Theories of Audience Consumption

Theories of audience consumption have developed over time along with the evolution of consumption habits in conjunction with the proliferation of hardware and content.


'Uses and Gratification Theory’

This Theory was initially created by a man named Lasswell in 1948 but was then adapted by Katz, Bulmer and another colleague for the modern audience who use new technologies.

The Uses and Gratification theory views the audience as active, meaning that they actively seek out specific media and content to achieve certain results or gratifications that satisfy their personal needs. It contradicted older views that said the audience was passive.

The uses and Gratifications Approach has five basic assumptions:

1. Audience conceived as active
2. People use the media to their advantage more often than the media uses them.
3. The media competes with other sources of need satisfaction.
4. People are very aware of their motives and choices and are able to explain them verbally if necessary.
5. The audience can only determine the value of the media content. It is the individual audience members who make the decision to view the media; therefore, they place the value on it by their individual decision to view it.

In yesterday’s lesson we were thinking about why audiences consume certain media and this links with the theory because the theory states that the audience actually seeks out the specific texts it wants instead of stumbling on them randomly meaning that there are reasons behind consuming texts and the media has to abide by those reasons to create an audience.