The first theory we looked at was The Hypodermic Needle Model this was a theory dated from the 1920s. It suggested people 'passively received the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data.' and did not take into account individual opinions assuming they were heterogeneous.
However this theory soon failed because the audiences are not all passive.
The next theory we studied was The Two Way Flow Theory (also known as the Limited Effects Paradigm). This theory was in the 1930s/ 1940s by Paul Lezerfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet and took into account peoples opinions. It all started when Paul, Bernard and Hazel decided to interview people who voted in the presidential election to see why they voted for certain people. This led them to believe we only filter information that we like and we have a choice in what we want to watch for example, if we like football we will filter the news we hear about games/scores where as if we don't like it we tend not to listen or process the information even though we are being told the same thing.
The third theory we learnt was from the 1970s by Blulmer and Katz The Uses and Gratification Theory. Blulmer and Katz came up with four reasons why people watch television: diversion (escaping reality), personal relationships (emotional support), personal identity (finding yourself in TV) and surveillance (to find out information). They believed the four uses would expand as media expands.
The last theory we found out about was The Reception Theory in the 1980s-1990s by Stuart Hall.He believed we could produce media for certain gender, class, age, ethnicity etc (this is known as preferred reading). He thought the audience received text by encoding and decoding.
See this link for more details:
http://marlboroughmediastudies.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/audience-theories.html
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