Notes

Hypodermic syringe: It's like the media content is injected into you; if they tell you to write you will write; the audience is entirely passive. It's a crude model that suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data. 

Two-Step Flow Theory: The hypodermic model quickly proved too clumsy for media researches seeking to more precisely explain the relationship between audience and text. As the mass media became an essential part of life in societies around the world and did NOT reduce populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation was sought. 

Uses & Gratifications Theory: The audience are not passive and will select things that they want to watch based on what they need; it might be that the audience want information or want to escape from a long and heavy media lecture for example.

Researchers Blumler and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use text for the following purposes (i.e. uses and gratifications)

Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.

Personal relationship - using the media for emotional and other interaction, e.g. substituting soap operas for family life. 

Personal identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from text.

Surveillance - informations which could be useful for living e.g. weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains. 

Reception Theory: Stuart Hall - said there are different ways that audiences ail read texts - they'll read them the right way; the way the producer intended them to be read which is called the preferred reading - they'll take bits and disregard other bits or read it the complete opposite way. 

Narrative Theory: 

Meaning - Roland Barthes - texts may be 'open' or 'closed' Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel  meaning are called narrative codes. 

Structure - Tvzetan Todorov - texts are constructed around the vas ice scaffolding of equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium. 

Character - Vladimir Propp - produced a character typography of characters and their actions (31 character types in all).

Conflict and resolution - Claude Levi-Strauss - recognised the constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. In order to understand what it's like to be something, you have to understand what it's like to not be something. Useful way to construct narrative because you're looking at oppositions.