Audience theories can also be pitched at different levels of analysis ranging from individuals to large masses or networks of people.
There is a long tradition in the social sciences of investigating “media effects.”[3] Early examples include the Payne Fund Studies, which assessed how movies affected young people, and Harold Lasswell’s analysis of WWI propaganda.
Subsequent work in the social sciences employed a variety of methods to assess the media’s power to change attitudes and behaviors such as voting and violence.
Sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld introduced the concept of a two-step flow in communication, which suggested that media influence was moderated by opinion leaders.
[6] While the tenets of that limited effects perspective retain much of their appeal, later theories have highlighted various ways in which media operate on audiences.
Similarly, some forms of literary criticism such as Screen theory, argue that cinematic texts actually create spectators by sewing them into subject positions.
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, was founded at the University of Birmingham, England in the 1960s by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart.
Notable examples include: Social scientific interest in audiences as agents is, in part, a consequence of research on media effects.
Two lynch pins of the limited effects perspective, selective processes and the two-step flow of communication, describe how the actions of audience members mitigate media influence.
Work on the audience as a mass makes little use of the individual traits discussed above (e.g., attitudes, need, preferences) and relies instead on structural factors and the law of large numbers to reveal patterns of behavior.