The active audience

1
The active audience

• Lecture 4
• 16/03/06

2
Legacies of audience research

• Print capitalism and imagined community
• Audience measurement
• Propaganda and behavioural effects
• Functionalist uses and gratifications

3
The ambiguity of the cyborg

• Effects and uses and gratifications research can
  be seen as competing aspects of human liberation
  and enslavement by and through media/technology

4
A summary of effects thinking

• Their image, first of all, was of an atomised
  mass of millions of readers, listeners and
  moviegoers prepared to receive the Message and
  secondly they pictured every Message as a direct
  and powerful stimulus to action, which would
  elicit immediate response. In short, the media of
  communication were looked upon as a new kind of
  unifying force a simple kind of nervous system
  reaching out to every eye and ear, in a society
  characterised by an amorphous social organisation
  and a paucity of interpersonal relations
• Katz Lazarsfeld Personal Influence The Part
  Played by People in the Flow of Mass
  Communication (1955/1964)

5
You and whose masses?

• There are in fact no masses, only ways of
  seeing people as massesthe degree that we find
  the formula inadequate for ourselves, we can wish
  to extend to others the courtesy of acknowledging
  the unknown
• Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950
  (1958 289)

6
Uses and gratifications saw audience use of the
media as aimed at social and psychological needs

• Concerned with (1) the social and psychological
  origins of (2) needs, which generate (3)
  expectations of (4) the mass media or other
  sources which lead to (5) differential patterns
  of media exposure (or engagement in other
  activities) resulting in (6) need gratifications
  and (7) other consequences, perhaps mostly
  unintended ones
• Blumler Katz, The Uses of Mass Communications
  Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research
  (1974)

7
Nationwide and hegemony

• (The) varied individual reports of human life
  inour times which constitute Nationwides stock
  in trade, a very important set of implicit
  messages about basic attitudes, taken together,
  tend to constitute what we might think of as a
  set of base-line assumptions about life in
  contemporary Britain and about what are the
  sensible attitudes for us to take towards
  various social problems
• David Morley Charlotte Brunsdon (1978)
  Everyday Television - Nationwide

8
The audience is situated, not determined

• Members of a given sub-group will tend to share
  a cultural orientation towards decoding messages
  in particular ways. Their individual readings of
  messages will be framed by shared cultural
  formations and practices, which will in turn be
  determined by the objective position of the
  individual in the social structure. This is not
  to say that a persons objective social position
  determines his consciousness in a mechanistic
  way people understand their situations and react
  to it through the level of sub-cultures and
  meaning systems
• David Morley (1980), The Nationwide Audience
  Structure and Decoding

9
The hidden significance of soap opera

• Dorothy Hobson (1982) Crossroads The Drama of a
  Soap Opera
• (Soap opera proceeds through) endless
  unsettlingand resettling of acceptable modes of
  behaviour within the sphere of personal
  relationships

10
Hobsons audience

• It became clear through the process of study
  that the audience do not watch programs as
  separate or individual items, not even as types
  of programs, but rather that they build up an
  understanding of themes over a much wider range
  of programs and lengths of time viewing
• (Preference for) feminine realm of fictional
  programmes that connected with the personal and
  emotional concerns of everyday family life, or
  else offered a fantasy alternative to their own
  daily experiences

11
Charlotte Brunsdon Notes on Soap Opera (1982)

• The soap viewer needs to possess extra-textual
  competences to read and reveal pleasures in a
  genre
• Understanding of generic codes and conventions
• Knowledge of a particular serials characters and
  history
• Ability and willingness to engage emotionally in
  the moral codes of personal conduct

12
The importance of narrative

• The most striking narrative feature of soap
  operas as the term serial narrative implies
  is their openness. Closed narratives (found in
  most feature films and novels) resolve all the
  major narrative questions raised in the plot by
  the end. The pleasure derived from reading or
  watching closed narratives is closely connected
  with that moment of ultimate closure when
  secrets are revealed, riddles solveddesires
  fulfilled. Open narratives on the other hand, do
  not tie up all the narrative loose ends.
  Questions, problems, mysteries might remain
  unsettled or their resolutions might provoke
  still further questions, problems
• Robert C Allen, Audience-Oriented Criticism,
  Channels of Discourse Reassembled (1992)

13
Narrative and audience pleasure

• Pleasure is in the process of revelation and its
  oral reconstruction
• Children understood narrative economy and
  enjoyed the pleasures of speculation and
  anticipation
• David Buckingham, Public Secrets Eastenders and
  its Audience (1987)

14
Dynamics in the private sphere

• Viewing habits, patterns and legitimacies in the
  domestic space relate to the gendered
  distribution of social roles (i.e. who controls
  the remote control?)
• David Morley, Family Television Cultural Power
  and Domestic Leisure (1986)

15
Influence of Michel de Certeaus The Practice of
Everyday Life (1986)

• Production the strategy of cultural imposition
• Consumption the tactics of cultural use
• Everyday life invents itself by poaching in
  countless ways on the property of others
• Users make (bricolent) transformations of and
  within the dominant cultural economy in order to
  adapt it to their own interests and their own
  rules

16
Romantic extremes?

• John Fiske, Television Culture (1987)
• Excorporation the process by which the
  powerless steal elements of the dominant culture
  and use them in their own, often oppositional or
  subversive interests
• In a system and society where power is unequally
  distributed, consumers are acted upon freely but
  develop forms of resistance. While people are not
  free to construct a socio-economic system, they
  are free within the realm of semiotic power
• Dismissing escapism as mere fantasy avoids the
  vital question of what is escaped from, why
  escape is necessary, and what is escaped to

17
Difrent strokes for different folks

• What the aboriginal readers were demonstrating
  was the ability of a subculture to make sense out
  of a text that clearly bears the dominant
  ideology. The discourses of powerlessness through
  which they lived their lives activated a set of
  meanings that resisted those preferred by the
  dominant ideologyreading television in this way
  provided them with a means of articulating their
  experience of powerlessness in a white dominated
  society and the ability to articulate ones
  experience is a necessary prerequisite to
  changing it