People will respond to a message if it offers them something that is missing in their own life.
Dyer suggests that audiences want media products that provide Utopian solutions to their problems . This is because they want to be offered escapism and diversion.
For example some one who has a boring life might watch an action movie.
Uses and gratifications model is and approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs.
It is and audience centred approach to understanding mass communication. Diverging media effect theories that question 'what does media do to people', it focuses on 'what do people do with media'.
It gives consumer power to decide what media they consume, with the assumption that the consumer has clear intent and use.
Moves consumers on from being the victims of mass media. Audiences are not passive and forcefully fed.
Stuart Hall claimed that media texts go through stages of encoding and decoding. He believes that media texts are encoded by the producer and that the texts contain only the ideologies of the people who made the media text. Decoding is when an audience views the text and interprets their own ideologies into the text. Not all audiences will respond in the same way and often not the way the producer intended.
DOMINANT
- How the producer wants the audience to view the media text they agree with the message is it conveying.
NEGOTIATED
- A compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings, the audience understand and agree with the text but disagree with other areas they have their own views on.
OPPOSITIONAL
- The audience rejects the encoded meaning and creates their own meaning for the text, they fully disagree with the message being submitted.
Believes in most media texts men are portrayed as the following: Masculine, aggressive, strong and powerful. So essentially saying that the media portray men in an extreme stereotypical manner.
She also believes that in most media texts women are portrayed as, weak, submissive to men and in traditional roles e.g. Housewives.
Stanley suggests that a moral panic occurs when a “ condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.“
He believes that the media play a massive role in enforcing moral panic and demonising a group through negative representation
Propp believed that texts represent characters as different types so that the audience can easily identity them and know how to react to them. For example:
Unrestricted narrative: Information is given out in as much detail as possible so that the narrative is clear. Audiences often know more than the characters so, for example the audieence know who the killer is or where they are
Restricted narrative: Narrative is kept minimal , with parts unclear.
Bordwell states that genre is based on different conventions and 'any theme may appear in any genre'
‘One could... argue that no set of necessary and sufficient conditions can mark off genres from other sorts of groupings in ways that all experts or ordinary film-goers would find acceptable'
He believed that many films mixed more than one genres (hybrids)
Rick Altman argues that genres are usually defined in terms of media language, SEMANTIC elements or SYNTACTIC elements.
SEMANTIC elements are what you see which are easy for the audience to identify with. For example in horror movies these would be things such as knives, blood and dark colours.
SYNTACTIC elements are themes such as fear, revenge or rage and plots