ABSTRACT
The Field of Audience Research is one of the most contested in the social sciences. Given the epistemological and methodological rifts and divisions that have characterised audience research, it is perhaps not surprising that media criminologists have tended to steer clear. The history of debate about audiences can be characterised as a series of pendulum swings. In some periods theorists have emphasised the media’s impact, at other times they have argued that media influence is quite weak and is highly mediated by other social factors. The origins of contemporary media studies are often identified as being located in 1930s Germany with the work of scholars such as T. Adorno, Marcuse and M. Horkheimer. These writers propose a very powerful model of media effects known as the hypodermic model because it suggests that media messages are directly injected into the hearts and minds of the masses.
