Media audience, media contents, and media-use theoretical discourse

Abstract

The ferment in this theoretical discourse places the audience members at the heart of media effect process by presupposing that they, often thought to be at the receiving end, are self-willed and socially-deterministic individuals who decide their pattern of usage of media contents. The import is that audience-members decide what media content to consume, when, and how to consume them, and by implication, twist the nature of influence the media exert on them. This view finds explanation in the idea that as there are diverse use of divergent communication media, the audience members are hardly divested of their active participation in shaping and deciding what media/contents to turn to in meeting their individualised needs. It is sustained that based on the variations in audience’s demography and psychography, different media contents and media sources would continue to strive in meeting audience members’ different specific needs and not the other way round.