Media Theories!

When creating my magazine, I have to take the different media theories into consideration, one of the main ones being ‘Audience theory’.  Audience theory helps to show the vast change within media over the years, and there are lots of different concepts within.

Hypodermic Needle Theory is the idea that media can easily influence a large group of people without any opposition. It was believed that mass media can ‘inject’ messages directly into its audience, who will immediately be influenced by it. In contrast to this, Halloran stated ‘We must get away from the habit of thinking in terms of what the media do to people and substitute for it the idea of what people do to the media’.

The quote is suggesting that people are now getting a lot more involved as to what they want in the media. It tells us that instead of just passively accepting the media we are now more involved and can interact with it. Nowadays, we have a choice as to what media we want to experience, whereas before people had no choice, we can be more selective about types of media, and people nowadays influence the media more, rather than before when the media was massively influencing us.

The Two Step Flow theory is the idea that media starts off with individuals (opinion leaders) who pass on their interpretations/ personal influences of the media to others. It states that the majority of people are influenced by the media second-hand, through the beliefs and personal experiences of the opinion leaders.

C.Wright Mills came up with four functions of the media for its audience:

- give individuals identity

- give people goals and aspiration

- give instructions on how to achieve these goals

- give people an alternative if they failed (escapism)

                When creating my front cover, contents and double page spread, I am going to take all the media theories into consideration. I want my magazine to be unique and have a ‘diversion’ in order to get people to escape from their everyday lives. Also, I want my magazine to have a sense of ‘surveillance’, so my readers can know what’s going on in the world of pop, in order to give them goals and aspirations they may wish to achieve, and points on how exactly their goals can be achievable.