Media audience studies

Media audience studies is the academic study of media audiences, connected with the academic disciplines of sociology, psychology and media studies.

=Media effects=

Early research into media audiences was dominated by the debate about media effects , in particular the link between screen violence and real-life aggression. Several moral panics fuelled the claims, such as the incorrect presumptions that Rambo had influenced Michael Robert Ryan in commit the Hungerford massacre, and that Child s Play 3 had motivated the killers of James Bulger.

In the 1990s, David Gauntlett published critiques on media effects , most notably the Ten things wrong with the media effects model article.

=Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies=

From the 1970s, researchers from the CCCS produced empirical research about the relationship between texts and audiences. Amongst these was The Nationwide Project by David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon.

Stuart Hall (cultural theorist) s seminal Encoding/Decoding model can be seen as the beginning of research into how audiences are active consumers rather than passive recipients.

=References=

*Moores, Shaun (1993) Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption. London: Sage. ISBN 0803984472