A media text has no meaning until it is read or decoded by an audience. Over the course of the past centuries, people who analyze media have developed many theories from the information that they perceived in media. In this post we will analyze some of the theories which have been developed.
Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet came up with a theory after analyzing the audience of a 1940 election and they came up with an idea that information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its unmediated but instead is filtered through opinion leaders which read their opinion to the audience and may be able to influence them with their ideas. After this the audience then mediates the information that they have heard and ideas which they have heard from the media. Now this is called the two step flow theory because the audience is being influenced by not one source only but now two.
Hypodermic Needle model
This was one of the first theories created and this theory tries to explain how mass audiences may react to mass media. It suggests that audience passively receive the information which is transmitted from a media text. Now this doesn’t take any attempt from them to process or challenge the data that they are shown. This theory was done when mass media had just been introduced, so people weren’t really used to mass media. Basically this theory explains how information from the media passes into the audience mass consciousness unmediated. It also explains that the audience is manipulated by the media to make our thought process change in order to their favor, and that we are passive and heterogeneous.
Sources
http://www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/alevkeyconcepts/alevelkeycon.php?pageID=audience
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