Audience and Consumption

This week we studied audience and the consumption. This means the way in which audiences use the media and consume the media. Different audiences will consume the media in a different way depending on the media text in which they desire to consume. You may not intentionally seek to consume the media but as it is something that does surround us, you may not help but take it in. The different audiences consume the media in different ways. Some like to listen to the radio, watch television, surf the net, read a newspaper or connect with people via social networks. There have become many more ways now for audiences to consume the media. However, the media approach the audience in different ways too. This is when the theory factors come in when decoding and gaining the understanding of audience consumption within the media.

“The main theories of audience research have been the ‘effects debate’ the ‘uses and gratifications’ model, the ‘encoding/decoding’ model and ethnography” [Lacey, N, 2002;p144]

The way in which the audience tend to consume products have the obvious outcomes such as you may wish to listen to a specific song; therefore you might search for it on YouTube. You want to find out what’s going on in the world? So you would turn on the TV to the News Channel. However, there are other ways in which the audience consume media products such as advertisements.

“in consumer society, advertising agencies represent expertise in reading trends, fashions, signs and other codes. They are able to use these systems of signification for clients to help position their products in the minds, desires and affections of consumers.” [Long P and Wall T, 2012;p430]

Photography has a lot of power within its text. When an audience go to consume a product such as a magazine and they are viewing the advertisements within the magazine, they are merely just looking at the picture. However, what they are really getting back from viewing the image may be something completely different. This is the effect which it may have on the audience. Through Uses and gratification, for example, some women may look at beauty product adverts and wish to aspire to be like what they are seeing. However, the produces have created this image to look attractive and they have edited the image simply to create this effect on the audience which they then hope for the audience to go and consume the product just because they’ve taken this view on the advert. By using celebrity endorsement in an advertisement, the audience are then taking into account who the celebrity is which makes the product which the producers are selling, much more memorable. This is then another way in which audiences consume the media because not only are they taking into account of the product but they are also taking into account the celebrity representing it which then shows how a cycle begins to form, a cycle which allows various participants within to gain some acknowledgement. So where is the consumer left within this cycle?

I would test the way in which audience consume media products by doing a Focus Group which would allow me to analyse the different ways and the effects in which they gain from different media texts.

Lacey N (2002). Media Instituions and Audiences. New York : Palgrave. 144.

Paul Long and Tim Wall (2009). Media Studies Text, Production and Context. Essex, England : Pearson Education Limited. 430.