Planning & Development: Uses and gratifications

The opposite range of audience theories and effects theory is uses and gratifications theory. This is where the active audience assumes or chooses the texts it consumes and where individuals have differing reasons for consuming a media these texts.

Blumler and Katz expanded this theory in 1974 suggesting that their are possible reasons why an audience might consume certain media texts. The types of reasons are as listed:

• Diversion- escape from everyday problems and routine e.g. watching reality TV.
• Personal relationships- using the media for emotional and other interaction e.g. substituting soap operas for family life.
• Personal identity- constructing their own identity from characters in media text, and learning behaviour and values.
• Surveillance- Information gathering e.g. educational programmes, weather reports, news reports.

In my music video we have included the personal relationships because we wanted to show how the girl in the narrative is feeling really low and isolated which is reflecting through the song because it is being played to reinforce her feeling of wanting to escape. The people that will watch the Paramore- Emergency music video will be mainly people in the cultural code of C-E because of the issues that will be raised and the target audience that the video is aimed at.