What are the challenges posed in researching media audiences and how Essay

What are the challenges posed in researching media audiences and how have media and cultural studies researchers addressed them - Essay Example is considered as valuable by authors Morley and Barker who want the contribution of audience research to extend beyond what they term mere â€Å"stories† (Press, 2007: 95). Audience Research: Research on users of information systems, and the World Wide Web environment which combines the features of an information system with many potentially entertaining visuals should be studied using the gratification theory. When there are a variety of different channels to choose from, our understanding of individual’s selection as well as use behaviour may be enhanced, according to Iyer (1998: 14). It is an accepted fact that television presents a distorted view of reality (Bryant; Zillmann, 2002: 69). Researchers, media critics, television executives, and the general public are interested in knowing whether the distortion has any effect on people, and if so, why and to what extent. Over the past few decades there have been two persistent criticisms against media effects research: one is that the evidence accumulated till date show very little indication of media effects on people’s psyche, behaviour, etc, in spite of the myth of â€Å"massive media impact†. The second criticism of media effects research is that it has for the most part lacked any focus on Barker (2007: 128) states that researchers felt the need for a fully elaborate audience research paradigm, and responded to it by developing the Uses and Gratifications Tradition. The virtues of this essay which has not yet been published, and the research that lay behind it, are the attempt to combine in a mutually informative way, a theoretical framework, working concepts, methods of enquiry, research implements and paradigmatic studies. Audience research in the United Kingdom, and consequently in the rest of Europe was conceived and constructed under Stuart Hall’s encoding-decoding model (Hall, Stuart, 1992: 31 as quoted in Barker (2007: 128). This model created a conceptualization of text-audience relations