Audiences - Theories
The Marxist view that the audience is directly influenced by media is a powerful perspective that has many arguments to support it. Our film opening does not aim or mean to send a clear direct message to the audience, on the contrary, we wanted to allow viewers to create their own understanding of the story. The hypodermic syringe model suggests that the producers of media are in direct control of what the content transmits to the audience. Of course we chose a certain theme and idea to express through our product, that of the struggles of teenagers and how they are rarely understood and helped properly, but we saw the audience as active, not passive. We relied on viewers extracting what they understood, based on their experiences and thoughts.
Stuart Hall supported the uses and gratifications theory, this states that the audience chooses what to watch for different needs or desires. For example, people may choose to watch a comedy to relax and be entertained. The idea of picking what and how you consume media can also relate to our film opening. We did not want to present our ideas to a large audience, but we intended to put the message out there for those who are interested in issues about teenagers and who enjoy surreal and symbolic images. There are several ways of understanding one piece of media, and “Demure” offers this possibility to its audience, it can be interpreted and decoded in various ways.
G. Gerbner described the process of desensitization, considering how media repeatedly uses the same images, ideas and themes. This, in time, can make the audience less receptive to what is presented because they become used to the same messages. For example, showing violence at TV can make people less sensible to aggressive acts. Many movies and shows present teenagers in similar ways, such as rebels, misfits and problems for wider society. To some extent, our film opening does respect this patter, by suggesting the difficult time that is adolescence. However, we tried to wake our audience up and make them sensible to the inadequate way in which society deals with these problems. We used a more unusual approach, that of artistic, surreal films, to attract attention and make people think about what they are seeing. On a smaller scale, our product attempts to break the audience away from their perception and influence them in a way that is different from usual representations of youth.
“Demure” challenges more theories, not only Gerbner’s. Our project also presents the harsh truths of reality, opposing Richard Dyer’s view on the uses of media text for the audience. His theory states that people use media to escape reality and entertain themselves in ways that save them from social tension, inadequacy and absence. Dyer sees media texts as offering something better, which the audience looks for. In our film opening we did not offer an escape, we used cinematic methods to make the audience uncomfortable and aware of what we are presenting. The music, setting and camera angles were ways in which we suggested the character’s difficult, strange and harsh reality.
David Gauntlett talked about the emergence of prosumers in his more contemporary theory about audiences and media. Thanks to new technologies, platforms and social networks, the consumers of media can easily and accessibly create their own products. There is little censorship and anyone can show their own version of reality. Young people make up most of this group of prosumers, this enables them to recreate the way in which they are represented and break traditional stereotypes. Creating our film opening for As Media Studies is precisely and example of this. We had the opportunity and the means to put our ideas out there and capture them through images. With “Demure” we presented how we saw one of the issues concerning teenagers. We used our creativity and our ideas to put together a personal representation of a young man that has failed and has been failed by others in adapting to society.
