SD - Audience Theories

Audience theories:

- Julian McDougal (2009) suggests that because online age is getting harder to concieve media audiences as a stable identifyable groups.

HOWEVER..

Audiences still clearly make sense and give meaning to cultural products, certain people may not be interested in media products in which others are.

- McQuail (1972) said an audience can be described as a 'temporary collective' ie. people that are linked as being fandoms and are temporary audiences such as a couple going out to the cinema and picking a film last minute which they would'nt normally be interested in they may like or dislike the film after watching it.

HOWEVER..

If there was a cult following (not mainstream) but gathers sucess over a long period of time instead, these people are not temporary collective audiences. Some serious cult followers embrace aspects of a band or film or character intot their lives such as quoting characters and reading up on subjects they want to know more about in the text.

- Ien Ang (1991) says that audiences only exist as an imaginary entity, an abstraction which is constructed from the vantage point of the institution. This theory is talking about companies and corporations and is therefore not relative to people. This theory could be seen as outdated because of recent digitisation, because of digitisation audiences can be now scientifically measure on websites such as youtubes and website statistics.

Ang also said that audiencehood is becoming ever more multifaceted, fragmented and diversified repertoire of practices and experiences. More and more subgenres are coming about which would agree with this theory although the older generation may disagree.