You will prepare and submit a term paper on In what sense are media audiences (a) active and (b) powerful Discuss with reference to the strengths and weaknesses of ‘active audience’ theory. Your paper should be a minimum of 4000 words in length. genre, subject matter, style), e) by time (e.g. primetime or daytime)

Audiences originate both in society and in media and their contents: either people stimulate an appropriate supply of content, or the media attract people to the content they offer. To create the media audiences, we consider audience as often brought into being by some new technology as in the invention of film, radio or television or attracted by other channels such as newspaper or radio. Through the media source, the audience is thereby defined. (Mcquail’s Mass Communication Theory p.396)

No one could possibly wrong to say that one cannot finish a day without encountering the media in any form. You may wake up to the sound of the radio, play an MP3 on your way to school, read billboards in the street and watch television or DVD movies in the evening. We are all therefore part of the audience if in any other way we experience such activities.

In the early times, the media is used to persuade people to buy products through advertising, or to follow politicians through their propaganda. There have also been fears that the contents of media texts can make their audiences behave in different ways- become more violent for example. The effect of media to audience is highly influential. As agents of knowledge, the media is transforming its audience. (Hartley, 2007.).

The ‘media’ that we think of today are actually the latest inventions. To go back through centuries and decades, things like computers, television, film, and photography would have seemed impossible to olden days. One hundred years ago is what we call the pre-media times where people made their own sort of entertainment such as reading, watching plays, or simply stroll around a park and mingle with some people getting some fresh air.

Today, media has evolved in a great extent. The effect on the audience can be positive and negative.