Audience Theory

Hypodermic Needle Model

1) This article suggests that since the university students had played a violent video game, they would then act aggressively. This could be due to the violent attributes that are heavily featured that could change the student and therefore make them act more aggressively. Adults who don't play games would automatically trust this and assume that video games could endanger people's lives. 

2) The coverage of the Talk Talk hack shows the young hacker as a bad influence since they highlight his apparent habit of playing video games. This could suggest to the audience that young teenage gamers would be bad. Also, video games have been a common victim as they would have to try and push the blame onto them. This would then make readers assume that gamers are bad and so they would assume that video games cause terrible things. Someone can criticise this by stating the mass number of people who purchase a game should be suspects when yet a small minority of them would ever consider crime. The one criticism is that video games would cause people to change and turn into violent people. This could suggest that the audience are mainly

Two-step flow model

1) The two step flow theory is when the opinions of the audience is influenced by opinion leaders soon after they receive the media.  

2) TotalBiscuit is an opinion leader as he would get the media from publishers such as Activision or any other game publisher and gives his first impressions on the games that he gets. His impressions would then give influence to his audience so that then audiences could have an impressions to either purchase it or not due to his experience playing with that game. 

3) The journalist is the opinion leader as they are expressing their opinions over the majority of celebrities who have more followers compared to politicians such as the Prime Minister and other important figures. And the audience are the readers of this article who are reading the Telegraph.

4) Similar to the Telegraph article, Jamal Edwards is the media and the opinion leaders are BBC. This is because the BBC are reporting and expressing their opinions on the media being Jamal Edwards. 

Uses and Gratifications theory

Diversion: One form of media that would be seen as escapism would be Doctor Who as it follows the adventures of a Time Lord who isn't of human origin venture through time with a companion who is human as they gain new experiences which may interest some viewers into the worlds which the characters travel through.

Personal Relationships: Emmerdale is an example where people would have emotional ties with the characters as they would have stories that the audience could either understand and feel empathy or do see how their favourite character goes on with their lives and the troubles that they would have to overcome.

Personal Identity: These programmes would include realistic facts that the viewer may find useful. The example below is an extract from the BBC three Britain's Biggest Sexists as they explore how genders are treated differently as they explore different platforms ranging from sports to video games. The audience that watches this or are interested in documentaries are most likely going to be interested in this format.

Surveilance: People use the media to get informed or updated about situations that not only affect them nationally but they may also want information from global sources. Channel 4 News has an in-depth look with their reports as they aer known for their investigative reporting upon their topics.