Audience Theory

Hypodermic Needle Theory

The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by ‘shooting’ or ‘injecting’ them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response. Both images used to express this theory (a bullet and a needle) suggest a powerful and direct flow of information from the sender to the receiver. The bullet theory graphically suggests that the message is a bullet, fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head". With similarly emotive imagery the hypodermic needle model suggests that media messages are injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by the message. They express the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating an idea because the receiver or audience is powerless to resist the impact of the message.

Film Theory


Screen Theory (Specific theory of film)


Screen theory is a Marxist-psychoanalytic film theory associated with the British journal Screen in the 1970s. The theoreticians of this approach, Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath and Laura Mulvey describe the cinematic apparatus as a version of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus. According to screen theory, it is the spectacle that creates the spectator and not the other way round. The fact that the subject is created and subjected at the same time by the narrative on screen is masked by the apparent realism of the communicated content.


Uses and Gratifications Theory

The theory states that audiences get four uses from media. (Personal identity, social interaction, information and entertainment)