Yr 10 Radio and Audience Theory

Audience Gratifications

To understand the impact of meaning encoded, you must be able to identify audience gratifications/pleasures as well as apply audience theories when deconstructing a media text. 

USES & GRATIFICATIONS THEORY

Uses and Gratifications theory as developed by Blulmer and Katz suggests that media users play an active role in choosing and using the media. Blulmer and Katz believed that the user seeks out the media source that best fulfils their needs.

The uses and gratifications theory assumes the audience chooses what it wants to watch for five different reasons.

Information and Education – the viewer wants to acquire information, knowledge and understanding by watching programmes like The News or Documentaries.

Entertainment – Viewers watch programmes for enjoyment.

Personal Identity - Viewers can recognise a person or product, role models that reflect similar values to themselves and mimic or copy some of their characteristics.

Integration and social interaction – the ability for media products to produce a topic of conversation between people. For example who is the best contestant on The X-factor who which was the best goal shown on Match of the day.

Escapism – Computer games and action films let viewers escape their real lives and imagine themselves in those situations

1. Complete the following questions in your Blog.

Example Radio Questions

Explain some reasons why might people listen to the radio? Refer to the Uses and Gratifications theory in your answer. (8)

Explain some of the threats facing the radio industry and how the industry is responding to these threats. (12)

DYER'S UTOPIAN SOLUTIONS THEORY

Dyer suggested that the media fulfils our needs and compensates for what we are lacking in our own lives.

E.G. An exhausted office worker might watch lots of TV Dramas where the hero denotes immense energy when battling villains; a lonely person might watch Soap Operas to gain a sense of community etc. 

These are 5 solutions that consuming media texts can offer us:

• Transparency
• Finding out what is really happening, seeing behind the scenes, seeing into hidden or private places
• Energy
• Seeing people involved in energetic activities, including sports
• Intensity
• The emotional drama and excitement of conflict; arguments, tension & suspense, life & death situations
• Community
• Working as a team, having a group of friends; 'people' who need you
• Abundance
• The plentiful supply of money or material goods like clothes, technology, cars etc

CAN YOU THINK OF OTHERS?

2. Create a table in your blog like the example below and enter with your own solutions in regards to what the media might offer people.

MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

3. Answer the following questions in your blog

Q. What does radio as a media form offer audiences?

Q. What did Radio One in 1967 offer its audience?

Q. What does Apple Beats Radio offer it's audience?

Q. How has technology changed the gratifications on offer to audiences?

Q. Do you think radio will still exist in 10 years time? Explain why.