Audience Theorists.

Today I have been looking deeply into Audiences relating to what scares them and why. This led me onto researching some theorists on Audience. Here is what I have found...

The Hypodermic Needle Model

This sounded very complicated to me but it is actually very simple. Basically, it suggests that an audience passively receives information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to challenge the data that they have been given.

The theory suggests that as an audience, we are passive and are manipulated by the creators of media texts and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media makers.

My opinions: In my previous Blog I posted a video of a thriller film being watched by a large audience in the cinema, when you watch each individual carefully you can see that they all have very similar reactions to each other of the movie, for example, they all shriek at the exact same time, pull their bodies back  simultaneously when they believe something is about to happen. Why is this? They look as if these reactions have been programmed into them and I believe that the media have almost trained them to be scared at the parts in the movie that they say they should be scared at. It is quite a scary thing in itself when you think about it.

However, another thing  that I noticed when watching their reactions, is that some individuals would turn to their friend or partner to see what their reactions are. Could this mean that, yes, we are influenced by the media and what they inject into us but could the power of our peers opinions have a stronger influence? Then I found this theory...

The Two-step Flow of Communication Theory

This theory believes that even though the media had power to change people's minds, this could be
re-affected by the way in which this information was discussed by influential people, such as Party Leaders.

I think that this theory talks a lot of sense, however I believe that it doesn't just have to be high, influential people to change your opinion on the media, it could be whoever is influential to you. That could be your parents, family, friend's etc..

I also believe that in this day and age where social media and voicing your opinions online is a huge thing, the media doesn't necessarily shape our opinions anymore and were not as passive as we once possibly were. We are now heavily influenced by our friends comments on Facebook and celebrities Tweets, basically we all shape each others opinions now. There is no longer a selected group of people (the media) that single handedly have control.

This is also quite a shocking realisation but this could be used to our advantage when creating our short film. Especially because we want to take the post-modernism, viral route to creating our film, we can use the concept that society influences each other through the Internet to our advantage. For example, we can try and make people believe what we want, this could be through posting different facts about the cinema, making out that new information has just been released, to even creating our own newspaper articles pretending that a  story relating to the cinema has just been discovered. The possibilities are endless, we now need to take action and put these ideas to use and hopefully make at least one person believe in what we are saying! This would then disprove both of the theories and help people realise that we are now all influential people, who have control over not only our own opinions but others too!