Audience Theory: Two Step Flow Theory

The two-step flow model was first presented by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet in the 1944 study, The People’s Choice. It focused on how people made decisions during the campaign for Presidents. It was surprising to them that they found out informal and personal associates were mentioned much more than being exposed to newspaper or radio sources as influences on voting behaviour. By gaining this data, theorists Katz and Lazarsfeld created the two-step flow theory of mass communication.

This theory focuses on the belief that the media influences people in two different stages. The first one involves people known as opinion leaders. They are attentive to the mass media and receive messages from it. Then, they pass on their own beliefs on this content to associates who are less effective and they have influence over. Therefore, members of the audience receive information from the media with the thoughts and ideas expressed by the opinion leaders, which means they aren’t directly influenced, it happens in a two-step flow. The researchers believed this diminished the media’s power and resulted in them concluding that social factions were importantly related to how audiences interpreted texts too. This is often known as the limited effects paradigm.

“Personal influence” is a term which was created in reference to this process which exists between the media’s messages and the audience’s reaction to it. The researchers learnt that the opinion leaders can be influential in getting people to change their thoughts and behaviours and are similar to those who become influenced. This theory has helped to improve our knowledge on how the mass media influence how we make decisions. It helped us to understand why particular media campaigns may fail to change the audiences’ behaviour and helps us to predict the influence of media messages on people’s behaviour.

It is therefore beneficial to helping my group and I create our music video as it implies we should think about how different opinion leaders may interpret the messages and themes within our video and how they could inform less active audience members about it. To avoid any negativity it emphasises that we should avoid including controversial scenes like alcohol or drug references as the belief that we endorse anything illegal could be incorrectly believed and spread to other people. However, it also shows that if we produce a video with positive themes in a professional way it could result in optimistic views on it being spread to lots of people and they may be influenced to believe in them too.