Active and Passive Audience

The idea of Active and Passive audiences has derived from the hypodermic needle theory. This theory suggests that audiences are passive (inactive) in the sense that they allow themselves to be injected with certain ideals by the media which aid their decisions in life. An active audience is not hive-minded, allowing themselves to be a victim of mass-production, but an individual that seeks and pursues their own interests regardless of the way the media targets them. As a 21st century audience we are able to be more selective in terms of the type of media we consume, expansion of technologies and progression of different concepts and ideologies has allowed this to happen; there is much more variation in the way we consume texts compared to the 19th century. During the 1920's-60's the three main ways people consumed media was through the radio, the newspaper and by going to the cinema. This means they were a passive audience as alternatives didn't exist. Television didn't start entering households until the late 1940's, families fortunate to have one were only able to access a limited amount of channels, programmes were only broadcasted at certain times. It wasn't until around 1997 that the internet started to enter households, we can look at this in comparison to the range of on-demand internet streaming media we have in this century such as Netflix; also many people would say that Youtube is the biggest internet revolution of the 21st century. There is now globalisation in media, the vastness of media we have access to now means that we cannot fit into the target audience for each and every media production, hence there are niche productions which target only a small definitive audience. Another way a 21st century audience is more active in the media is that they have become the producers, we now have access to the technology and materials to create media productions, most commonly on digital cameras and phones, these products are not set on a big budget and are not industry standard but appeal to a specific type of media consumers.
- old marketing styles gone

Frankfert school - mass media is a form of control