Research: Active Audience

This idea (particularly associated with mass-media usage) that the audiences are not just passive containers for forced meanings but rather individual audience members who are aggressively (although often unconsciously) involved—both cognitively and emotionally—in making sense of texts.

This active involvement has several consistent proportions: perception, comprehension, understanding, evaluation, and response. Advocates of active audience theory claim that scholars cannot assume that the meaning of a text is fixed in advance of its reception because meaning is the product of a negotiation between the audience and the text in the context of reception. They argue that people use the media for their own purposes.

This newer model sees the audience not as couch potatoes, but as individuals who are active and interact with the communication process and use media texts for their own purposes. We behave differently because we are different people from different backgrounds with many different attitudes, values, experiences and ideas.