The idea that message deconstruction requires certain skills,
and varies from person to person depending on their background, knowledge and
predispositions, certainly supposes a lot of audience activity.
Traditionally the audience was seen as massive, uniform and passive.
Unable to select or block messages.
Therefore media organizations and advertisers, whenever they commissioned an audience study,
were mostly interested in how many people were exposed to a message.
They basically wanted to know their so called ‘reach’
since how many people you reach is an important indicator
of the economical worth of advertising space.
Advertisers paid more for a spot in media with a high reach.
But, when gradually the idea of the powerful audience came into sway,
reach became a more complicated concept.
Instead of the simple definition ‘amount of people that are exposed to a message’
Roger Clausse proposed the following hierarchy of reach.
First the ‘message offered’, let’s say I’m doing a direct mail campaign.
This level of reach would be the amount of letters that I sent out,
the second level is ‘message receivable’,
the amount of people that have a mailbox and are therefore able to receive my letter,
thirdly ‘message received’, this is the amount of people that actually received my letter.
Please note that this is the traditional definition of reach.
On a fourth level is message registered, since we can imagine
many people will throw away this letter they didn’t ask for without reading.
And fifthly ‘message internalized’ the highest level of audience activity,
everyone who read the letter and thought about it.
Commercially the highest level of audience activity, internalization,
is worth more to advertisers and hence media organizations
than merely the people who receive a message. So not only scientists,
but also market researchers were very interested in audience
activity and the question how and why people select certain messages for consumption.
Why they choose to be part of an audience.
This was also something new, compared to the traditional passive audience paradigm,
hat people choose to be an audience member, they made conscious decisions
about which media to use and they did this to fulfill their media-related needs,
because they wanted to be informed, entertained, pass the time,
belong to a group or any other reason. This idea of an active audience
that was aware of their media-associated needs was already studied in the early 1940’s.
In the sixties the theme was rediscovered and made explicit in the
Uses and Gratification theory. Many important scientists like Katz, Blumler and McQuail
made use of this theory and further explored the issue.
They focused on the needs of audience members.
Primarily they tried to answer the question Why people use certain media.
This theory sees people as actively seeking out the media that suit their needs best.
If I want to laugh I’ll watch a sitcom on tv.
For an evening of safe suspense, you might pop in a DVD of some exciting new detective series
or read an exciting book or comic book.
The point is, everyone is aware of which media serve their needs best.
So the next person might not choose a book but will reach the same goal
by using a computer game.
So, we choose the media that fit our needs.
If you want to know something about communication science
one person might read a book on the topic and the other will follow this MOOC.
You can of course also do both, compare the two and start a discussion on our forum.