Uses and Gratifications and my Short Film

In order to make any successful media product it is always good to look into the uses and gratifications theory around the media text that you are creating. Uses and Gratifications give an insight into what we are supposed to get out of the media text that is being viewed, and the ways in which the viewer of the text is getting pleasure or gaining something from what they are viewing. 

Gratifications and uses have four main used, these are as follows: 

• Information- This is the ways in which find about the society and world in which we live in. 
• Personal identity- Watching or reading different media texts analysing a character or characters deciding whether we agree with the behaviours that they are showing. 
• Integration and Social Interaction- In order to look at the ways in which other people live and what and how other people do things through watching others through the media. 
• Entertainment- When relaxing we will use the media in order to switch off and not have to think much, this may be done by watching a film, soaps or scrolling through social media websites.

When looking into the uses and gratifications of media other area that is focused on is the reception analysis. This looks into the audience in which reading the media text and the ways in which they are going to be interpreting the different things you are portraying. All media texts have more than one way that the audience is going to read into it, the interpretation of the text will change depending on the gender, age and personality of the audience. In order to get an idea about the ways in which my media text is going to be read I am going to be asking a range of different audience types to be watching my short film in order to get feed back about the ways in which they read into it and what they thought of it. Different people will read into the media text in different ways, this will depend on many different factors like the interest they have, the ways in which they have been brought up. The media text may include a norma home life setting scene like a family dinner however if a person doesn't have family dinners like that or lives in a children's home they are going to read into it in a different way to a person that does live in a normal family setting. A personas mood can also play a massive part to the way they will feel about a media text, for example if you are in a good mood the type of music that you will listen to will be different to the music that you would listen to if you were in a bad mood. 

A theory behind the way in which we read into things has been created by David Morley, who said that the place in which we have in society has a massive impact towards how we read texts. Morley started to study the response that people had towards the BBC programme Nationwide in the year 1980. The way in which he analysed the ways in which people were reading the media text was through the break up of three different categories: 

• Preferred/ Dominant reading 
• Oppositional reading 
• Receiving an alternative message