Active vs. Passive Audience Theory (Readings)

Active audience theory argues that media audiences do not just receive information passively but are actively involved, often unconcsiously, in making sense of the message within their personal and social contexts. Decoding of a media message may therefore be influenced by such things as family background, beliefs, values, culture, interests, education and experiences.

Other theories and models are compatible with active audience theoy, including the encoding/decoding model and the uses and gratifications theory, which states that audiences are actively involved in determining what media thy engage with and how, in order to gratify specific needs or desires.

Uses and Gratification Theory
This theory tries to interpret how and why people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs. It is based upon an audiences approach of understanding large scale communication. Instead of the question asked by other media effect theories - "What does media do to people?" - Uses and Gratification Theory suggests the question "What do people interpret from media?".

Encoding/Decoding Model

This is an active audience theory that was thought of by Stuart Hall
which examines the relationship between a text and its audience.
Encoding is where a text is constructed by its producers.
Decoding is where an audience reads, understands and interprets a text.
Hall claims that texts can be read in different ways by different people due to the differences in cultural knowledge and opinions.

Hypodermic Needle Model

This model was formed in the 1930's and suggests that a message within the media is directly received and accepted by the receiver i.e. the passive audience who are automatically affected by the message. This model states that the audience can be easily led by the media because at that time there was a limited amount of communication tools. As more research was made, it became more obvious that the media had selective influences on people. One of the most famous examples of this model was the 1938 broadcast of 'The War of the Worlds', which had a massive reaction of panic among its American audience. This model is discredited today due to this incident being the cause of deeper research being made by Paul Lazarsfeld and Herta Herzog, which goes against the ideas of the hypodermic needle model and Hadley Cantril stated that the reactions towards the broadcast were in fact mainly to do with the audiences attitudes and the situations they were in at the time.