Dexter: The Media Response

The media text being investigated is Dexter; a television series based around a blood splatter analyst Dexter Morgan. The series follows his career by day and his killing addiction by night. My argument will focus on how this text creates an ‘active’ response from its audience. The key concept under investigation is the audience, in relation to the ways that they’re impacted. For this I will explore my chosen concepts in conjunction with the media text itself, followed by a conclusion to summarise my argument. An audience can be defined as anyone who receives a media text in any aspect of time or place; however this can be further investigated and categorised into three identified groups; simple, mass or diffused audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998, 39).

The two concepts that I will be looking at are the ‘Two Step Flow’ by Katz and Lazarsfeld along with the ““Active Audiences” and “Pleasure and

This shows an example of an active audience through the ways in which they begin to seek out the book series along with writing a review of the book. I will also look into is the way in which Fiske (1988) argues that audiences are active in the sense that they engage with the programme in ways that were unthought-of, meaning that audiences aren’t seen as passive (Fiske 1988, 79). This theory is materialised through the ways in which fans react to the programme, such as creating their own versions of elements from the show, along with communities and forums that can be found regarding the subject. Jensen