Radio and Audience Theory

Audience Gratifications

Learning Objective:

- To understand the impact of meaning encoded, you must be able to identify audience gratifications/pleasures as well as apply audience theories when deconstructing a media text.

Audience Pleasures

Aesthetic Pleasure - The appreciation of experiencing something beautiful. It could be the pleasure of listening to music perfectly matched to visual images in a film or video.

Cerebral Pleasures - The intellectual satisfaction that may come, for example from solving the problems set by a video game or following a perfectly constructed narrative.

Visceral Pleasures - These are of the body more than mind; the sort of thing that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up or makes you want to punch the air. Representations of revenge, 

triumph, horror, 'come-comeuppance', violence or sex all provide visceral pleasure.

Voyeuristic Pleasures - The satisfaction drawn from spying, prying or knowing something unknown to others. Audiences are often positioned as voyeurs as, for example, when we discover intimate secrets of a character in a drama.

Vicarious Pleasure - The pleasure enjoyed at second hand through the experiences of other. In sport, we can identify with the skills and triumphs of competitors. As above, dramas often position the audience to share the experiences  and feelings of a character.

Catharsis - This is the idea that our own pent up motions can be relieved by experiences like witnessing drama or music. Crying at the romantic comedy or enjoyed the violent destruction of a villain would be cathartic.

Uses and Gratifications Theory

Uses and Gratifications theory as developed by Blulmer and Katz suggests that media users play an active role in choosing and using the media. Blulmer and Katz believed that the user seeks out the media source that best fulfils their needs.

The uses and gratifications theory assumes the audience chooses what it wants to watch for five different reasons:

• Information and Education - the viewer wants to acquire information, knowledge and understanding by watching programmes like The News or Documentaries.
• Entertainment - Viewers watch programmes for enjoyment.
• Personal Identity - Viewers can recognise a person or product, role models that reflect similar values to themselves and mimic or copy some of their characteristics.
• Integration and social interaction - the ability for media products to produce a topic of conversation between people. For example who is the best contestant on The X Factor who which was the best goal shown on Match of the Day.
• Escapism - Computer games and action films let viewers escape their real lives and imagine themselves in those situations.

Example Radio Questions

Explain some reasons why might people listen to the radio? Refer to the Uses and Gratifications theory in your answer. (8)

Explain some of the threats facing the radio industry and how the industry is responding to these threats. (12)

Dyer's Utopian Solutions Theory

Dyer suggested that the media fulfils our need and compensated for what we are lacking in our own lives.

E.g. an exhausted worker might watch lots of TV dramas where the hero denotes immense energy when battling villains; a lonely person might watch Soap Operas to gain a sense of community etc.

These are 5 solutions that consuming media texts can offer us:

• Transparency - finding out what is really happening, seeing behind the scenes, seeing into hidden or private places.
• Energy - seeing people involved in energetic activities, including sports.
• Intensity - the emotional drama and excitement of conflict arguments, tension and suspense, life and death situations.
• Community - working as a team, having a group of friends; 'people' who need you
• Abundance - plentiful supply of money or material goods like clothes, technology, cars etc.