In your representation section you will have have identified a definite Ideology emerging from the pages of your magazine.
You will, perhaps, have had something
to say, perhaps something negative to say, about the way your chosen magazine has constructed a given reality.
Just because your magazine is pushing a message it
does not necessarily mean that the audience will receive and accept wholeheartedly that message.
Your Audience section will be about the possible ways in which the audience responds to that message. If you feel that your magazine has offered a construction
which is fundamentally damaging or demeaning it does not necessarily follow that the audience will be demeaned or damaged when they encounter that message.
The protocols of the examination suggest that each candidate and should involve himself, herself, in a synoptic overview of the entire course.
In your Independent Study therefore it is important that you indicate to the examiner that you’re fully conversant with audience reception theory.
You must indicate that you were fully aware of a number of theories relating it to the way in which audiences respond to media texts.
This will involve your in a broad brief
outline of the major theories related to audience reception.
You must be aware of what these theories are.
In any event, audience reception theory is central to both the papers in the final
examination in June.
I suggest that you outline to the examiner your broad grasp of the notion of the
active audience and the passive audience.
The idea that of the totally passive audience has been largely discredited.
The notion of the active audience involves
ideas are like, uses and gratifications theory,
notions of cultural competence,
and the idea that audiences may accept, reject, or negotiate their own meanings.
The notion of audience pleasures is also important.
No one should assume that because a magazine constructs gay people negatively
that it will turn its audience into homophobes
or because a magazine is obsessed
with celebrity its audience will be equally obsessed.
You should stress above all else that the idea of a mass audience has been largely discredited too .
Each member of an audience is an individual and each individual has his own individual way of responding to a media text.
You should speak about
your own mini focus group and how it suggested of that there were many different repertoires when reading a magazine. This would suggest that different readers
take different pleasures from their magazine and use it in a variety of different ways.
Because your eye is seeing the photographs in a magazine and because your brain decodes the text in a magazine it would seem that some cognitive change has
taken place but it does not necessarily mean that personal ideologies/beliefs have been radically altered.
Every decoding is another encoding
Magazines make-up a very tiny part of one’s daily media intake, they are not the only area of the media attempting to change hearts, minds and behaviours.
Personal / ideological change is MULTIFACTORIAL in its causes.
