Remote Control

Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power

Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, Eva-Maria Warth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138985100
• eBook ISBN: 9781135036898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The ways in which we watch television tell us much about our views of gender, the family and society. Bringing together the leading experts in the field of audience studies, this book investigates how viewers watch television, and what they think about the programmes they see. Originally published in 1989, the book is divided into two sections which discuss some of the theoretical issues at stake and then present case studies of a wide range of viewers: women office workers, Israeli watchers of Dallas, German families, the elderly, and American daytime soap fans. Contributors from Britain, the United States, Western Europe, Australia and Israel offer a wide range of perspectives, from feminism to post-modernism, and from semiotics to Marxism.

'Together these essays constitute one of the best possible introductions to the leading edge of research into the phenomenon of television.' Choice

Chapter one

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Changing paradigms in audience studies

David Morley

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Effects, uses, and decodings

The history of audience studies during the post-war period can be seen as a series of oscillations between perspectives which have stressed the power of the text (or message) over its audiences and perspectives which have stressed the barriers “protecting” the audience from the potential effects of the message. The first position is most obviously represented by the whole tradition of effects studies, mobilizing a hypodermic model of media influence, in which the media are seen as having the power to “inject” their audiences with particular messages which will cause them to behave in a particular way. This has involved, from the right, perspectives which would see the media causing the breakdown of “traditional values” and, from the left, perspectives which see the media causing their audience to remain quiescent in political terms, or causing them to inhabit some form of false consciousness.

One finds curious contradictions here. On the one hand, television is accused of reducing its audience to the status of “zombies” or “glassy-eyed dupes” who consume a constant diet of predigested junk food, churned out by the media “sausage factory” and who suffer the anaesthetic effects of this addictive and narcotic substance. However, at the same time as television has been held responsible for causing this kind of somnambulant state of mind (as a result of the viewers' consumption of this “chewing gum for the eyes”) television has also been accused of making us do all manner of things, most notably in the debates around television and violence – where it has been argued that the viewing of violent television content will cause viewers to go out and commit violent acts.¹ One point of interest here is that these “television zombies” are always other people. Few people think of their own use of television in this way. It is a theory about what television does to other, more vulnerable people.

The second key perspective has been the work that has developed principally from the uses and gratifications school. Within that perspective, the viewer is credited with an active role, and it is then a question, as Halloran puts it, of looking at what people do with the media rather than what media do to them.² This argument was obviously of great significance in moving the debate forward – to begin to look at the active engagement of the audience with the medium and with the particular television programs that they might be watching. One key advance which was developed by the uses and gratifications perspective was that of the variability of response and interpretation. From this perspective one can no longer talk about the “effects” of a message on a homogeneous mass audience who are expected to be affected in the same way. However, the limitation is that the “uses and gratifications” perspective remains individualistic, in so far as differences of response or interpretation are ultimately attributed to individual differences of personality or psychology. Clearly, uses and gratifications does represent a significant advance on effects theory, in so far as it opens up the question of differential interpretation. However, it remains severely limited by its insufficiently sociological or cultural perspective, in so far as everything is reduced to the level of variations of individual psychology. It was against this background that Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of communication was developed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, as an attempt to take forward insights which had emerged within each of these other perspectives.³ It took, from the effects theorists, the notion that mass communication is a structured activity, in which the institutions which produce the messages do have a power to set agendas, and to define issues. This is to move away from the idea of the power of the medium to make a person behave in a certain way (as a direct effect which is caused by stimulus provided by the medium) but it is to hold on to a notion of the role of the media in setting agendas and providing cultural categories and frameworks within which members of the culture will tend to operate. The model also attempted to incorporate, from the uses and gratifications perspective, the model of the active viewer making meaning from the signs and symbols which the media provide. However, it was also designed to take on board, from the work developed within the interpretative and normative paradigms, the concern with the ways in which responses and interpretations are structured and patterned at a level beyond that of individual psychologies. The model was also, critically, informed by semiological perspectives focusing on the question of how communication “works.” The key focus was on the realization that we are, of course, dealing with signs and symbols which only have meaning within the terms of reference supplied by codes (of one sort or another) which the audience shares, to some greater or lesser extent, with the producers of messages.

In short, the encoding/decoding model was designed to provide a synthesis of insights that had come out of a series of different perspectives – communication theory, semiology, sociology, and psychology – and to provide an overall model of the communication circuit as it operated in its social context. It was concerned with matters of ideological and cultural power and it was concerned with shifting the ground of debate so that emphasis moved to the consideration of how it was possible for meaning to be produced. It attempted to develop the argument that we should look not for the meaning of a text, but for the conditions of a practice – i.e. to examine the foundations of communication, but crucially, to examine those foundations as social and cultural phenomena. This was the point of interest in socio-linguistics and in the connections with debates in the sociology of education (most notably around the work of Basil Bernstein) which was evident in the early development of the encoding/decoding model.⁴ It was also connected to the field of political sociology and notably with the work of Frank Parkin, in so far as his theory of meaning systems which might exist within a given society (dominant, negotiated and oppositional) provided the basis of the three decoding “potentials” identified in the encoding/decoding model.⁵ However, it remains a limited model, in so far as it simply provides for the three logical possibilities of the receiver either sharing, partly sharing, or not sharing the code in which the message is sent and therefore, to that extent, being likely to make a dominant, negotiated, or oppositional decoding of the encoded message. Further, following the encounter with the work of Hymes, Bourdieu, and Bernstein the encoding/ decoding model also represented an attempt to develop an analysis of the role of social structure in distributing different forms of cultural competence throughout the different sections of the media audience.⁶

In the more recent period, a whole number of shortcomings with the encoding/decoding model of communication have been identified.⁷ These criticisms concern, for instance, the extent to which the model tends to conceive of language merely as a conveyor belt for preconstituted meanings or messages; the way in which it tends to confuse textual meaning with the conscious intentions of broadcasters; and the tendency to blur together under the heading of “decoding” what are probably best thought of as separate processes along the axes of comprehension/incomprehension, as opposed to agreement/disagreement with the propositional content of messages. Furthermore, the concept of the preferred reading, which is of course central to the encoding/decoding model, has been subjected to a number of criticisms. At one level one can ask how specific the concept of preferred reading is to the field of news and current affairs television (within which the encoding/decoding model was first applied). How one might effectively transfer that model to the analysis of fictional television remains a problem. There are also further problems about the exact status of the “preferred reading.” Is it something which is in the text (a property of the text) or is it something which can be generated from the text by certain methods of semiological analysis, or is it a statement, or prediction by the analyst, as to how most members of the audience will empirically read a given program or message?

There are then a number of problems with the model and in particular with the concept of preferred reading as specified in that model. However, I would still want to defend the model's usefulness, in so far as it avoids sliding straight from the notion of a text as having a determinate meaning (which would necessarily impose itself in the same way on all members of the audience) to an equally absurd, and opposite position, in which it is assumed that the text is completely “open” to the reader and is merely the site upon which the reader constructs meaning. This latter “reader as writer” position seems to unite theories as apparently distanced as those of “uses and gratifications” and many forms of “postmodern” theory. In either case, any notion of particular forms of textual organization as constraints on the production of meaning disappear entirely and the text is seen as infinitely (and equally) open to all interpretations. The point of the preferred reading model was to insist that readers are, of course, engaged in productive work, but under determinate conditions. Those determinate conditions are of course supplied both by the text, the producing institution and by the social history of the audience.

Psychoanalytic theories of the subject

The other key perspective on the audience which has been developed in recent years is the body of work, principally within film theory, based on a psychoanalytic perspective, which is concerned with the positioning of the subject by the text.

Despite the theoretical sophistication of much of this work, in offering a more developed model of text/subject relations it has, until now, contributed little to the empirical study of the audience. This is for the simple reason that those working in this tradition have, on the whole, been content to “deduce” audience responses from the structure of the text. To this extent, and despite the theoretical advances achieved by this work in other respects, I would argue that the psycho-analytically based work has ultimately mobilized what can be seen as another version of the hypodermic theory of effects – in so far as it is, at least in its initial and fundamental formulations, a universalist theory which attempts to account for the way in which the subject is necessarily positioned by the text. The difficulty, in terms of audience studies, is that this body of work, premised as it is on universalist criteria, finds it difficult to provide the theoretical space within which one can allow for, and then investigate, differential readings, interpretations, or responses on the part of the audience. This is so quite simply because the theory, in effect, tries to explain any specific instance of the text/reader relationship in terms of a universalist theory of the formation of subjects in general.

From within this perspective emphasis falls on the universal, primary, psychoanalytic processes through which the subject is constituted. The text is then understood as reproducing or replaying this primary positioning, which is then the foundation of any particular reading. My argument would be that, in fact, we need to question the assumption that all specific discursive effects can be reduced to, and explained by, the functioning of a single, universal set of psychic mechanisms – which is rather like a theory of Platonic forms...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Changing paradigms in audience studies
• 2 Bursting bubbles: “Soap Opera,” audiences, and the limits of genre
• 3 Moments of television: Neither the text nor the audience
• 4 Live television and its audiences: Challenges of media reality
• 5 Wanted: Audiences. On the politics of empirical audience studies
• 6 Text and audience
• 7 Out of the mainstream: Sexual minorities and the mass media
• 8 Soap operas at work
• 9 The media in everyday family life: Some biographical and typological aspects
• 10 Approaching the audience: The elderly
• 11 On the critical abilities of television viewers
• 12 “Don't treat us like we're so stupid and naïve”: Towards an ethnography of soap opera viewers
• Select bibliography
• Index