Audience theory offers explanations of how people encounter media, how they use it, and how it affects them. Although the concept of an audience predates media,[1] most audience theory is concerned with people’s relationship to various forms of media. There is no single theory of audience, but a range of explanatory frameworks. These can be rooted in the social sciences, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies, communication studies and network science depending on the phenomena they seek to explain. Audience theories can also be pitched at different levels of analysis ranging from individuals to large masses or networks of people.
James Webster suggested that audience studies could be organized into three overlapping areas of interest.[2] One conceives of audiences as the site of various outcomes. This runs the gamut from a large literature on media influence to various forms of rhetorical and literary theory. A second conceptualizes audiences as agents who act upon media. This includes the literature on selective processes, media use and some aspects of cultural studies. The third see the audiences as a mass with its own dynamics apart from the individuals who constitute the mass. This perspective is often rooted in economics, marketing, and some traditions in sociology. Each approach to audience theory is discussed below.
^Butsch, Richard (2000). The making of American audiences: From stage to television 1750-1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
^Webster, James G. (1998). "The audience". Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. 42 (2): 190–207. doi:10.1080/08838159809364443.
Audiencetheory offers explanations of how people encounter media, how they use it, and how it affects them. Although the concept of an audience predates...
Active AudienceTheory argues that media audiences do not just receive information passively but are actively involved, often unconsciously, in making...
reception. Media audience studies have become a recognized part of the curriculum. Audiencetheory offers scholarly insight into audiences in general. These...
known as reception analysis, audience reception theory has come to be widely used as a way of characterizing the wave of audience research which occurred within...
The audience motivations they were able to identify helped lay the groundwork for their research in 1972 and eventually uses and gratifications theory. McQuail...
an audience without being evaluated, or those that were alone. In 1972, Nickolas Cottrell came up with Evaluation Apprehension Theory. This theory also...
discipline for his theory of the habitus. In his written work Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977), Bourdieu claims an audiences’ preference in...
Reception theory is generally referred to as audience reception in the analysis of communications models. In literary studies, reception theory originated...
TheFutonCritic.com. Retrieved May 2, 2009. "'Big Bang Theory': 'We didn't anticipate how protective the audience would feel about our guys'". Variety. May 8, 2009...
An audience cost, in international relations theory, is the domestic political cost that leaders incur from their constituency if they escalate a foreign...
interpretative methods, such as close reading, textual analysis, and audiencetheory, methods shared with other media disciplines such as television and...
The target audience is the intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement, or other message catered specifically to the previously intended...
mold an audience's beliefs, cognition, and behaviors according to the communicators' will. The basic assumption of strong media effects theory was that...
psychology, drive theory was used by Robert Zajonc in 1965 as an explanation of the phenomenon of social facilitation. The audience effect notes that...
are selected to reach their intended audience effectively. Grunig's model of segmentation Grunig proposed a theory-based model of segmentation which comprises...
the structure of program offerings. They were not, as most bodies of audiencetheory would predict, much affected by program type loyalties. The growth...
ISBN 978-0-07-140020-6. Suitable for a general audience. Osborne, Martin J. (2004), An introduction to game theory, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-512895-6...
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated...
showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point. Greene has become known to a wider audience through his books for the general...
for all types of style-shifting. The audience design model was inspired by Giles' communication accommodation theory and Bell's own research on the speech...
and negative consequences for the economy. Conspiracy theories once limited to fringe audiences have become commonplace in mass media, the internet, and...
methodologies to test and develop theories of audiences' processes of reception. Much of the field borrows concepts from literary theory and research approaches...
and experiences cohesively align. As per 2010, integral theory had found its primary audience within certain subcultures, with only limited engagement...
The theory of the least objectionable program (LOP) is a mediological theory explaining television audience behavior. It was developed in the 1960s by...
Audience fragmentation describes the extent to which audiences are distributed across media offerings. Traditional outlets, such as broadcast networks...
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