2. Texts need audiences in order to realise their potential for meaning. So a text does not have a single meaning but rather a range of possibilities which are defined by both the text and by its audiences. The meaning is not in the text, but in the reading. (Hart 1991)
3. Audiences are not blank sheets of paper on which media messages can be written; members of an audience will have prior attitudes and beliefs which will have prior attitudes and beliefs which will determine how effective media messages are. (Abercrombie 1996)
4. Baker describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text. This is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle.
5. Gauntled Audience throy:
The effects model tackles social problems 'backwards'
The effects model treats children as inadequate
Assumptions within the effects model are characterised by barely-concealed conservative ideology.
The effects model inadequately defines its own objects of study
The effects model is often based on artificial elements and assumptions within studies
The effects model is often based on studies with misapplied methodology
The effects model is selective in its criticisms of media depictions of violence
The effects model assumes superiority to the masses
The effects model makes no attempt to understand meanings of the media
The effects model is not grounded in theory.
6. The ritual approach to genre study as developed by John Cawelti, Thomas Schatz and others attempts to suggest some common threads among many, if not most, of the genre audience. Their intention is to find links between culture and texts, and attempt to answer what role genre texts play in genre and attempt to answer what role genre texts play in genre audiences’ lives.
