ABSTRACT
What I am going to deal with in this paper are some of the implications of the realisation, within mass media research, that one cannot approach the problem of the ‘effects’ of the media on the audience as if the contents of the media impinged directly on to passive minds. The realisation that people in fact assimilate, select from and reject ‘communications’ from the media has led to the development of the ‘uses and gratifications’ model of the media, Halloran advising us that ‘we must get away from the habit of thinking in terms of what the media do to people and substitute for it the idea of what people do with the media.’ This approach highlights the important fact that different members of the media audience may ‘use’ and interpret any particular programme in a quite different way from how the communicator intended it, and in quite different ways from other members of the audience.
