Audience manipulation

Audience Manipulation and Hegemony

Manipulation - controlling someone to do something they want to do.  The audience are being manipulated by the producer.

Audiences can be split by demographics - age, class, gender etc...

There is a relationship between the audience and producer.

Audiences are easily manipulated 

You can get addicted to watching television, you can be easily hypnotised by the TV. This shows that audiences are easily manipulated without much effort.

By watching Youtube (for example) false expectations are sold to us as audiences.

If you play too many video games, it influences the way you do things. For example if you play GTA, then you may become violent.

The producer makes an assumption that the audience are stupid.

Key theory 15 - Albert Bandura

Media effects

Hypodermic - under the skin.

Hypodermic needle model - the audience has no say in what they watch.

An example of where the audience has no choice over whether to be manipulated or not, was propaganda. Media was formed mostly after the second world war. The propaganda worked because it portrayed certain minorities in a bad light.

Key theory16  - George Gerbner 

Cultivation theory

"The idea that prolonged and heavy exposure to TV cultivates, as in grows or develops in audiences "a view of the world consistent with the dominant or majority view expounded by television."

- George Gerbner 

The word you always must use with cultivation theory is 'ideology'.

Television presents a mainstream view of culture, ignoring everything else. In doing so, television distorts reality. Heavy television users are therefore more likely to accept this edited and distorted view of reality.

Pros and Cons of this theory

CONS: Not everyone is going to view the same thing in the same way.

Not everyone is going to think something is realistic.

This advert makes the assumption that all the audience are identical.

Gerbner's research was restricted, due to his study being based on people who solely watch 6-8 hours of TV, with no diversity in watchers.

Things have changed drastically media-wise since this time period.

PROS: - It is still absolutely essential as it allows us to understand how people's opinions shift. 

Key sentences to use when discussing the theory:

This cultivates the ideology that...

Gender representation

World we live in 

Hegemony

Having leg hair for women is not seen as being acceptable because of the hegemonic society.

Key Theory 17 - Stuart Hall

(reception theory)

Any audience can get anything they want out of a media product.

The theory is HOW we receive. an advert. 

This theory is a criticism of Gerbner and Bandura's theory

Preferred reading - the 'right' reading of a media product, the meaning the producer wants the audience to come up with. This can be reinforced by positioning. This concept has to be approached carefully: often texts intentionally have multiple meanings/readings and of course, as we have discovered, audiences can potentially get whatever they want out of any media text.

It is not to do with whether the audience like or dislike the advert, it is to do with whether they agree or disagree with the ideology of the producer.

The three readings:

DOMINANT READING - The audience agrees with the dominant values in the text, and agrees with the values and ideologies it shows.

OPPOSITIONAL READING - The audience completely disagrees with what they see, and rejects the dominant reading.

NEGOTIATED READING - The audience generally agrees with what they see, but they may disagree with certain aspects.