Theories (Faraz Maqbool)

Mcquails Uses and Gratification Theory
This theory is used as a way or means to understanding mass communication. This theory puts more emphasis on the audience rather tha the actual media product itself. It does this by exploring what people do with the media products they view rather than what media products do to people. It suggests that people choose to view and use media products to meet their own needs. Mcquails theory assumes that the audience are not passive but do take an interest in what they want to watch and make their own decisions regarding what they want to watch.

An example of this is that a person may feel more comfortable and confident to talk to others when they have facts or stories from a certain media product. This in turn will lead them to want to view the media product because they want to and so this is their own choice.

Vance Packards Hypodermic Needle Theory
This theory is actually quite straight forward and easy to understand. It states that the audience of a media product will clearly know the intended meaning of it and that they will accept this intended meaning completely. This theory however is actually very old going back to the 1930s and 1940s and is considered as being obsolete today. However it was quite popular when it was first introduced and the evidence for it was the war and the propaganda and how everyone easily and openly believed what they were told about the war by the media through Radios and TV's. It was not heavily questioned and people just swallowed, however things are different today and people choose what they want to watch and what they want to believe and even then we now know that media has a selective influence on different individuals.

Narrative Codes and Theory of Media
Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. he was able to create a theory which stated that in every story there were five major Narrative codes which are all connected together and that these codes once brought together created meaning. We have only so far learnt of two of the codes both of which are shown below.

1. Hermeneutic Code (The Voice of Truth)
The hermeneutic code is associated with enigmas of the text. So to reveal the truth you would first have to be able to solve the enigmas.

- Thematisation. What in the narrative is an enigma?

- Positioning. Additional confirmations of the enigma.

- Formulation of the enigma.

- Promise of an answer of the enigma.

- Fraud. Circumvention of the true answer.

- Equivocation. Mixture of fraud and truth.

- Blocking. The enigma cannot be solved.

- Suspended answer. Stopping the answering after having begun.

- Partial answer. Some facets of the truth are revealed.

-Disclosure of the truth.

Because the hermeneutic code involves a move from a question to an answer it is one of the two codes (the other being the proairetic or action code) which Barthes calls “irreversible”. Once a secret is revealed, it cannot be unrevealed—the moment of cognition is permanent for the reader. TV Shows like "Lost" use the Hermeneutic Code very clearly.


Proairetic Code (The Voice of Empirics)
A Proairetic Code is a plot action that does not directly raise particular questions -- it is simply an action that is caused by a previous event and which leads to other events. It is not inherently mysterious. An example would be like a person walking down the street or a tile falls off the roof of a building.

Where the proairetic code creates tension in a story is in the anticipation it causes with regard to what might happen next. When we read stories we may try to read the mind of the author and hence wonder why what is happening as it is. This effect can be used by the author to lead the reader astray and hence create further tension.