Mass Media and Audiences
Mass media is written, broadcast, or spoken communication that touches a huge audience. It consists of television, radio, advertising, movies, the Internet, newspaper, magazines and is a weighty strength in the modern world, which produces the culture. People are attacked regularly with messages from thousands of sources which influence their moods, attitudes, and an understanding of what is and is not significant. There are three key sociological viewpoints on the role of media and its influence on the audiences - the limited effects theory, the class-dominant theory, and the culturalist theory.
The limited effects theory claims that media has an insignificant influence because people choose what to watch and read according to their own beliefs. Nevertheless, this theory ignores the concept of framing and was created when the mass media were not so widespread as today. The class-dominant theory describes the situation when the media presents the view of media owners who control it claiming that they can manipulate what people see or hear. The culturalist theory is the combination of these two theories and it says that publics interact with media to produce their own meanings out of the messages they receive.
Media change not only audiences but itself as well and its development is a process that comprises such stages as innovation, penetration, peak, decline, and adaptation. Each media begins with the innovation that makes transmission of the messages possible and the business model which uses this innovation, for example, Internet and dot-com companies. Audience’s growing attention and interest to the new medium is characterized by the penetration stage. The better medium can satisfy the needs of the audiences the faster it will penetrate the market and affect the people as television did. The next stage is a peak when the medium receives the highest level of attention and can generate great amounts of income for media owners. The decline stage comes always after the peak and is characterized by the loss of audiences, revenues and of course by the emerging of a newer more comfortable for people medium. The adaptation stage means that a medium does a repositioning in the market and offers the audiences other ways to satisfy their needs, like newspapers today, using the internet for presenting information and monetization (Potter, 1998).
It is possible to discuss the McDonalds’ Happy Meal commercial with the Despicable Me 2 characters - minions. The thirty seconds long video presents minions buying and eating Happy Meals using jokes and having fun and children with their mother looking really happy visiting McDonald's (Happy Meal Commercial, 2016). This ad attempts to encourage children to visit McDonald's, buy Happy Meals and show how much fun they will have doing this. The advertisement uses the characters of a popular cartoon to receive the attention of the young audience and to create the desire to buy the product by putting the toy inside the meal box. The media appeals to …
