Timed Essay Question 6

 

 

Evaluate the effectiveness of the following theories in understanding how cultural and historical circumstances can affect audience interpretations of news stories:

Hall’s reception theory

Bandura’s media effects theory.

Media effects theory suggests that certain messages presented by the media are injected into people’s minds, having them believe what the media has said. But this theory doesn’t match with the ideology people have today, as audiences of certain media products are more passive and interact more with the media that is presented to them. The theory is presuming that everyone has the exact same views as everyone else and that no one can have their own opinion on a certain topic presented by the media. With newspapers, every newspaper will have a different view and someone who reads a newspaper such as the Guardian won’t have the same views as a newspaper like the Daily Mail, no one can agree on both of the different views in each newspaper which is why this theory doesn’t work like it used to. Unlike Media Effects, Cultivation theory talks about ideas presented by the media that are cultivated over time, and not just injected into people’s minds. This theory is more mindful in the fact that people don’t just believe what they see in the media anymore, because they are a more passive audience now, they aren’t going to just believe what they see the first time they see it. Ideas that have been cultivated, such as, teenagers are all unsociable and moody, is an ideology that some people have, but one thing cultivation theory doesn’t fix is the fact that not everyone is going to have this viewpoint. Most adults will have this idea cultivated in their minds, but teenagers themselves aren’t going to believe this ideology at all and have their own view that they are overworked and because of the stress they have because of school, is the cause of them seeming moody and unsociable. Cultivation theory is definitely a step up from the Media Effects Theory, but still doesn’t fit the ideology we have as a society today.

As a society today the media is very influential in how we present ourselves to the world and how we grow as a person, and ideas shown to us and cultivated over time are a apart of how we grow, but as an individual person we are going to have our own opinions on certain media topics, our own cultivated ideas. Identity theory presents the idea that it isn’t just the media that helps shape our identity, but also the environment we grow up in, as well as the upbringing we receive from our parents and the friends we choose to hang around with. There are so many other factors that feed into how our identities are shaped. Because we all have our own identities, we are all going to have our own viewpoint son certain topics, which is the base of reception theory, which suggests that everyone is going to read a media text in a different way. Any media product is going to either have a preferred reading, which is what the media product is intended to be read. A oppositional reading, which is someone having the complete opposite reading of what was intended, and a negotiated reading, which is the middle ground in agreeing and disagreeing with what the media text is presenting. Newspapers support this theory in the fact that some people might read a newspaper and completely disagree with what is being said, whereas someone else might completely agree with it. But there is also the chance that someone might be able to reach a middle ground with what the newspaper is saying, not fully agreeing with it, but also considering what the newspaper has to say and vise versa.