Audience Theory...

The Hypodermic Needle Theory:

This theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. It suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data.
Horror films are usuallly discriminated for letting their audience receive certain topics and images passively, causing them to react or adopt the trates of horror characters, giving the horror genre a bad image. However, a horror film is made to entertain, and some would argue that purpose is fullfilled, and not abused or distorted.

The Hypodermic Needle Theory - Youtube clip

 

Uses & Gratifications Theory:

 Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:

- Surveillance

- Correlation

- Entertainment

- Cultural transmission

Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (uses and gratifications):

- Diversion/Escapism - escape from everyday problems and routine.

- Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, for example; substituting soap operas for family life.

- Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour, morals and values from texts.

- Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living such as; weather reports, financial news, adverts ect.

Target Audience:

What is a target audience?

In marketing and advertising, a target audience, is a specific group of people within the target market at which a product or the marketing message of a product is aimed at.

 

This is relevant to our task because we have to choose an audience type and age to target our media at.