Cultural Studies Approach On Audience

This approach, according to David Morley, says that audiences aren't just passive when consuming media forms of text. Instead, an active role is taken, and based upon the indivual themselves, readings can vary within the same social group. The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies concluded that audiences adopt different standpoints in relation to the values expressed within a media text. This includes:

• A preferred reading, whereby the audience understand the values being presented by the media form and accept them as natural and correct.
• A negotiated reading includes audiences which recognise the values in the text as legitimate and accept them to a degree, but adapt their reading of the text to fit in with their own strong values based upon experiance and belief.
• An oppositional reading where the understood values within the text are rejected.

Our music video will most certainly cause divisons in readings dependent on both interest and age. Elderly audiences will most certainly take an oppositonal view of the text, due too the uncouth glorification of wealth and gluttony and the many close ups of cigars and alcoholic beverages. However, because our target audience consists of a 14 - 25 year range, this oppositional reading would not find itself too relevent in the success of the video. Those in publishing and reviewing, the writers who work for music magazines like NME are paid to be critical of media texts, however our music video will hopefully be recognised as a text that uses the convention of gloating and greed in successful rapper music video's, but twists it on it's head as we find out the success is immaterial and part of the rapper's dream. Perhaps this will cause UK magazine reviewers like NME and uncut too take a greater preferred reading too the text for this reason than, for example, an American magazine like Empire.