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Audience Activity Model
Abstract
Audiences play an active role in media selection and exposure. This statement is at the foundation of much research exploring how audiences navigate and respond to media messages. Yet, there is nothing new about audience activity. The relationship between media and what audiences do with them has been the focus of research dating back to the 1970s and the advent of the uses and gratifications approach. One tenet of uses and gratifications is that audience activity is a more powerful condition of media exposure and effects than media content itself. But what does activity mean? How do audiences demonstrate their activity? Is this modern media environment an ideal setting for models of audience activity? To address these questions, several models of audience activity are reviewed, with a specific eye toward explaining how activity is conceptualized and measured, and discussing how these models are altered to better fit today's media environment.
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One recent change in the U.S. media landscape is the shift toward specialized audiences consuming specialized news content. With this trend as a backdrop, this study argues that viewers of a news talk show are more involved with the show's content when the style of the show is compatible with their psychological needs. This proposition is tested across two instances of compatibility: a host promoting critical debate and viewers with a high need for cognition, and a host promoting humorous commentary and viewers with a high need for humor. Results from an experimental design support the compatibility argument. When compatibility occurred, respondents perceived the program as more relevant, which in turn increased cognitive and behavioral activity regarding the program's content.
The proliferation of visual media worldwide during the past 50 years has made mediated personalities, both real people and fictional characters, powerful agents of social change. Communication theorists have explored various forms of involvement with these personalities, generally referred to as media personae. The current academic literature that explores various forms of audience involvement with media personae lacks conceptual clarity. The present article discusses distinctions among four processes of involvement—transportation, parasocial interaction, identification, and worship—and provides an integrated theoretical model for assessing these powerful forms of social influence.
Certain aspects of the concept of an “active” mass media audience are explored and two dimensions of audience activity identified. The first activity dimension centers on the qualitative orientation of audiences toward the communication process. Audiences are seen as being “selective,”“involved,” or in a “using” relationship to communications. The second activity dimension relates to specific phases in the communication sequence and includes a preexposure period, exposure itself, and a postexposure time. Based on these two dimensions (audience orientation and temporal sequence), a typology of nine audience “activities” is developed. Empirical measures of three types of activity are derived and tested, with audiences found to vary considerably with regard to their “activeness.” A model that links audience activity to uses and gratifications and to exposure is then proposed.
Although the uses and gratifications approach lacks a single general theory, it is not inherently atheoretical, and the author suggests how progress can be made in dealing with four conceptual issues facing this tradition: the nature of the "active" audience; the role of gratification orientations in mediating effects; the social origins of media needs and uses; and the interest shared with students of popular culture in perceptions of and cognitions about mass media content formed by audience members.
The variable nature of audience activity was examined with a sample of 329 local television news viewers. Instrumental news viewing was expected to be related to audience intentionality, selectivity, and involvement with local news. Hierarchical regression found that affinity, selectivity, and involvement predicted intentionality; pass time motives, perceived realism, and reduced intentionality predicted nonselectivity; pass time motives and reduced affinity predicted distractions; and information and nonentertainment motives, perceived realism, and intentionality predicted involvement. Canonical correlation found two news viewing orientations. Instrumental use, or seeking exciting and entertaining information gratifications, was related positively to perceived news realism, affinity, intentionality, and involvement. Ritualized use, or more habitual and time-consuming viewing, was related negatively to news affinity, selectivity, and intentionality, and positively to coviewing distractions. Implications of the links between instrumental media use and audience activity for uses and effects research are discussed.
Although late-night comedy and satirical news programs like The Daily Show have been recognized as important sources of political information, prior research suggests that viewers gain only a limited amount of political knowledge from watching these programs. Drawing from uses and gratification theory and extant research on political information processing, this study examines whether learning from The Daily Show depends on whether viewers orient to the message as news or as entertainment. Results from an online experiment suggest that viewers who orient to a segment from The Daily Show as news or as a mix of news and entertainment invest more mental effort and subsequently learn more than viewers who have a purely entertainment orientation. Further, among viewers with a purely entertainment orientation, providing them with an explicit informational-processing goal increases the amount of mental effort and learning relative to viewers who are given no explicit viewing objective.
This article responds to recent calls for conceptual and methodological refinement, issued by uses-and-gratifications scholars (Rubin, 200944.
Rubin , A. M. 2009. “The uses-and-gratifications perspective on media effects.”. In Media effects: Advances in theory and research , 3rd ed. Edited by:
Bryant , J. and
Oliver , M. B. 165–184. New York, NY: Routledge.. View all references; Ruggiero, 200046.
Ruggiero , T. E. 2000. Uses and gratifications theory in the 21st century. Mass Communication & Society, 3: 3–37. doi: 10.1207/S15327825MCS0301_02 [Taylor & Francis Online], [CSA]View all references), for studying emergent media. Noting that studies on the uses of the Internet have generated a list of gratifications that are remarkably similar to those obtained from older media, it identifies two measurement artifacts—(1) measures designed for older media are used to capture gratifications from newer media; and (2) gratifications are conceptualized and operationalized too broadly (e.g., information-seeking), thus missing the nuanced gratifications obtained from newer media. It challenges the notion that all gratifications are borne out of innate needs, and proposes that affordances of media technology can shape user needs, giving rise to new and distinctive gratifications. A sample of new gratifications and potential measures for those are provided.
This investigation examined the role of motives, attitudes, and audience activity in explaining the affective, cognitive, and behavioral involvement of 328 daytime soap opera viewers. Because inter correlations were found among motives, attitudes, activities, and involvement variables, canonical correlation analysis was used. There were two multivariate patterns. First, except for viewing to pass time, more salient viewing motivations (especially exciting entertainment and social utility), perceived realism, viewing intention, and attention were related to parasocial interaction, post viewing cognition, and post viewing discussion. Second, viewing for social utility, but not for voyeurism, and the lack of realism were related to post viewing discussion, but not to parasocial interaction. These audience orientations and the role of involvement in media uses and effects were discussed.
This paper proposes and develops a model of audience evolution. The concept of audience evolution in this case refers to the notion that the dominant framework employed by media industry stakeholders (content producers, distributors, advertisers, media buyers, etc.) to conceptualize the audience evolves in response to environmental changes. These environmental changes primarily involve technological changes that simultaneously transform the dynamics of media consumption as well as the dynamics of gathering information on various dimensions of audience behavior. These technological changes also interact with one another, in that the technological changes that affect the dynamics of media consumption also simultaneously provide new means of gathering information on previously umeasurable aspects of audience behavior. These technological changes, and their economic and strategic implications, are then filtered through a process of stakeholder resistance and negotiation, out of which new institutionalized conceptualizations of the media audience emerge. This paper asserts a causal relationship between the decline of traditional exposure metrics and the emergence of alternative conceptualizations of audience behavior. That is, the extent to which the fragmentation of the media environment is undermining the long-institutionalized exposure-focused conceptualization of the audience is creating an environment of exploration of – and receptivity toward – alternative conceptualizations of the audience that are derived from dimensions of audience behavior that are better capturable in today’s increasingly fragmented, increasingly interactive media environment. This pattern suggests that the institutionalized audience is a very malleable construct; something that evolves in response to environmental conditions in order to facilitate the continued functioning of the audience marketplace.
Some mass communications scholars have contended that uses and gratifications is not a rigorous social science theory. In this article, I argue just the opposite, and any attempt to speculate on the future direction of mass communication theory must seriously include the uses and gratifications approach. In this article, I assert that the emergence of computer-mediated communication has revived the significance of use and gratifications. In fact, uses and gratifications has always provided a cutting-edge theoretical approach in the initial stages of each new mass communications medium: newspapers, radio and television, and now the Internet. Although scientists are likely to continue using traditional tools and typologies to answer questions about media use, we must also be prepared to expand our current theoretical models of uses and gratifications. Contemporary and future models must include concepts such as interactivity, demassification, hypertextuality, and asynchroneity. Researchers must also be willing to explore interpersonal and qualitative aspects of mediated communication in a more holistic methodology.
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