Theories in Depth
LANG. REP. IND. AUD.
Barthes – Signification
Barthes explains the orders in which messages in media are decoded by the audience, through what he calls the orders of signification.
At first instance, the audience interprets signs through their denotation, which Barthes calls the first order of signification. This is the literal or primary representation of a sign despite the feelings or ideas that the sign evokes.
Readers quickly move beyond this simple recognition and subsequently engage in connotative decoding, the second order of signification. This is the subjective interpretations that derive from an individuals feelings towards the sign.
He also comments that in second order of signification our interpretation of the sign can be derived from culturally specific meanings that have become accepted throughout time, and when this happens the sign is detached from its primary representation and becomes a conveyor or cultural meaning. This is a myth.
Barthes understood the limitations of this model in regard to considering the way elements combine to produce singular effects and produced the five code symphony.
The five code symphony alludes to the way that connotative effects operate like voices or instruments in a band, where sometimes they operate in unison to create meaning while other times they are muted so one can provide a solo affect.
The five codes include:
- Hermeneutic codes (enigma):
These elements construct moments of mystery to intrigue the reader or viewer, they are prompted to locate answers that can only be resolved if they consume the rest of the product.
- Proairetic codes (action):
Moments in which meaning is constructed through action or demonstration that can provide education or excitement to the audience.
- Semantic codes (connotative elements):
Refers to elements in media texts that produces a single connotative effect, examples including lighting, pose and typography.
- Symbolic codes:
These are repeated themes or visual motifs that are references throughout the product in a thread of continuous underlying meaning.
- Cultural codes (referential codes):
This is anything that relies on the audience’s knowledge beyond the text to create meaning.
Barthes also explains that media has replaced functional myth making and the shift between traditional allegorical myths that serve to teach lessons and media myths today.
He summarizes that media myths are reductive as the media simplifies, reduces and purifies ideas so that they are easily digestible for the audience, discouraging the audience from questioning or analysing media content too closely.
He also states that media myths reinforce existing social power structures due to the people in power having the ability to shape myths to their own needs and ideologies.
Todorov and Propp – Narrative
Propp concluded that stories use “stock characters” to structure stories that all draw on similar archetypes to provide familiar narrative structure.
The hero, The Villain, The princess, The donor, The helper, The dispatcher, The false hero
Stories do not necessarily use all the characters listed but the majority are organized around the interplay of the princess, hero and villain archetypes.
Repetition of these characters provides familiarity which allows the audience to quicker connect with them. However, repetition of reactionary representations of gender categorized into respective archetypes build upon the foundation of heterosexual norms and stereotypes within media – consequently providing a conventional role model that suits those norms.
Todorov refined Propp’s theory arguing that narratives were created instead using moments of action; which he called propositions. Those moments combines into narrative sequences that tends to follow a similar patterns.
The “ideal” narrative created follows along the structure of equilibrium, disruption, new equilibrium. This sequence disrupts the stability of character types by providing character development as a result of the sequence.
New media products tend to bend the traditional sequence of storytelling that Todorov suggested in order to provide originality for the audience, which is an important role surrounding genres.
Examples of these devices could be anachronic devices (flashbacks/forwards) that subvert linear storytelling to disrupt the highly predictable nature of the three act structure. Another example is multi-perspective narratives where stories are told from different characters perspectives.
Todorov references the ideological effects of story structure as well, he states that the disruption used represents ideas, values and behaviours that are deemed problematic and that these negative ideologies are often embedded through the villain character.
Neale and Schatz – Genre
Neale describes genre as a repertoire of conventions and rules to attract audiences based around predictable expectations, which are then reinforced with unique elements to attract audience through the unexpected.
Genre can be classified through levels of verisimilitude, narrative similarities, character-driven motifs (cliché), iconography and audience targeting
The use of repeated motifs and stylistic devices allow audiences to recognise and access media products that create the appeal that they are engaged by.
Neale argues that genres are subject to a continuous change of evolution, which he called genre subversion. Audience needs, contextual influence and economic influence all are driving forces contributing to subversion- suggesting that genre can be recognised as a chronotype of the context in which it was created in.
Neale tells us genre is an important feature of marketing, whereas genre labelling indicates to audiences the specific satisfactions that a product will generate.
Schatz further also theorised on genre, arguing that there are two dominant narrative strategies: Genres of order and Genres of intergration.
Genres of order are said to transport the audience to places where “fundamental societal values are in a sustained state of conflict” that highlights the conflict of our own culture
Similarly to Straussian oppositions, the resolution of these conflicts serve to produce culturally specific cues that teach the audience socially unacceptable or acceptable norms. Todorov also comments on the resolution of disruption also teaches this.
Genres of integration are said to follow “the struggle of a character to bring principles from their own views to align with the views of the larger community”
Todorov argues that stock character prepositions can serve to teach values that are deemed problematic to the audience and therefore have a strong ideological effect on the audience.
Levi-Strauss – Binary oppositions
Levi-Strauss outlined a subliminal set of structural rules that inform the production of myths – stories told and shared globally follow a simple but stable formula.
Myths universally explore human experience using polarized themes prompted by humankind’s innate bias towards organising the world using binary thinking.
Media narratives are suggested to follow the same structural blueprints offered in myths, using binary oppositions inferred through character oppositions, narrative oppositions and genre oppositions.
eg: good vs evil, hero vs villain, innocence vs evil
Media producers deploy these binary oppositions to create a range of audience-orientated effects: such as to clearly explain ideas, to create compelling narratives and to create identifiable characters
Myths articulate a version of the world around us, generating culturally specific cues that define acceptable and unacceptable social norms as a result of the way story oppositions resolve. Cultural products offer resolutions to conflicts within their narratives allowing media products to play a significant role in prompting an explicit set of values and ideologies
Baudrillard – Postmodernism
Baudrillard used hyperreality, simulacra and media implosion to suggests that mass media messages are inescapable while also being devoid of meaning.
Postmodernism describes the concept of new production and an approach to understanding life is built from an addition of elements from past aspects/media formats, and is therefore referential to existing concepts.
Media is inescapable, it is everywhere in our lives and can not be avoided, Baudrillard argues that this makes authenticity impossible to find or keep. The mass media favours the generation of copies over the generation of original products; through repeated copying representations become increasingly distorted until they form a simulacra.
Ultimately, the simulacra has replaces the meaning of the original product; the simulacra is true.
Simulacra is created everywhere around us, commercially successful products are repurposed and reused for example.
Advertisements are said to hold us in a hypnotic state of superficial saturation and satisfaction; teaching us from an early age that commercial advertising is rarely realised in real life. Distortion of reality used in adverts are easier to recognise, however there are more subtly integrated simulacra in media products as well.
Glorification of war in video games proving to be successful, and then this concept being repurposed over and over replaces the meaning of war, glorification of men’s health surrounding body building replacing the meaning of balance and mental health.
Although we are taught to understand these standards are hardly met in real life, a psychological approach can offer understanding to why we still engage with simulacra.
Advertisement in itself has many other tactics to manipulate the audience into thinking the product is authentic, but additionally the market contains adverts ranging over a wide spectrum of authenticity. Applying Skinner’s approach to operant conditioning we can understand that advertisements positive reinforce the audience to consume their product; as when the advert is authentic they are positively reinforced to buy other products.
Hall – Representation
Hall argues representations are built via codes, professional media products are composed through the selection of visual and linguistic elements – therefore media products offer versions of reality that are shaped by the subjective viewpoint of reality rather than the accurate objective reflections of the world.
Hall argues that our ability to decode the meanings of media imagery is not innate but instead produced as a result of our continued exposure to media products; the media therefore shapes our shared understanding of the real world.
eg; we are not born with the ability to infer strength from someone with muscles, but instead learn this connection through media exposure.
The meaning of media products are shaped by their producers instead of reflecting reality, those versions of reality have profound influence on audience thinking. Hall states that media products produce ideological inferences for their readers and viewers.
Hall tells us media stereotypes are important because they reflect social attitudes; by studying media we cab gain a since of what wider society thinks about those groups that are routinely stereotyped. The conjunction of media stereotyping and media producing ideological inferences significantly shapes social attitudes regarding specific groups.
Gilroy – Double Consciousness
Gilroy’s book “There ain’t no black in the union jack” traces the story of UK race relations following the second world war. Gilroy argued that marginalisation of the immigrant black community constructed them as a racial “other” in the predominantly white hegemonic culture.
Cultural diaspora into the great British legacy sparked fears of the public that greatness would somewhat be diminished, black people were associated with criminality and other harmful stereotypes to position them on the boundaries of society.
He describes the internal struggle of being both European and black, the duality of culture within their identity and the suppression of their own in order to suit ideologies engraved within Britain- he called this double consciousness.
Van Zoonen – Gender as discourse
Van Zoonen describes the female body as a spectacle to be looked at, building on Laura Mulvey’s theory on the male gaze. Objectified representations are formed as a result of highly specific creative practises in the media such as:
- Using male gaze to infer female sex appeal
- Restricting females to secondary roles
- Contructing women as passive participants
- Framing women differently
- Reinforcing narrow beauty ideals
Within patriarchal societies, masculinity is constructed to be the socially dominant gender; Zoonen recognises the presence of sexualised male imagery in the media in the following ways:
- Male eroticisation is romantisised
- Male strength instead of male vunerability
- Male bodies are predominantly celebrated through sports imagery
However, the male form is not a subject of female gaze because the act of looking castrates power- and to be looked at suggests passivity and weakness.
Referencing the relationship between power and gender representation and the patriarchal society, the media favors traditional heterosexual norms surrounding gender roles to maintain the dominant ideology.
ie; men being domestic while women are nurturing
Only by competing in male dominated fields can women break free of the conventions used to oppress them over time, the media should support change by regularly portraying radical representations of gender. She also argues that rising counterstereotypes in media still portray a distortion of reality as they are often impossible to achieve.
e.g supermum has to have a stable work life, kids, etc…
In addition Van Zoonen believes mass media is a socializing agent that secures continuity, order and transmission of dominant values. She describes this as discourse, individuals with large exposure to media presenting feminine ideals will cause a reflection of those behaviours.
Ariel Levy – Raunch Culture
In Ariel Levy’s book “Female chauvinist pigs: women and the rise of Raunch culture” critiques the highly sexualised culture in which females are objectified, objectify one and another and are encouraged to objectify themselves. She describes Raunch culture as a product of the unresolved conflict between women’s movements and the sexual revolution.
The rise of sex-positive feminism embraced empowerments and ownership within female sexuality, however it simultaneously adheres to older patterns of misogyny and exploitation.
Women are further fragmented into differing categorized based on their form of self-expression, causing more division within feminism and conflict between each other.
hooks – Intersectionality
hook’s states that intersectionality highlights the ways ideas and concepts such as “female” and “feminine” intersect with other ideas and approaches, including sexuality, race, class, age etc..
This idea emerged from black women’s experiences and representations being different from white women’s.
Absent representations of black females has resulted in the whole absence from mainstream media, beauty ideals are constructed around white beauty and the black experience is centred around black masculinity in men.
hook’s commented on the range of stereotypes in black femininity such as:
- Jezebels – Over-sexualised representations that have become so prominant that hook argues they have begun to internalize.
- Aunt Jemimas – Association with domestic service
- Sapphires – Comedic depictions
hook states that intersectional media is constructed to explore the interlocking nature of oppression, celebrate otherness and give a voice to invisible social groups in order to provide education and awareness to the systemic oppression that is so commonly overlooked.
Butler – Gender as a performance
Butler argues our gendered identities are not established at birth, nor are they formed in childhood or adolescence, but they are instead realised through a continuous performence of gender based behaviors. Masculinity and feminimity aren’t given states but are instead maintained by rituals and performative actions that work together to signal our identity to ourselves or others.
The media plays a vital role in providing gender-based templates that we use to inform these performances, and moreover the dominance of heterosexual-orientated representations in media helps maintain traditional male and female identities as a social norm.
Butler provides an alternative concept of gender that suggests they are culturally formed rather than naturally formed, where gender-based cues learnt from media products signal gender performativity- for example make up is a micro-performance that signals our identity.
Butler aknologes the expansive nature of gender but also undertands the heterosexual dominant ideology of our culture. Gender subversion is the maintenance of an identity that falls outside of the hetersexual norms of our society- this maintanence is so difficult because of the heteronormative ideals that’re so deaply entrenched within the fabric of language and cultural practises, that is being constantly reestablished by mass media.
The difficulty of this sebversion is why major media producers do not have as many representations surrounding the LBTQ community, and those that do often use parodic representations. Parodic representations within media reference the core values of something in an over-exaggerated way often for the purpose of humour and comedic relief, it produces questionable humour while also reinforcing the idea that homosexuality is unusual.
These parodic representations are so prominant that they cause what butler calls “gender trouble” where the gender-based cues are so overly exaggerated when trying to be inclusive that less people in the LBTQ can actually relate to the character.
Gauntlett – Identity
Gauntlett promotes a more optimistic framework surrounding identity construction then Van Zoonen and Butler, he states the idea of identity has the potential to be changed and shaped frequently in many directions throughout life and social environment.
Identity is not ever fixed but is constantly evolving to suit our own needs depending on the time and place, we can have multiple identities presented at different times to different people.
–Constructed identity:
Identity that is changed and altered throughout experience.
–Negotiated identity:
The balance between expressing ones identity between their own desires and the expectations of others.
–Collective identity:
Identity that refers to the sense of belong to a group
Gauntlett says the expanding number of media products offer a huge range of diversity for audiences to use as templated to guide them while constructing their identity, they can pickpocket aspects of each or make up their own.
Van Zoonen argues more that our identity is fixed by the pull of patriarchy and Butler argues that the media create gender-trouble through its wide range of representations. Gauntlett instead provides a perspective that infers unlimited possibilities within the media.
Habermas – Public sphere
The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action.
Conditions of the public sphere according to Habermas include:
- The formation of public opinion
- All citizens have access
- Unrestricted publication about matters of general interest (implying freedom of political control) eg freedom to express.
- Debate over the general rules of governing relations
The public sphere was most prominant after the printing press was developed, newspapers played a key role in allowing more people to share ideas that didn’t conform to more traditional christian values – it sparked developments in science and technology.
As a result of industrialation and consumer capitalism, media concentration become more prominant. Mass media conglomerates produce newspapers that is highly influencing and uses techniques to manipulate public perception; the majority of newspapers conform to a politcal bias that is shaped by the producer.
Bounderies between the private and public sector and between state and society became blurred, this shift had the ultimate effect of destroying the public sphere through the rise of mass media and consumer culture. He argues these developments prevented rational politcal debate, politcal parties functioned in a way that bypassed the public sphere. Political differences ultimately became more polarized.
Through regulation, unrestricted publication about matters of general interest is seen little to none in mass media, those who present specific expressions and ideas about political debate are discredited and overrun by mass media.
New media and the digital revolution only exaggerated this affect, creating echochambers that individuals fall into reinhancing their pre-existing values and beliefs sheltered from rebuttle- the politcal spectrum became more binary and pinned against eachother.
Public spheres over time have structurally transformed and still exist today- however its a distorted version of what it was originally defined as, engaging with smaller groups rather than the general public.
Curran & Seaton – Ownership
Media concentration began when smaller free press could not compete with commercial rivals, whereas only the upper class privileged producers were able to successful sustain production costs in the early ages of media products, whether this is radio, newspapers etc..
Over time this meant that media was and is owned and dominated by a small group of global mass media conglomerates- this resulted in a lack of diversity and choice of products to consume.
Curran and Seaton describe the conflict between creativity and commerciality, whereas profit driven incentives take priority of creativity in the world of commercial media.
Commercial broadcasters and producers have to secure long-term advertising revenue to service production, therefore the content they produce is designed to attract economically affluent audiences who are more likely to buy products that are prompted through advertisements. Rather than the sale of products to audiences, production is based on the sale of audiences to advertisements.
ie the daily mails online version contains significantly more adverts than the I; hinting towards audiences that support the political bias of the daily mail being more economically affluent. Bourdieu would also argue this is an indicator of cultural capital, where the shared habitus of right winged authoritarian viewpoints are seen as more economically affluent. Suggesting an explanation as to why Daily mail is seen as a more popular tabloid as it is so successful with profit from the audience it was created for.
Curran and Seaton also analysed the culture with an Marxism approach, arguing that the culture deployed is used to make the working poor believe there isn’t an alternate to their working conditions.
They stated culture is controlled by social elites that work for the benefit of themselves, and that culture serves as a distraction of our own exploitation by offering depoliticized narratives through entertainment-orientated media, or by what Gerbner suggests, by overloading the conflict and brutality of the world onto readers so that they internalize mean-world syndrome causing them to see no alternative as better.
In respect to broadcasting, full independence through has never been reached as it is too powerful to display over broadcasting, they can only negotiate a political discussion without having a bias to a side.
Broadcasters have come to see the state as their enemy yet depend on the state for legitimation. They are being kept running by the state yet can not express their independence via broadcasting as they will be flacked (Chomsky link) and need to keep a “foreground bias” which has ultimately been skewed.
Livingstone & Lunt – Regulation
Livingstone and Lunt highlighted different models of communication, of citizens and of consumers.
Consumer based is realized through the creation of media landscape in which audiences can choose the content they want to engage with, this guarantees audience choice and promotes product diversity.
Citizen based argues media plays a significant role in shaping society and its civilians, it has a role to educate and inform audiences about the domestic health of the nation that the producers operate in. The producer has much more freedom to produce to meet needs of different audiences.
Livingstone and Lunt highlight the underlying conflict between the meeting needs of the citizen vs the needs of the consumer in UK regulation policies. The need to further the interests of citizens (by offering protection from offensive material) and the further interests of consumers (by ensuring choice)
Consumer orientated regulatory codes exist primarily to protect venerable audiences from violating content which is why regulation is important, however this also results in a lack of choice.
ISPO was criticized for the regulators failure to encourage citizen-based news values across the print sector, ISPO is responsible for the regulation of both the daily mail and the I. These two tabloids serve to the consumer by providing more choice between them, they have almost oppositional political compasses; but the lack of regulation further polarizes class divisions and political viewpoints.
Hesmondhalgh – Cultural industries
Hesmondhalgh makes reference to the risk of the media industry, stating that is significantly riskier than what meets eye. Risks can include not meeting audience tastes and needs, production and distribution costs and those affects on overall profit.
Risks and costs associated with the production of media products has resulted in vertically and horizontally aligned conglomerates.
Horizontal integration is when a conglomerate acquires media companies of the same media type, this can minimize production cost (ie bulk buying newspapers), it also allows resources to be shared. It allows companies to control the market, by owning both newspapers (eg i and daily mail) they can control a substantial slice of the broadsheet markets – they align so that they don’t compete with each other so their shared use of resources helps nurture a competitive advantage over rival titles.
Vertical integration is when conglomerates own both production and distribution sectors, allowing global distribution of their products and allowing all profits from product distribution to be retained
Other ways to minimize risk is to mirror societal values and beliefs that are prominent in the context in which products are created in, such as becoming slightly more diverse to be seen as more inclusive or merging internationally/globalization so that the product can be consumed throughout the world rather than targeted at a local niche. This also results in media products being more diluted in content, broadcasting towards wider ranged audiences means they need to meet a specific ideology, and the content must not target too small of a topic as it minimizes individuals who are interested.
Chomsky – Manipulating consent
Chomsky theorizes that the primary function of mass media is to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector. The mechanisms of what Chomsky identifies as effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function largely divide into what he calls “the five filters”.
In summery there is a powerful set of informal restrictions and controls that limit what journalists cover and how they cover it, these include,
- Structure of ownership;
Media concentration results in a lack of choice and therefore reduced opinion amongst the public, all mass media orientates around profit and will push for whatever guaruentees that profit.
2. The role of advertising;
Media costs more than consumers will pay, advertisements fill in the gap: advertisements pay for access to audiences. Advertisements is structured in a way where we are the product and adverts buy our attention, rather than adverts selling us a product.
3. Media Elite / Links with the establishment;
Mass media know how to influence the media and do so by providing information through supposed experts, they make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. Those higher in power are seen as experts in their field that are more reliable.
4. Flack;
When a story is inconvenient for the systemic hierarchy then larger sources will discredit the story and divert the conversation.
5. The common enemy;
To manufacture consent you need an enemy, communisms terrorists, immigrants, anything that helps unite the public through fear to corral a public opinion.
Bandura – Media modelling effects
Bandura carried out psychological experiments to show behaviors are acquired as a result of direct experience and modelled learning. Her bobo doll experiment showed how audiences copy symbolic modelling- such as role models and conflict.
This important study sparked fear surrounding games that include violent content, PEGI age ratings for games marked content that could spark violent modelling for a developing younger audience.
Contrary to the negative implications, Jenkins argued that audiences have the ability to separate gameplay from reality and that studies linking gameplay time and criminal behavior are flawed. Furthermore other theorists, such as Levi-Strauss and Todorov argue that conflict and it’s resolution in narrative serve to produce culturally specific cues that serve to teach the audience socially acceptable and unacceptable norms.
Gerbner – Cultivation theory
Gerbner suggests that through repeated exposure to media over time can subtly cultivate viewers perception of reality; and that perceptions and values are reflected from what is repeatively shown.
Gerbner described cultivation differential as the cultivated perception of audiences as a result of exposure to violence in the media. He identified the following effects:
Resonance: People who live in high crime areas who also engaged in heavy media consumption were subject to a double dose affect, and those with experience of crime had their fears of real-world crime significantly amplified by media
Mainstreaming: Gerbner concluded that heavy viewers who were significantly less informed about real-world crime, perhaps as a result of living in a safe neighborhood, also reported increased perception of increased violence in the real world.
Therefore he concluded that consumption of media, in the main television, can lead to an attitudinal change irrespective of weather viewers had any objective evidence to corrobate what they were seeing. He labelled this as enculturation, the process of learning social norms or behaviors through watching others or engaging with culture- the media contributes to the enculturation of individuals by making them adopt specific attitudes or outlooks.
Mean world syndrome is an assumption of cultivation differential that describes the phenomenon whereby violence related content in the media makes viewers believe the world is more dangerous than it actually is, the media can manipulate the public perception to their advantage.
From this we can infer that media consumption leads audiences to accept mainstream ideologies. Violence in media represents symbolic power organizing social groups hierarchally by telling us who is more likely to fall victims to violence. He states that media violence defines powerless characters, eg women/elderly/non-whites have higher victims counts which symbolically demonstrates their ideologically inferior status, and that media violence also defines powerful characters, eg the dominance of white males as heroic simultaneously suggests their superior social position.
Through this it is suggested that narrative conventions reinforce authority- the dominance of happy endings surrounding good-guys winning and law and order winning construct a clear ideological message.
Hall – Reception theory
Hall argues that media products are encoded by the producers with editorial biases which construct versions of the truth that are entertaining, marketable or persuasive. Furthermore encoding processes are framed around a variety of codes (eg visual or aural) which may not be connected to the story but serve to enhance the messages relayed.
Hall suggests media products create an connotative effect rather than a denotative effect, and ultimately audiences decode the message in different ways.
Audiences use situated knowledge to decode media messages which refers to the experience, knowledge and beliefs an individual has while decoding a media product.
Dominant readings are when an audience decodes and accepts the intended cultural messages produced from a product.
Oppositional readings are when the audience understand the message but refuse to believe it or use their personal experience (situated knowledge) to challenge the message.
Negotiated readings are when the audience agree with some of the message but disagree with other aspects of the message.
He also comments that a misreading is a result of an audiences failure to decode the encoded message as a result of it’s complexity, for example confusing narratives or alien ideas, and that this is different from an oppositional reading.
Jenkins – Fandom
In Jenkin’s book “textual poachers”, Jenkins engages in the study of fandom and how they build communities.
Fan culture describes the key role fans play in the media, they interact with the media and contribute to distribution and production sectors of the industry.
In relation to production they create:
Recontextualizations – create their own narrative to fill in unresolved plot holes.
Refocalisations – construct stories that reposition minor or secondary characters as central protagnosit
Moral realignments – Supply antagonists with backstories that explain their dark motives.
In doing so, they create multiple fanfiction narratives that can also be shared to other people and convince them to engage with the product, which ultimately contributes to distribution of media products.
Shirky – End of audience
Mcquail, Blumer & Brown – Uses and Gratifications
Audiences have specific needs that media is used to gratify, the products that fulfill the needs are more likely to be consumed again, such needs include:
- Escapism
- Education
- Personal identification
- Social interaction
Specifically in regards to social interaction, audiences need interaction with other people to develop bonds with others, the media offers this in the opportunity to discuss media texts with others; different negotiated readings surrounding unresolved conflict or mysteries can offer this.
Dyer – Utopian possibilities
Dyer highlights the human desire for a better world as it is reflected in joyful media, he argues that moments like these occur universally within all forms of entertainment.
Media products that offer this form of escapism are more likely to be consumed repeatedly and therefore are more likely to be successful, eg. sims.
Lasswell, Shannon & Weaver, Lazarsfeld – Communication model development
Lasswell’s ideas on audience consumption summarized that audience engage with media in a passive way, he developed the hypodermic needle model which was a model of communication which suggested the encoded message is fully received and wholly accepted by the receiver.
Shannon and Weaver adapted this model by addressing and identifying three basic problems that can disrupt the effectiveness of communication. They state that technical, semantic and effectiveness problems distort the encoded message – these include culturally specific factors, noise, error etc..
Lazarsfeld built a 2-step flow analysis that differed from Laswell, Shannon and weavers ideas- he summarized that audience consume actively. He explains that the encoded message is filtered through influential opinion leaders who then interpret a message first and then relay them back to mass audiences, the audience can then consume the message from the opinion leader with interpretations that resonate closely to their own values and beliefs.