Audience Theories

Hypodermic Needle Theory

- Passively intake or inject the mass media's portrayal and tend to believe it.

- Draws attention to power the media producers have.

- Injected Audience > Passive + Powerless

Audience are injected with the idea that war + violence is an enjoyable experience and the misrepresentations of race, gender and ethnicity are the correct portrayals within the video game.

The "hypodermic needle theory" implied mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on its audiences.
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.
The Hypodermic Needle Theory is therefore an effects theory that contends viewers are passive, and directly affected by what they view; people accept the message they see without considering its merits. In that way media content is shot at the audience like a magic bullet, directly penetrating the viewer' mind.

“it is the process of creating shared meaning.”(J.Baran, Introduction to mass communication).

“It views audience as the passive receptors of virulent viruses produce by the media” (Starker, Evil influences: crusades against the mass media).

Cultivation Theory

- Different groups/audiences respond differently to the media put before them.

- Audiences gradually develop certain views about the world, some of which are 'false'.

"The mass media are controlled by people who are in power in society, and therefore tend to provide representations which uphold the status quo."

- Audiences gain knowledge about world from media, recognises important role media has in our lives.

- Encourages news > crime watch feeds perceptions that Britain's Crime rate is growing.

They emphasize the effects of television viewing on the attitudes rather than the behaviour of viewers. Heavy watching of television is seen as ‘cultivating’ attitudes which are more consistent with the world of television programmes than with the everyday world.

Watching television may tend to induce a general mindset about violence in the world, quite apart from any effects it might have in inducing violent behaviour.

Gerbner argues that the mass media cultivate attitudes and values which are already present in a culture: the media maintain and propagate these values amongst members of a culture, thus binding it together.

Gross considered that 'television is a cultural arm of the established industrial order and as such serves primarily to maintain, stabilize and reinforce rather than to alter, threaten or weaken conventional beliefs and behaviours' (1977, in Boyd- Barrett & Braham 1987, p. 100).

Hawkins and Pingree (1983)

References

Key publications

Boyd-Barrett, Oliver & Peter Braham (Eds.) (1987). Media, Knowledge & Power. London: Croom Helm.

Condry, John (1989). The Psychology of Television. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Dominick, Joseph R. (1990). The Dynamics of Mass Communication. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Evra, Judith van (1990). Television and Child Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1976a). Living with television: The violence profile. Journal of Communication, 26, 172-199.

Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1976b). The scary world of TV’s heavy viewer. Psychology Today, 10(4), 41-89.

Hawkins R.P & Pingree, S. (1983). Televisions influence on social reality. In: Wartella, E.,

Whitney, D. & Windahl, S. (Eds.) Mass Communication Review Yearbook, Vol 5. Beverley Hills CA: Sage.

Livingstone, S. (1990). Making Sense of Television. London: Pergamon.

McQuail, D. & Windahl, S. (1993). Communication Models for the Study of Mass Communication. London: Longman.

Stappers, J.G. (1984) De eigen aard van televisie; tien stellingen over cultivatie en culturele indicatoren.Massacommunicatie 12(5-6), 249-258.