Abstract
The increasingly central part which audience analysis plays in media studies is identified in this chapter and the differences of opinion over the relative power of media and audience examined. Reference to the pessimistic views held by the Frankfurt School about the apparent powerlessness of audience is followed by summaries of Uses and Gratifications Theory, Dependency Theory and Cultivation Theory. Mention is made of emancipatory/repressive uses of media prior to media performance being discussed in Chapter 4.
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Notes
Peter Collett and Roger Lamb, Watching People Watching Television (UK: IBA Report, 1985).
Frankfurt school of theorists. When the Institute for Social Research returned from New York to Frankfurt in 1949, Herbert Marcuse stayed in America, writing a number of influential books, the best known of which is One Dimensional Man (UK: Sphere Books, 1968). See The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance (UK: Polity paperback, 1995) by Rolf Wiggershaus, translated by Michael Robertson.
Jay Blumler and Elihu Katz, The Uses of Mass Communication (US: Sage, 1974).
Denis McQuail, Jay Blumler and J.R. Brown (eds), Sociology of the Mass Media (UK: Penguin Books, 1972).
Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning: Cross-cultural Readings of Dallas (U: Oxford University Press, 1990; UK: Polity, 1993).
Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach and Melvyn DeFleur, ‘A dependency model of mass media effect’ in G. Gumpert and R. Cathcart (eds) Inter-Media: Interpersonal Communication in the Media (US: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Hans Magnus Enzensburger, ‘Constituents of a theory of the media’ in Denis McQuail (ed.) Sociology of Mass Communication (UK: Penguin Books, 1972).
Enzensburger’s chart is taken from Sven Windahl, Benno Signitzer and Jean T. Olson’s Using Communication Theory: An Introduction to Planned Communication (UK: Sage, 1992), itself derived from Enzensburger’s ‘Bankassten zu einer Theorie der Medien’ in D. Prokop (ed.) Medienforschung vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985).
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (UK: Methuen, 1986).
Greg Philo, Seeing and Believing: The Influence of Television (UK: Routledge, 1990).
Retention concerning people and places is stronger than recall of causes and consequences according to researches conducted by O. Findake and B. Hoijer summarised in ‘Some characteristics of news memory comprehension’, in Journal of Electronic and Broadcasting Media 29(5) (1985).
L.A. Festinger, A Theory of Dissonance (US: Row Pearson, 1957).
Paul Lazarsfeld et al., The People’s Choice (US: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1944).
John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (UK: Polity, 1995).
John Fiske, Reading the Popular (US: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
Resistance Through Rituals: Touth Sub-cultures in Post-war Britain (UK: Methuen, 1975), edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (UK: Methuen, 1979).
Herbert J. Schiller, Culture Inc. The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (US: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Ien Ang, ‘Global village and capitalist postmodernity’ in David Crowley and David Mitchell (eds) Communication Theory Today (UK: Polity, 1994).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendell (US: University of California Press, 1984).
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© 1998 James Watson
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Watson, J. (1998). Audience: the Uses We Make of Media. In: Media Communication. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26546-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26546-6_4
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