Post 7: Audience Theory

Audience theory is a starting point within media tasks. Audience theory is something you need to consider in media because it needs to consider the target audience and how the audience will respond to the media text. Media texts are transmitted and this may influence peoples behaviour to things.
The effects model such as the theory called the Hypodermic Needle was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences react to mass media. This idea is that information within the media text is passively transmitted. The Hypodermic Needle were an injected message, and are passively received.
Other theories within the effects model is the Desensitisation which said that the more violence we see the more desensitised we become to it and the less shocked we are in real life.
Copycat Theory states that individuals may act out what they see modelled on T.V. An example of this may be the Jamie Bulger Case.
The Dominant- Hegemonic Reading is one in which consumers unquestioningly accept the message that the producers are transmitting to them.

I did independent research and watch four short films and I analysed them and looked for possible audience receptions.

For this short film I looked on the BBC for short films and I watched one called 'The Hive'. This film started off very dark with a man in a van. It shows him holding a tin box with something in it. In the box it shows money and this is making the audience question where this money has come from and what the man is doing in the van when it is really dark. The uses and gratifications theory helps us think about the identity of this man and it also says that situations such as this helps the audience to learn more about the character.

Another short film which I watched was from a DVD which is called 'Life's Too Short' the short film on this was called 'Tenner'. This film has a big impact on the audience as it makes them intrigued into what the real story is behind it. This becomes clear by the end of the film. At the beginning of this film you see a teenage boy vandalising a shop and shouting at the shop keeper. The boy lives with an older man which appears to be his grandad. The boy gets into a lot of trouble of a regular basis. The teenager then goes to a hard ware store and he takes some sand paper and begins to rub his leg by his ankle with the sand paper which causes it to bleed. The audience is unaware of why he is doing this and makes them confused and also interested in the reason behind him doing this. The audience reads from this is that the boy is self-harming but it becomes clear to why he has done this to himself. In the next part the boy is back at home when the door knocks and his grandad answers the door. There is a man in a black suit with a silver metal box. The audience questions who this man is and what he is doing there, also to what is in the box. The boy comes into the room and the man takes out of the box a police tag. He asks the boy to roll up his trouser leg to place it on his leg and he has a bandage on one leg and cuts on the other from the sand paper. He puts it on the leg with the bandages and the man leaves. After he has left the boy shows that this leg is in fact a false leg. Throughout the film there is flash backs of the boy on his bike and has been hit by a car and this is revealed to the audience that he lost his leg when he was hit by a car. The car was driven by the shopkeeper and the audience becomes clear to why the boy reacted in the way he did and also the reason to why he vandalised the shop. 

I watched another short film from the DVD in which I mentioned above was another short film called 'Jade'. Jade is about a teenage school girl and she finds herself in a difficult situation. She has a boyfriend who she does not appear to be interested in and tries to avoid. The audience reads this as her not wanting to be with him anymore. In one scene she is sitting in the school toilets with and she holds her hands together and reveals she is holding a pregnancy test. It shows that she is pregnant. Some of the audience who will watch this would be shocked by this as they may not agree with it or they have never experienced someone being in this particular situation. Others may not be as shocked by this as they have either watched other films which have the same story line so this message has been passively received that things such as this do happen and may not be shocked. Jade has a job at a caravan site and it is later revealed that she has a relationship with an older man. The audience such as me would feel uncomfortable watching this this as they do not agree with what is happening is right. This makes the audience question who the father is. This particular short film audiences may react in different ways depending on whether they have been revealed to these particular situations.

Post 6: Representation Theory

Representation is a key concept in media studies. In media there are representations of things such as social groups, gender, age, class and race. Through media texts representations are portrayed and these are very important because these groups have to be portrayed in a careful way. Representation refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. Such representations may be in speech or writing as well as still or moving pictures. Representation involves not only how identities are represented (or rather constructed) within the text but also how they are constructed in the processes of production and reception by people whose identities are also differentially marked in relation to such demographic factors.

This is a diagram to show how the process of showing representations are constructed.

The main idea about representation is its concern with the way in which representations are made to seem ‘natural’. Systems of representation are the means by which the concerns of ideologies are framed; such systems ‘position’ their subjects.

Semiotics is a main concept in analysing representation. Semiotics was the idea that you can read signs given within a piece of media text. The sign is given through a representation of something and has a meaning behind it and an example of this may be a really expensive car may represent the class of someone and this representation immediately tells us something about the character before we have been introduced to the character. Semiotics are a main method to use with representations because it informs the audience of the representation of the character in which they are trying to portray without giving the audience anymore information.


In class we have studied short films and we looked at different ones to try and identify the representations which were being portrayed throughout the short film. We watched the same clip over again to see if we could recognise all of the representations within the short film.

To get an angle on representation we looked at a clip from the TV drama Doctor Who. We watched the same clip more than once to try and identify all of the representations shown throughout the clip. In this clip

the representations are very clear to see because within the first few seconds of the clip it shows the Doctor giving the lady instructions to follow straight away and this represents the idea of male dominance over women. Also shown in this part is the age representation because the man is older than the woman so he feels that he is more superior to her and he feels that he can order her around to do what he wants her to do and this is also showing the dominance in which the man has over the woman within this particular clip.
Also in this clip the woman character is strongly represented in her sexual aspect because when she is talking to the man she is playing with her hair and this is an act of a sexual representation and she does this purely for the man's attention and this is backed up by her saying to the Doctor that she would do anything to get what she wants. The woman is trying to impress the man because he is of a higher status and she is trying to be approved by him because the man has dominance over her. Known as the Doctor's assistant Billy Piper's costume is red and her make up and long hair conform to stereotypical representations of women.  It is quite clear that Piper's character construction appeals to the male gaze, (Laura Mulvey).

A short film which we watched was called 'Tender'. This was directed by Deborah Haywood in 2009. This short film is about a school boy called Liam who wins some money on a scratch card but he keeps this quiet from his mum and his mum's boyfriend.  Liam is the unwanted son and his 'step father' is not much older than Liam is. A girl at school finds out about the money and she gets interested and uses him to buy her gifts. Violence and unhappiness dominate the film.

The representations in this short film is centred around representation of class. The house is a big part of the representation, the front door's glass panel is smashed, inside the house is untidy. The relationship between the boy and his mum is represented in a negative way as they do not have much of a relationship, the mother has an open sexual relationship with her boyfriend in front of her son, clearly this is a representation if a dysfunctional family. When they find out that Liam has won money they are mad at him and take it off him. The girl at his school when she finds out that he has won money she uses him and this represents her being greedy and selfish because she does not actually like him she uses him for the money. To obtain more money Liam sells his PlayStation to a local, the local man is represented as fat and clearly not working. There are several scenes of violence. The representation of class is very negative.

Another short film was directed and written by Daniel Elliott and it is called 'Jade'. This short film was about a school girl who has a boyfriend but she becomes very distant from his as we realise that she has been with someone else but this man is a lot older than she is. She later finds out that she is pregnant and she is unsure of who the father is. In this short film the representations are shown through age. Age representation is shown by the teenage school girl seeing a man around the age of 30. This representation may be seen as being uncomfortable for the audience to watch as this may not be seen as morally right in today's society. Some people may see this as a man being dominant and superior to a young girl and may be seen as she is being taken advantage of. Also the age of the girl being pregnant may also be seen in a negative way in today's society because people do not believe that a girl of her age would be able to support and bring up a baby. This may also be a representation of the class of her home life in which she has been brought up in.