Post 7 - Audeince Theory

Audience theory has the follwing four sectors within the media industry and these are as follows:

- Maslow's hiereachy of needs
- Dyer's Utopian Theory
- Uses of gratification theory
- Hyperdermic needle theory

Maslows hiereachy of needs in a theory in psychology, it is proposed by Abraham Maslow, he represented the needs that consists of; self actualisation, self esteem, love belonging, safety and phsychological, this is presented in a triangle where the physchological needs as they are 'more basic' are at the bottom and the self actualisation is at the top of the pyramid. This can be linked to the idea that consuming partical media texts fufils self esteem as does by certain products.

Dyer states that people will respond to a media text if it offers them compression for the inadequaces in their own lives through the media audiences can vicarously live their lives and fulfil their wants and needs leading them to strive to a Utopian life.

Uses and gratification theory suggests the understanding of why people actively seek out specific media outlets and content for gratification purposes. it also discusses how users proactively search for media text that will not only meet a given need but enhance knowledge, social interactions and diversion

The hyperdermic needle theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by 'shooting' or 'injecting' them with the appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response.

Stewart Hall - Dominant-hegemonic Reading (also known as preferred reading)
The position of a viewer who can identify with the hegemonic position and receive the dominant messages of an image or text in an unquestioning manner.

Analysis of three short films



Pop Art

One of the short films we watched as a class was called 'Pop Art', this film was about a young boy who is struggling with life until one day a new 'blow-up' boy joins his class and so he starts to make friends with him as seen on the picture above. The plot of this film is about the blow-up who gets bullied by his class friends, he is unaccepted in this film and therefore the audience can relate to him as at least one time in a person's life, someone has been bullied or they have seen someone who has been bullied. This is shot in a school and therefore their mise-en-scene is school clothing. The language used here has some foul words such as 'shithead' which is conventional as most children tend to swear in a school.



Tender

 Another short film that we watched was called Tender, this was about a young school boy called Liam, who lives in a council flat with his mother and her boyfriend who is shown to be very aggressive gets a hold of a bundle of cash, later on a classmate of his who suddenly becomes interested in him just for his money tells her that he won it from a scratch card, and so takes advantage of him and tells him to buy this, that and the other for her.



Jade

 This is a short film about a life of a young teenage girl. The first scene starts of with a swimming pool which in fact has no relation to her however it is later found that the swimming pool was a sign of symbolism, to suggest that 'being blue' is a sign of unhappiness and also getting a positive blue sign pregnancy test suggests that she is unhappy about it. This film raises an enigma of why this girl is dating a man who could be old enough to be her dad or even grandfather. However Jade has no choice but to turn to him as she is going through tough times and has no one to turn to.