Audience Theory

Bulmer and Katz stated that audience needs are:

surveillance – telling us about the world around us, personal identity – influences how we see ourselves and our place in society,

personal relationships – develop relationships with media characters; aids social interaction,

diversion – provides escapism from daily life

Our product is most likely to fit in with diversion as an audience need, as the girl's imagination provides escapism from reality. This will be seen when the audience realise her friend is actually an imaginary form of the doll, or when the girl sees her paper birds transform into real ones.

Our audience may also be able to develop a personal relationship with our lead role too, if we pull our product off successfully. We can try and achieve this through things such as close ups, to make the audience feel literally closer to our character. 

Our product probably won't tell our audience much about their place in society or themselves, so surveillance doesn't really apply as much to our planned product.

Stuart hall said that the audience may respond to their readings of products in different ways:

dominant – the reader shares the text’s code and accepts its preferred reading

negotiated – understands the text’s code, generally accepts the preferred reading but modifies it according to their social position and experiences

oppositional – understands the code but rejects the preferred reading.  The audience member will be reading the text from an oppositional position (e.g. a feminist reading).

We hope that our audience accepts our product as preferred reading, yet we don't see how our text would be seen as dominant by the majority of the audience. This is because we doubt that most of the audience will have shared the same experience as the girl in our product will have.

We also doubt that the product would be seen as oppositional, as the storyline is seen from mainly one perspective and the planned readings are well planned out, so there aren't many oppositional sides the audience could see the context from.

This leaves negotiated reading, which fits the best with our planned product. We hope it's easily understood and that the preferred reading will be accepted, yet we also know that it's possible that our audience may mentally modify the product in their own personal way.

David Morley believes that the social background of some audience members may affect how they interpret our product.

We don't think our product will massively conform to this belief, as the storyline doesn't leave much to the imagination. There aren't many things left open for interpretation and this is why we believe that our audience will read our product in the way we intended it to be.