Audience Theory

Richard Dyer - Utopia (perfect idealised world)
Audience want media products that offer 'utopian solutions' to their problems. e.g. Pretty Woman.
Dystopian-  makes the audience reflect on the film, in a lot of sci-fi films e.g. Blade Runner, Matrix.

The Frankfurt School - The Hypodermic Needle Model
The audience are seen as passive. Their intelligence, experience and opinion is not relevant. They are manipulated by producers of texts and are told how to think.

Blumler and Katz - Uses and Gratifications
The audience are active (so the opposite of passive) The audience choose what media to consume and to meet their needs. The audience have different needs at different times and different things can effect their needs, mood, weather, opinion, intelligence, experience. The audience have identified needs that the media need to fulfil.
Identified Needs:

• Entertainment & Diversion - escapism, the audience just want to enjoy and sometimes it has nothing to do with the audience.
• Personal Relationships/Social Interactions - identification with characters (representation) and to discuss media products with others. The audience can relate. It's prevalent to young people (they want to watch it as other people talk about it).
• Personal Identity - audience compares their life to the characters and situations in the media texts (representation). This appeals to people who think they are like the characters in a film or tv drama.
• Information/Education - to find out and learn about what is going on in the world. This can be in the form of a moral message. e.g. Trainspotting tries to deter young people from taking heroin.

David Buckingham - The Creative Audience
Young people can use the media to help make sense of their experiences, of relating to others and organising their daily lives. They can form attachments to certain characters in a media text and create their own sense of identity, trying to understand the world around them.
"The media offer material for experimentation with alternative social identities, if only at the level of fantasy or aspiration" 
Young people's media use fits in with their other social activities and experiences. To young people the media = 'wallpaper'. A wall of noise to fill up 'down time' or just to pass the time due to boredom. Many of their interactions with the media are not contrived, commited or concentrated but fleeting, visceral or meaningless. E.g 'Bad movies' appeals to teens (sex, drugs, swearing), because it is a way for young people to experience without actually having to do it.