Media Theorists

Audience Theory

Richard Dyer

• 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.

Blumer and Katz: Uses & gratifications model

• 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.

5 things comprimising uses & grticfications

• The audience is conceived as active
• In the mass communication process, linking gratification and media choice lies with the audience member
• The media compete with other sources of satisfaction
• Methodologically speaking, many of the goals of mass media use can be derived from data supplied by individual audience members themselves
• Value judgements about cultural significance of mass communications should be suspended while audience orientations are explored on their own terms

Hypodermic needle theory

• Humans react uniformly to stimuli.
• The media’s message is directly “injected” into the “bloodstream” of a population like fluid from a syringe.
• Messages are strategically created to achieve desired responses.
• The effects of the media’s messages are immediate and powerful, capable of causing significant behavioral change in humans.
• The public is powerless to escape the media’s influence.

Reception theory- Stuart HallS

• 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, NEGOTIATED and OPPOSITIONAL reading

• 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.

Representation Theory

Laura Mulvey - The male gaze

• Women are objectified and seen as sex objects
• Women play passive roles and are seen as erotic objects which slow the narrative
• Mulvey argued that women where given two characters types - sexually active female & powerless female
• Films presented images of women that were produced simply for the gratification of male viewers

angela Mcrobbie

• 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 cohen- Moral Panic

• 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

NARRATIVE THEORY

todorov- nARRATIVE THEORY

• A STATE OF EQUILIBRIUM- ALL IS HOW IT SHOULD BE
• A DISTRUBTION OF THAT ORDER- CAUSED BY AN EVENT
• A RECOGNITION THAT THE DISORDER HAS OCCURED
• AN ATTEMPT TO REPAIR THE DAMAGE OF THE DISTRUBTIPN
• A RETURN OR RESTORATION OF A NEW EQUILIBRIUM

ALLEN CAMERON- 4 TYPES OF MODULAR NARRATIVE

• ANACHRONIC NARRATIVE- REGULAR FLASH BACKS AND FLASH FORWARDS E.G. PULP FICTION. ALL STANDS EQUALLY IMPORTANT
• FORKING PATH- SHOWS TWO DIFFERENT OUTCOMES THAT ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM CHANGES OR DECISIONS E.G. GROUND HOG DAY
• EPISODIC- SEPARATE NARRATIVES THAT HAVE SOME SORT OF LINK E.G. ALL INVOLVED IN SOME ACCIDENT OR INCIENT.
• SPLIT SCENE NARRATIVES- DIFFERENT STORIES LINKED BY THE FACT THEY ARE ON SCREEN AT THE SAME TIME.

VLADIMIR PROP

• 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:
• Hero
• Villian
• Princess
• Doner/ helper
• Dispatcher

Lewis strauss- Binary opposites

• Binary opposite e.g. good vs evil, weak vs strong, sane vs insane
• He believed that we essentially believed things not because of their direct meaning but because of the opposite of it.
• So a hero only really means something if you see them in opposition to a villian

unknown narrative theorists

• 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.

genre theory

Steve neal

• Believes genre isn't set- there are five stages
• 1. The form finding itself (psycho)
• 2. The classic (Halloween)
• 3. Stretching the genre boundaries (nightmare on elm street
• 4. Parody (scary movie)
• 5. Homage (scream)

Bordwell

• 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

• 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

rOBERT Stan

• Films can't be categorised as a particular genre (concept made up because film critics need them) it is down to your personal preference.
• He argues the four main problems are:
• 1. Extension- The breadth or narrowness of labels
• 2. Normativism- Having pre conceived ideas of criteria for genre membership
• 3. Monolithic definitions- As if an item belonged to only one culture
• 4. Biologism- A kind of essentialism in which genres are seen as evolving through a standardised life cycle