Audience Theory

The Cultural Studies Approach to Audience:

Within the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, David Morley researches how the media influences audiences, he encourages researchers to understand the active nature of certain audiences. His approach aims to understand the intended effects of media texts, he has noticed that audiences take different standpoints to values expressed in certain media texts, these are:

1. Preferred (or dominant) reading - the audience recognize the values being offered by the text and accepts them as natural and correct.
2. Negotiated reading - the audience recognize the values in the text as legitimate and accept them in general, but adapt their reading of the text to fit in with their experiences and interest.
3. Oppositional reading - the audience understands the values in the text, but disagrees with them and rejects them

• How might audiences read the values expressed in your video and print work in a preferred, negotiated and oppositional way? - I believe our target audience will recognize our video in a preferred way because of it's views of loneliness, the age of our target audience will relate to this because each of us experiences loneliness at some stage. I think our video could also be recognized in a negoitated way because our target audience could relate to the text and fit it in with their own personal experiences, they could also reognize it's artistic value because the main character is shown as a lonely but incredibly gifted individual and creates imagery from his dreams, many may relate themselves to his artistic talents. Our video could also be recognized in an oppositonal way where the target audience rejects our views of loneliness, in their own opinion our views could be said to be incorrect but then again their views could also be incorrect.

• What are you going to do to encourage the target audience to take a preferred reading? - To encourage our target audience to take a preferred reading to our video we will use an actor of a similar age range to the audience, we will also try to make him seem like a typical student just like themselves. Our video won't feature stereotyped characters that may offend our audience because young people stereotyped into different groups can be quite hurtful towards some people.

• What kind of person might take an oppositional reading? - Seeing our video is targetted at a younger audience some older people may disagree with our views of loneliness, they may understand them but may dislike the way we explained them on screen, this may be the same with some of the younger audience but the video wasn't designed to please everyone, some will like it whereas others may not.