Mass Media Audiences: Reception Analysis Model and Selective Filter Model

Mass Media Audiences: Reception Analysis Model and Selective Filter Model

1. Active audiences see the media as far less influential. They believe that individuals have considerable choice in the way they use and interpret the media.

   • Selective Filter Model
     • The way encoding/decoding and reception analysis might take place in practice is shown by the interpretivist selective filtering approach.
     • Klapper suggests like Hall and Morley for media messages to have any effect it must pass through three filters. He suggest that the three filters have a degree of active choice for an audience.
       • Selective Exposure: The audience must choose to view, read or listen to the content of the media, it can only have an effect if someone sees/hears it and the audience chose this based on their interests.
       • Selective Perception: The audience will react differently to the same message; they may choose to accept or reject, depending if it fits with their own views. So they may just ignore certain news stories.
       • Selective Retention: The messages have to stick in the mind of this that have accessed the information - people tend to remember what they agree with.

2. Encoding/Decoding

   • Hall a Neo-Marxist suggests media texts (such as television news and current affairs programmes) are encoded with a particular meaning, which they expect media audiences to believe. Media is encoded by those who produce the media, such as owners, journalists, editors and TV producers for example. This meaning or encoding is what Hall calls the dominant hegemonic viewpoint, which takes the dominant ideology for granted and accepts it as the normal, natural and only sensible way of viewing social events.
   • Hall then suggests most audiences will interpret or decode media texts as they were intended because the views of the dominant class appear normal, natural and reasonable. However this view recognises that some of the audience may decode or interpret the same texts differently, due to their social characteristics, for example their age, social class, gender or ethnicity.
     • Conclusion: The point of the reception analysis theory is to suggest that audiences are not passive, impressionable and homogeneous. The way audiences decode media will be dependent on their own knowledge and experiences, the social groups they belong to and their social characteristics. Media content is polysemic i.e it attracts more than one type of reading or interpretation.
   • Sociologists who subscribe to this model are interested in analysing how different groups interpret media content. The reception analysis model, therefore suggest that media content is interpreted in a variety of ways.

3. Reception Analysis - Morley

   • Applied Hall's approach and based his study of audience interpretation (or decoding of messages) on the 1970's news programme Nationwide, Morley found that audiences were far from passive, they are much more active.
   • Instead audiences made up their own minds and there was significant opposition to the views obtained in the news programme.
     • Morley argues that the average person belongs to several subcultural groups and this may complicate a person's reading of media content. For example, a young British Syrian may respond to the immigration crisis in a number of ways:
       • As a young educated person, they may feel that the Syrian refugees have been persecuted by their own government.
       • As a British person, they may feel that the war has very little impact on them as they don't live in Syria.
       • As a Syrian person, they may feel a sense of identification and sympathy with the refugees.
       • As a young person, they may feel that current affairs are fairly bring and consequently not show much interest.
   • When people did accept the ideological position of the programme it was because they had personal knowledge or experience of an issue.
     • He suggests people read or decode media in one of three ways, which are:
       • Preferred reading: Audiences interpret or decode media texts in the same way they were encoded in the first place and in the way media producers would prefer.
       • Negotiated reading: The media audience generally accept the preferred reading, but may amend it to some extent, to fit they own beliefs and experiences.
       • Oppositional reading: A minority may reject the preferred reading all together.

4. Postman

   • Suggests that we live in a 3-minute culture, this is the attention span of an average member of society.

5. Conclusion: While seeing audiences as more active, rather than passive, allows us to understand how and why different groups read media text in a variety of different ways, there are still many problems with the methodology. It is almost impossible to disentangle the effects of the media on audiences of things like violence, stereotypes, consumerism and prejudice. Pluralists would argue that media owners do not encode messages into the media, they simply give the audiences the media they want and there is a wide variety of media available, so audiences will choose the media that suits their views.