Media Audience

• • It is almost impossible to go through the day without being exposed to some form of media. This means that we are part of the audience for that particular media. People have feared that media audiences are easily manipulated by mass media such as advertising and propaganda. People have also feared the effects of media texts and how it could influence people to behave.
  
  • In pre-media times people used to do things such as reading by themselves or they would involve in mixing with other people and doing things such as playing music. This leads people to believe that the media nowadays has made people less social and can seen to split people up.
  
  • The media are often experienced by people alone. (Some critics have talked about
  media audiences as atomised – cut off from other people like separate atoms). Wherever they are in the world, the audience for a media text are all receiving exactly the same thing.
  
  • These points led some early critics of the media to come up with the idea of media audiences as masses. According to many theorists, particularly in the early history of the subject, when we listen to our CDs or sit in the cinema, we become part of a mass audience in many ways like a crowd at a football match or a rock concert but at the same time very different because separated from all the other members of this mass by space and sometimes time.
  
  • Media is a powerful tool in influencing millions of people, e.g. Election Posters – These are used by leaders to influence a mass audience to vote for them using propaganda.
  
  • media producers and institutions like to consider audiences in groups. This is particularly true of advertisers, who have led the way in targeting groups of consumers.

• Audience is segmented, marketing strategies are based around these particular segments. You can classify audiences by age, gender, race and location, also you place people in terms of their class.