Effects of Media on Active and Passive Audiences

All media text is produced with the audience in mind. Audience is the people who ‘read’ or consume different media text. Because we all perceive different information in different ways audience as a whole has been divided in two types; Active and Passive.
An active audience is one that actively engages with the media product. They question what they are presented with and do not easily accept it. They build their own interpretation on it according to their past experiences.

A passive audience is one that does not question the text and accepts the message as it is intended. They do not have their own perceptions on the message as planned.
The behavior of these two types of audiences can be better explained according to different theories.
For example the hypodermic needle theory suggests that all audience is passive and readily accepts whatever the media ‘injects’ into its brain. This theory is backed up by an experiment carried out by Orson Wells in the 1930s in which a fake news bulletin was broadcasted saying that earth was being invaded by aliens. Out of 12 million people one million believed this to be true.

As technology grew theories claiming all audience as passive was debunked and new theories emerged which suggested that audience is actually not as blind as first perceived. One theory that explains this is the Uses and gratification theory.
The Uses and gratification theory states that the audiences have different choices in order to satisfy their needs. According to this theory audience is free to decide how they will use media and how it affects them. Apart from this there is also the two step theory that says that people tend to be influenced by opinion leaders more than the media itself. Opinion leaders are those who consume media and have their own perception about it which is further shared by them to other people. Opinion leaders are mostly people who have a stronger or alpha position in society which is why they are able to influence those around them.

In today’s world audience is more complex and has their own tastes and needs. They cannot be categorized into just one type, active or passive. Now the audience is a consumer that interacts with the media due to the rise of digital media. In the past one way communication did not allow feedback which led to the old ideologies on audience behavior but since the rise of two way communication these theories have drastically changed and the audience cannot be put in one category anymore due to the vast diversification of the sorts of audiences.

References:
Influence of mass media (2017) in Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_mass_media

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/417/1/Chapter_in_Valdivia_Blackwell_volume_2003.pdf