ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how audiences are produced by media organisations and how theorists have explored the effects of media on groups and individuals. It considers how audiences make use of media and media meanings in ways that go beyond their role as mere consumers. The chapter investigates what audiences do with media and the meanings and resources they make from them. Media audiences and their viewing/listening/playing experiences are an object of research for media scholars as well as an object of speculation, opinion and research by educators, pressure groups, politicians, media commentators, media corporations and audience members themselves. The concept of moral panic is a useful one, for framing popular concerns about media effects, their manifestation, impact and indeed for the way in which media organisations themselves look to and make use of effects research in ‘producing’ versions of media audiences.
