AQA A-Level Media Studies audiences overview quiz quiz

Attitudes and values

Lifestyle and aspirations

Age, gender and income

Personality type

The largest possible mass audience that a product can reach across a country

An audience that does not consume any media products of any kind at all

Only the particular group of people who choose to watch the television news

A smaller, specific group with shared interests

Active, choosing media to satisfy needs

Passive recipients who simply absorb whatever media messages are sent to them

Entirely unaffected by any of the media that they consume in their daily lives

Completely unable to interpret or make any sense of the media products they see

Encoding

Personal identity

Vertical integration

Mean world syndrome

The way that different audiences read and interpret a finished media product

The process of classifying audiences into demographic and psychographic groups

The way producers build a preferred meaning into a product

The regulation and legal control of media industries by official bodies

Preferred reading, fully accepting the meaning

Negotiated reading, partly accepting it

Dominant reading, agreeing with the message

Oppositional reading

Long-term and gradual, shaping audiences' view of reality

Immediate and direct, taking effect the very moment the message is received

Completely non-existent, with the media having no measurable effect on anyone

Strictly limited to opinion leaders who then pass the message on to others

It greatly overestimates the role played by influential opinion leaders in society

It treats audiences as passive and uniform, ignoring active responses

It can only ever be applied to newer forms of digital and networked media today

It denies that the media have any measurable effects on their audiences at all

Media messages always reach all audiences directly without any intermediary

Audiences simply cannot be influenced by the media in any way whatsoever

Media influence passes through opinion leaders to others

Every member of the audience always takes the producer's preferred reading

Passive consumers who simply absorb whatever they are given

Opinion leaders who pass media messages on to other people

Demographic groups defined by their age, gender and income

Textual poachers who rework content into new creations

Ended the age of the passive audience by letting anyone produce and share

Made audiences far more passive than they ever were before the digital era

Removed entirely the need for any professional media producers to exist at all

Eliminated participatory culture and stopped audiences creating their own content

A professional market researcher who studies consumer behaviour for companies

An audience member who both consumes and produces media content

A type of official regulator that controls and oversees media industries

A demographic category used to group audiences by age, gender and income