Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Audience theory offers explanations of how people encounter media, how they use it, and how it affects them. Although the concept of an audience predates modern media, [1] most audience theory is concerned with people’s relationship to various forms of media. There is no single theory of audience, but a range of explanatory frameworks.
For example, analyses of quality television, such as Cathy Come Home and Twin Peaks, have attracted the interests of researchers for their cinematic qualities. However, television studies can also incorporate the study of television viewing and how audiences make meaning from texts, which is commonly known as audience theory or reception theory.
Jenkins examines topics such as three aspects of fans' characteristics mode of reception: ways fans draw texts close to the realm of their lived experience, the role played by rereading within fan culture, and the process by which program information gets inserted into ongoing social interactions.
For example, a film may be received as a comedy by some viewers, while others might perceive it as a tragedy, depending on their own experiences and cultural backgrounds. Reception theory further highlights the complex nature of media consumption, as audiences are not passive recipients but active participants in the construction of meaning.
The sociology of film deals with the sociological analysis of film. [1] According to a university class in it, the field includes "Contemporary cinema as a culture clue to social change; an introduction to the social forces involved in film-making in the United States and other cultures; the influence of films on mass and select audiences."
Active audience theory is seen as a direct contrast to the Effects traditions, however, Jenny Kitzinger, professor of Communications at Cardiff University, argues against discounting the effect or influence media can have on an audience, acknowledging that an active audience does not mean that media effect or influence is not possible. [5]
Theoretical approaches have also been adopted from visual anthropology and from film theory, as well as from studies of ritual and performance studies (e.g. dance and theatre), studies of consumption, audience reception in media studies, new media and network theories, theories of globalisation, theories of international civil society, and ...
Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; [1] and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. [2]