LESSON 6: AUDIENCE IDENTITIES

We need to explore some issues regarding how the media constructs identity and the impact this has on audiences.

To do so, we must first understand the theories of audience, specifically the effects debate.

The effects debate is about the idea that the media changes us. 

In watching, listening, involving, interacting - the text will effect the way we think, shape our ideas about the world.  The text will challenge the way that we think, sustain the way that we think, make us act in a particular way that we otherwise would not.

It shapes [alters] our morality, our beliefs, our actions.

We looked in AS at the theories of media products and audience behaviors.  We explored how the Hypodermic Theory was discredited yet still serves as the basis of censorship and fuels media debates even today.

Media institutions too often rely on sensationalist reporting of serious issues – too often representing complex issues such as the motive for murder or the causes of violence in society reduced to simplistic headlines.  Such reporting takes as its justification media theories such as the hypodermic model that are outdated and long discredited. The issue for identity is the extent to which audiences might 'believe' such stories.  this leads us into the ideas of Blumler and Katz - how we use the media [for example, for social identity or sense of self] and how we receive the messages of media products [the theories of Hall in encoding/decoding and of reception analysis - the acceptance, rejection or negotiation of a media products meaning].

We come to four key issues in the debate over media and identity:

We all have our identity shaped by the media – increasingly it is the cement that holds cultural groups together.

Media is the touch-point where groups meet and share ideas and experiences, where we find ourselves agreeing or disagreeing  with such ideologies or representations as we create our identity.

In media we find narratives we believe in, representations that are attractive or desirable for us

If we can believe that media choices define us then we are also defined by the media we consume.