CSP:

• Horizon Forbidden West
• Sims Free Play

Define the terms:

Active Audience – An audience that engages, interprets and responds to a media text in different ways and is capable of challenging the ideas encoded in it.

Passive Audience – An audience that is more likely to accept the messages encoded in a media text without challenge and are therefore more likely to be directly affected by the messages.

In what ways do media products impact audiences cognitively, affectively and behaviourally?

One way in which media products impact audiences is through entertainment and diversion. Audiences consume these media products, such as fantasy films, as an escapism from their everyday lives.

Another way audiences are impacted is through informative and educational products. Audiences consume this when they want to be informed and educated, these products inform them of what is happening in the real world. An example of this is documentaries.

Social interaction is another strategy that media products use to impact their audiences. Shows like X Factor provoke interaction and spark and immediate reaction from the audience while the action is happening.

One last way media products impact audiences is through personal identity. Audience members may choose to consume this as a way of comparing their life experiences with those represented the product, for example soap operas.

Albert Bandura – Social Learning Theory

The Social learning theory is a theory that emphasizes observational learning, or acquiring new skills or information, or altering old behaviours by watching others rather than overt, trial-and-error behaviour.

It considers how both environmental and cognitive factors interact to influence human learning and behaviour.

Bobo Doll Experiment

Children learn and observe from the people around them behaving in various ways. This is illustrated during the Bobo Doll experiment by Bandura 1961.

The aim of this experiment was to conduct a controlled lab experiment study to investigate if social behaviours such as aggression can be acquired by observation and imitation.

They tested 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University Nursery School aged between 3 to 6 years old. The researchers pre-tested the children for how aggressive they were by observing the children in the nursery and judged their aggressive behaviour on four 5-point rating scales.

The results of this experiment showed that:

• Children who observed the aggressive model made far more imitative aggressive responses than those who were in the non-aggressive or control groups.
• There was more partial and non-imitative aggression among those children who had observed aggressive behaviour, although the difference for non-imitative aggression was small.
• The girls in the aggressive model condition also showed more physically aggressive responses if the model was male, but more verbally aggressive responses if the model was female. However, the exception to this general pattern was the observation of how often they punched Bobo, and in this case the effects of gender were reversed.
• Boys were more likely to imitate same-sex models than girls. The evidence for girls imitating same-sex models is not strong, the boys also imitated more physically aggressive acts than girls. There was little difference in verbal aggression between boys and girls.

Henry Jenkins – Participatory Culture

According to Henry Jenkins, participatory culture is a culture where its members believe that their contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another.

This culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.

They build on participatory cultures and organize such communities toward civic and political goals. An example of a participatory culture is the media platform YouTube.

Clay Shirky – End of Audience Theory

This theory explores the sociological side of social media. It addresses the idea that modern audiences are turning into creators.

Shirky argued that audience behaviour has progressed from the passive consumption of media texts to a much more interactive experience with the products and each other.

He also argued that we are using our cognitive surplus to construct incredibly powerful forms of human expression. He stated that everyone is a media outlet and had called this mass amateurisation.

Mass amateurisation refers to the capabilities that new forms of media have given to non-professionals and the ways in which they have applied those capabilities to solve problems that compete with the solutions offered by larger, professional institutions.

Task 1: Explain how Bandura’s view of media audiences is essentially different to that held by Shirky and Jenkins

Bandura’s view of media audiences may be different to Shirky and Jenkins’ view because of contextual factors that could have affected and influenced his Bobo Doll experiment.

One of these factors may have been the model. The model played an effect on the child’s subsequent behaviour because all variables other than the independent variable were controlled.

Another factor was that some children were familiar with the Bobo Doll and the ones who weren’t were found to be five times as likely to imitate the aggressive behaviour displayed by the models.