preview

Audience Behavior and How It Relates to the New Media Essay

Better Essays

Encoding/Decoding Theory as It Relates to the New Media

Audience behaviour has always been a complex but nonetheless essential part of the material framework for theatre or theatrical events. In its extreme forms (e.g., at live wrestling matches, at exuberant and spirited plays, etc.) is more easily identified and also gives the passive observer some inkling as to where the boundaries for decent behaviour in the given society really are. Audiences are increasingly becoming involved in a multi-layered assortment of activities and affections (greatly contrasting in importance and fervour). It is interesting to note that the audience is now intrinsically intertwined with familiar social relations. There is an unravelling of the difference …show more content…

The reader will quite possibly appreciate different aspects of the work (e.g., sympathizing with certain characters, appreciating the depth of the storytelling, discerning different meanings, etc.) because the reader will have undergone different experiences and essentially become a different person upon every reading. Certainly the static text in that book hasn’t changed (the encoded messages) but the particular readings have (the decoded messages). Although the concepts underlined in Hall’s encoding/decoding paper seems to form a highly systematic theory, several external factors are not incorporated into it. It is widely held that the effects of media are very much moulded by the contexts and happenings in a certain time and place. There is a dynamic and fluctuating influence by means of various environmental factors. Of those environmental factors, there are many including the activities of lobbyist groups, those with special interests, the influence of the government and judicial bodies, the wavering tide of public opinion, technological innovation and advances, and the education of the decoding members of society. To put in more in perspective, consider the case of media messages they are transmitted within a certain sociocultural environment. These very messages must rely on conventions and restrict potentially unintended meanings to bear the consensus value of the dominating ideology. One might now consider the changes, or decline, in the mass media with

Get Access