believed that the user seeks out the media source that best fulfils their needs.
The uses and gratifications theory assumes the audience chooses what it wants to watch for five different reasons:
- Information and Education - the viewer wants to acquire information, knowledge and understanding by watching programmes like The News or Documentaries.
- Entertainment - Viewers watch programmes for enjoyment.
- Personal Identity - Viwers can recognise a person or product, role models that reflect similar values to themselves and mimic or copy some of their characteristics.
- Integration and Social Interaction - the ability for media products to produce a topic of conversatiion between people.
- Escapism - Computer games and action films let viewers ecaape their real lives and imagine themselves in those situations.
There are 5 solutions that consuming media texts can offer us:
- Transparency - Finding out what is really happening, seeing behind the scenes, seeing into hidden or private places.
- Energy - Seeing people involved in energetic activities, including sports.
- Intensity - The emotional drama and exitement of conflict; arguments, tension & suspense, life & death situations
- Community - Working as a team, having a group of friends; 'people' who need you.
- Abundance - The plentiful supply of money or material goods like clothes, technology etc
Richard Dyer's Utopian Solutions Theory
Richard Dyer states that people will respond to a media text if it offers them compensation for the inadequacies in their own lives. Through the media audiences can vicarioucly live their lives and fulfil their wants and needs, leading them to strive to a utopian life.
Inadequacy: Isolation
Solution: Community - Playing online community games
Inadequacy: Confusion
Solution: Clarity - Looking at a documentary or at the news
Inadequacy: Boredom
Solution: Exitement - Computer games and action films
Inadequacy: Loneliness
Solution: Social Networking - Message and talk to someone online
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