1. Audience hood- The public type of audience hood includes the audience reports to occasions such as reports of events, which are of wide social significance for example election results, major disasters, world crises or which involve the watching of major live sporting events on television.  Another version of audience hood, which is increasing involves a cross- over with the Internet, which serves to construct a network of contacts in response to mass media content. This is also gaining audience opinions on the media for example films.

2a. Passive Audience- A passive audience does not actively engage with the media text. A passive audience is an audience that does not question the message that the media is sending and simply accepts the message in the way the media intended for it to come across. ‘ Top down’ theories of media influence tend to assume that audiences are passive. The story has to be believable this would not make them question the medium.

b. Active Audience – An active audience is an audience that actively engages with the text. They do not simply accept every media message. The audience question what they see and develop their own interpretation of a media product based on examples such as life experiences, education, family and cultural influences.  ‘ Bottom up’ theories generally assume an active audience. The media does not initially convince them. An example of an active audience is through programs such as question time, the audience is more active and can get involved through home debates and joining on twitter.

The audience that relates to the medium, of short film is an active audience, this is because the audience would like to make their own interpretation of the film as short films include realistic situations, in long feature length films it has to be believable but not realistic because of this the audience is more likely to be passive and believe what they see.

Len Ang 1991

3a. ‘Media producers have an imaginary entity in mind before the construction of a media product’. This means that it’s less about the audience, and more about reflecting there own agenda and ideology, through their media product.

b. ‘Audience hood is becoming an ever more multifaceted, fragmented and diversified repertoire of practices and experiences’. There is a lot more to do with audience, it’s not just about their demographics such as genders, age and social class but rather it’s about the psychographics such as the audiences hobbies, habits and interests. Audience is not a big group of the same people; it’s made up of different individuals.

4.Stuart Hall’s is a cultural theorist. The reception theory this emphasises on the readers reception of a literary text. It sees the audience as being actively engaged in the interpretaton of media texts rather than a passive audience. The audience can interpret texts in different ways even though one message ios sent out from the media text. Media texts go through stages as being encoding and decoding. The texts are encoded by the producer and only include ideologies of the people who made the text. Decoding is when the audience views the text and interprets the text in their own way not how the producer intended.

a. Dominant or preferred reading- the meaning they want you to have is usually accepted.

b. Negotiated Reading- the dominant reading is only partially recognised  or accepted and audiences might disagree with some of it or fine with their own meanings.

c. Oppositional Reading- the dominant reading is refused, rejected because the reader disagrees with it or is offended by it, especially for political, religious, feminist reasons.

Tracy Kimani 8108

The reason we did this research about the audience is because it's a key concept in our media film and it is important for us to know what audiences look for in films.