Describe and explain the key differences in how media are consumed by mass audiences according to the magic bullet or hypodermic needle model, the uses and gratifications model, and the encoding/decoding model.

The magic bullet or hypodermic needle model assumes that audience members and spectators (of media, sports, books, etc.) are passive recipients of content and that whatever meaning is inherent in the text they consume is transmitted, unaltered, into their brains. The assumption is that, like an injection, media content is shot into audience members who respond instantly to its stimulus.
The uses and gratifications theory assumes a more active audience whose members have different individual and group interpretive strategies. Whatever meaning may be inherent in texts, the consumers of those texts bring their own interpretive resources to it. They can make, alter, and even invert the meanings of texts to suit their own purposes. So, instead of asking, "What does media do to people?" this paradigm asks, "What do people do with media?"
The encoding/decoding model combines elements of the two previous theories by assuming both that specific ideological messages are loaded into cultural products and that individuals may respond to those messages in a variety of ways. In fact, when faced with ideologically encoded cultural products, individuals can engage in cultural resistance or construct oppositional or against-the-grain readings of those products, in which meaning is subverted.