Is the Media Audience Passive or Active?

Topic

Is the Media Audience Passive or Active

Instructions

You will select one of the essay topics below and write a 1500 word formal essay in response.

Accordingly, unlike the Media Journal, the Critical Analysis Essay should be written in an essay style with an introduction, conclusion, appropriate scholarly references, and a “References” or “Works Cited” section. See Swinburne Harvard Style for further details. There is a Swinburne Referencing Tool available on Swinburne Commons to aid you in this process: https://commons.swinburne.edu.au/items/438e3851-5c67-45f9-b9cb-8e34be5c075b/1/

The essay should have a minimum of 6 peer-reviewed references, at least two of which should not be Required or Suggested Readings from the unit.

Essay Topics

Choose ONE of the following essay topics to respond to below. Ensure that it is clear which essay topic you have selected at the start of your essay.

  1. “Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything,” according to Adorno and Horkheimer. Discuss the context in which these Frankfurt School scholars coined the term ‘Culture Industry’ and how they used the concept to critique mass culture. Your essay should include your own analysis of a media text that has not been discussed in detail in the lectures or required readings.
  2. “The Medium Is The Message”: to what extent is McLuhan’s maxim still a useful framework for understanding media today? Outline McLuhan’s approach to media and discuss its strengths and weaknesses. Your essay should include your own analysis of a media form not discussed in detail in the lectures or required readings.
  3. Is the media audience passive or active? Compare and contrast the approaches to media audiences found in Hall’s Encoding/Decoding theory and Hypodermic Needle Theory. Outline these approaches and discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses. Your essay should include your own analysis of a media text that has not been discussed in detail in the lectures or required readings.

Answer preview

The essay fronts the argument that the media audience is active as opposed to being passive in their daily consumption of media. The argument is supported by the theory encoding/decoding by Stuart Hall. The paper compares Hall’s framework regarding active audiences with the hypodermic needle theory about the passive audiences, looking at the strengths and weaknesses for each theory. An audience is said to be active when they take part in a media and synthesis’s the media, while passive audience is highly influenced by the media and accepts it blindly. Today, people around the world spend their time sending and receiving messages and other contents on the social media (Livingstone, 2003pg 4).

Word count: 1589