Audience Theory

The cultural studies approach to audience:


According to Morley, audiences aren't just passively affected by media texts, they take an active role in reading a text.

How might audiences read the values expressed in your video and print work in a preferred, negotiated and oppositional way? 

I think that our target audience will be able to read our video in a preferred way as its all about people being different and because of the age of our target audience I know that they will be able to relate to and understand the idea we are going to put across in our video. I don't think our target audience could read the video in a negotiated way but possibly a oppositional way as we could have misinterpreted their view on difference and they could reject the idea of how people react when people are different, it really depends on our audiences opinion on the subject.

What are you going to do to encourage the target audience to take a preferred reading? 

I think that the overall idea will appeal to our target audience anyway but to encourage it even more we will use actors in a similar age range and the types of things the actors will be doing will be things that our target audience can relate to e.g. learning to drive or trying to get a girlfriend/boyfriend.

What kind of person might take an oppositional reading?

I think that someone who would watch the video and are older than our target audience might take an oppositional reading as it is possible that the older generation can be made to look like they don't accept difference. This could lead to some viewers to reject the idea we are showing them, however our video is only meant to appeal to our target audience.

The cultural studies approach perspective on audience:

David Morley tries to understand how media might be a powerful influence on audiences, but as well as this he encourages researches to understand the active nature of certain audiences.

     

This approach tries to understand the intended effects of media texts, but also see's audiences as active and that different audiences will differ in how they read the values in a media text.

• Preferred or dominant reading: The audience recognize the values being offered by the text and accepts them as natural and correct.
• Negotiated reading:The audience recognize the values in the text as legitimate and accept them in general, but adapt their reading of the text to fit in with their experiences and interests.
• Oppositional reading:The audience understands the values in the text, but disagrees with them and rejects them.