Media Audiences

Is Anybody Watching?

Sue Turnbull

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350306394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

The relationship between the media and its audiences has always been a topic of research and debate. Media Audiences provides a comprehensive and succinct overview of the field of audience studies from the time of the printing press to an era characterized by online digital connectivity. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book offers a wealth of personal insight into the experience of undertaking audience research in order to illustrate the key methodological issues and challenges in the field. Addressing such topics as technologies, content and the people who are the subjects of audience research, the author challenges readers to think about the value of such research for themselves and for society at large. Comprehensive yet concise, this is essential reading for students of Media with an interest in audience studies.

1 Introductions

It’s 1987 and I’m on my way from one side (the outer east) of Melbourne’s vast suburban sprawl, to the other (the inner west), to undertake a year-long study of the role of the media in the lives of a group of young women in a girls’ secondary school. I’ve not long been in Australia (three years), and am only just beginning to get a handle on its troubled settler–colonial history and social complexities. As will become apparent, the 50-minute car drive (on a good day) that transports me from my home in a leafy suburb populated by middle-class Anglo-Australians and migrants from northern Europe, who arrived before the Second World War, to the state-funded high school in a working-class inner-city suburb that has witnessed waves of post-war migration, is about to present me with a whole set of new challenges in thinking about Australia, people and the media in their lives.

This is the formative experience that will underpin my approach to audience research over the next 30 years as the media landscape has gradually evolved, and I am returning to this experience because, after accepting the challenge of writing a book about audiences in a series entitled ‘Key Concerns in Media Studies’, when it came to the point of defining just what those current concerns might be, I hesitated. While I have been encouraging undergraduate and postgraduate students to embrace audience research for the last 30 years, when faced with trying to define the field, and how best to proceed, I needed some time to think this through. In a globalized, fragmented, converged digital media environment, is the concept of the media audience still viable, I wondered. As I hope this book will demonstrate, I think it is, but we can learn much from the past of media audience research in seeking to move forward. Inspired by the French axiom ‘Reculer pour mieux sauter’, which might be roughly translated as the value of retreating a few steps in order to make a better leap forward, I decided to return to the history of media audience research first. I wanted to explore once again the why, when, where and how of this complex field as it has developed over the years in order to suggest how we might proceed. What can we learn from this history that will help us understand how audiences manage the complex media environment in which they are embedded today? As will become evident, while audiences have always been ‘active’ in their use of the media, every new media technology or form is almost always framed in terms of the imagined ‘effects’ that it will have on the audience that consumes it.

The backstory

While an interest in media audiences arguably begins with the emergence of the steam-driven printing press media in the 19th century, my own interest in the field began in a very different time and place. As a teacher of English working in a secondary school outside Cambridge in the UK in the mid-1970s, I discovered that talking about the media with a group of students who were classified as ‘disadvantaged’ was a way to get them to discuss, and even tentatively write about, films and TV shows which they had enjoyed. Some of these students came from tiny rural hamlets and had never been to Cambridge despite the fact they lived only 10 miles from the city centre. This was the class of ‘no-hopers’ to whom, as a newly minted eager young teacher, I was supposed to give some cheer, and perhaps even some literacy skills. As I discovered, these students were avid consumers of the media in the form of what has now come to be called ‘the legacy media’. This included television, radio, comics and magazines. Furthermore, they were well able to express their opinions and argue the case for the content they liked or disliked, even if we started from the position ‘It’s rubbish, Miss.’ For a teacher of English desperate to get students to extend their skills in reading and writing by whatever means, inviting students to think, talk and write about the media they encountered became a means to an end, one that had been advocated during my teacher training experience.

While undertaking a Postgraduate Certificate in Education in the Department of Education in Cambridge in the early 1970s, we were introduced to the work of the Education Unit of the British Film Institute. This included the materials available for film study in schools which came in ‘packages’ that included 16 mm film clips and study guides organized around such topics as ‘The Hollywood Blonde’, ‘The Western’ and ‘Horror’. While these topics were more indicative of the concerns of the burgeoning field of cinema studies than they were the interests of the students with whom I was working, my pupils nonetheless welcomed the weekly screenings. Showing the reels of film clips that arrived by post every week was not, however, easy. This endeavour demanded both commitment and a bit of muscle since it involved lugging a heavy Bell and Howell 16 mm film projector, and a cumbersome screen, into remote classrooms that were rarely equipped with any form of blackout. But the enjoyment of the clips, the lively discussions that ensued and the sheer potential of film studies in the classroom impressed me from the first. Teaching about television, it should be noted, was more of a challenge since we were unable to bring the object of study into the classroom except in the form of TV guides. Within a decade the introduction of the video recorder connected to a TV monitor on a stand equipped with wheels would make both film and television studies much easier, although the small screen was frustrating. However, during the 1970s teaching about any form of media other than film or radio was largely restricted to analysing and critiquing printed materials, such as the news in newspapers and advertising in magazines.

Despite these limitations, it was this experience of teaching media that inspired me to return to university in 1984 to undertake a doctoral degree in media education at La Trobe University in Melbourne. While cinema studies had recently found its niche in the undergraduate curriculum, media studies was taught only in the Graduate School of Education where the primary purpose was to teach teachers how to teach students to think critically about the popular media in order to resist its presumably pernicious effects. This was the gate-keeping function for media studies pre-figured in 1933 by Frank Leavis and Denys Thompson in their highly influential book Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. Here Leavis and Thompson set the agenda for a ‘prophylactic approach’ to teaching about the media and popular culture, the goal being to teach students to discount media messages so that they might not be impregnated by the ‘crude emotional falsity’ and ‘illusory values’ of popular culture (Buckingham, 1993, p. 214). The possibility that the popular culture they encountered in the media might have some intrinsic value was simply unthinkable. It was therefore implicit that those wanting to teach about the media in schools were not supposed to like the object of their study, but to hold the media in healthy disdain because of its presumed negative effects on society. It was this assumption of negative effects that was one of the key reasons I wanted to undertake audience research, since my experience with the students I had been teaching in England had led me to question this routine dismissal of the popular.

In Australia in the early 1980s, as in the UK and the USA, the issues about the media being routinely canvassed in and on the media included both the negative effects of the media in general, and some media in particular. This included representations of violence, but also the representation of gender inspired by a growing wave of feminist critique. Occasionally these concerns coincided, as in the case of the Australian soap opera Prisoner, known internationally as Prisoner: Cell Block H. With its representation of unglamorous women of all shapes and sizes, as well as its initially tentative approach to the depiction of same-sex relationships, Prisoner was simultaneously reviled in the popular press and applauded for its groundbreaking depiction of women (Turnbull, 2017). As Alan McKee (2001) has pointed out, during the 1980s more academic ‘ethnographic’ work was devoted to Prisoner than any other series in the history of Australian television (p. 184). Meanwhile, Australia’s other famous export, Neighbours, was largely ignored by scholars, though not by the popular media. Indeed, I was invited by the commercial Channel Ten to appear on a nationally broadcast breakfast show direct from the Ramsay Street location of the show as a ‘soapologist’ (not my chosen title) in order to explain how and why Neighbours had come to be on the front cover of Time magazine and why British viewers in their millions had embraced an unpretentious Australian suburban soap. There was, however, no audience research available for me at that time to cite, despite increasing academic interest in the popularity of soap operas as a genre.

During the 1980s, soap opera, and other genres favoured by women, became the focus of a number of studies inspired by what has been described as the second wave of feminism (Lotz, 2003). In 1982, Tania Modleski published Loving with a Vengeance, a study of gothic romance and soap operas that would herald a wave of feminist audience research in the following decade. Ien Ang would publish, first in the Netherlands (1982), and then in the UK and the USA (1985), her influential study of the Dutch audience for the American prime time melodrama Dallas, while Janice Radway (1984) would undertake a ground-breaking study of women romance readers in the American Midwest. As Liesbet van Zoonen (1994, p. 105) suggested, the turn to a focus on media audiences and their reception of these media texts was in part a reaction to the ‘textual determinism’ implicit in earlier approaches that assumed an effect from an analysis of the content. This was particularly the case in debates about media representation and the perceived need for more positive images of women.

One of the first books of feminist media scholarship I encountered when I arrived in Australia was Media She (1974), Patricia Edgar and Hilary McPhee’s searing take on the ways in which women were depicted in advertisements of the time. Culminating in a rather twee set of photographs featuring a bearded male in feminized poses to make the point, Media She predated Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements (1976) by two years. With a foreword by a key figure in the history of British cultural studies, Richard Hoggart, and a long essay by Goffman (1976), Gender Advertisements addressed such topics as ‘The Feminine Touch’ and ‘The Ritualization of Subordination’ in order to illustrate how advertising images reinforced women’s secondary status in society. The publication of Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertising: Ideology and Meaning (1978) subsequently introduced a new level of theoretical complexity by applying a structuralist-semiotic approach to an analysis of advertisements as complex ideological signs. It was as a result of interventions such as these that the representation of women in the media became the ideological battleground that it continues to be today, even though, as Amanda Lotz has pointed out (2003, p. 8), we have now passed through many different waves of feminist critique and activism.

As someone interested in media education, I could see the potential for teaching Williamson’s approach in the classroom. However, I wanted to explore just how the popular media might be received and appropriated (to use the language of the day) by ‘real people’ in the course of their daily lives. In particular, I was interested in the use of the media by the young people with whom I had been working in the UK. I’d read a collection of essays edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson entitled ‘Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain’ (1975), one of a series of Working Papers in Cultural Studies produced by the recently established Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, and I was intrigued by the suggestion that popular culture might be appropriated by students in their resistance to school, as well as other forms of authority. In particular, I was provoked by an essay by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber entitled ‘Girls and Subcultures’ (1975), in which they suggest that the female of the species had largely been ignored in ‘youth studies’. As a graduate of what McRobbie and Graber identified as the ‘culture of the bedroom’ in a depressed post-industrial town in the north of England, I wanted to know more about the role of the media in girls’ lives, and how it might shape their view of the world.¹ Or not, as the case might be, since I knew from personal experience that the role of the media in young people’s complicated lives was complex.

In thinking about the kind of study I wanted to conduct, I had also been impressed by Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (1977), an account of his experience as a teacher in a secondary school in the north of England, an environment with which I also identified. Here Willis explores how the cultures of masculinity operational in the school and the community ensure that working-class ‘lads’ will continue to get working-class jobs and inevitably be excluded from professional careers and social advancement. Once again, I was more interested in the girls in Willis’ story who play only a minor role (as the girlfriend or ‘the missus’). I wanted to know how they saw the culture in which they were embedded. What were options for them? And what role did the media play in thinking about their futures? After reading the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s influential but depressing essay ‘On Ideology’ (1971), I was alert to the ways in which the social formations of the family and the school, in conjunction with the ideological apparatus of the media, might function as forms of state control, limiting the ways in which people might think about themselves and the social structures in which they were located. I was, however, once again somewhat sceptical, based on my own experience of the world. As both a student and teacher, I was idealistic enough to believe in human agency, in the power of education and the media, to inform and to enable people to think differently and to bring about social change.

Back on the road across Melbourne, I’m therefore on a mission. My goal is to spend a year in a secondary school, to select a group of girls with whom I will work closely in order to understand the role of the media in their lives. I want to know what they are watching, what they are reading, what they are listening to and how this complex media landscape relates to how they see themselves and their future. In this endeavour, I am inspired not only by McRobbie, Garber and Willis but also by Hermann Bausinger’s call for an understanding of media practices in the conduct of everyday life as outlined in an article translated from the German and published in the academic journal Media, Culture & Society in 1984. In this essay, Bausinger describes two days in the life of Mr Meier and his attempts to follow the football while also negotiating his relationship with his wife and son. It’s a vivid portrait, revealing the intricacy of family relations and attachments to the media.

In his conclusion, Bausinger makes a number of key points:

• That a meaningful study of a person’s use of the media will inevitably involve the media ensemble with which they engage.
• That as a rule, the media are not used completely or with full concentration.
• That the media are an integral part of the ways in which everyday life is conducted.
• That the media are always consumed in a social context.
• And lastly, that media communication cannot be separated from direct personal communication.

While I found this an exciting set of propositions, it is not entirely clear from Bausinger’s essay exactly how one might go about conducting such a study. Bausinger has little to say about methodology, except to suggest that forms of empirical research in which qualitative methods, such as participant observation, introspections (my italics), depth interviews and case studies might be useful (1984, p. 347). In the end, he concludes, what is needed is a ‘bit of wild thinking to catch and describe this complex world in all its rational irrationality’ (Bausinger, 1984, p. 351).

As part of that ‘wild thinking’, I began by conceiving of the 22 girls who would participate in my study first and foremost as people rather than as a specific media audience for a specific media text.² While Nick Couldry will later call for a study of the media practices in the context of everyday life (2004) and Shaun Moores (2018) and others have advocated for a non-media centric approach to media research, I’m already there. In order to make sense of how the girls negotiate the media in their lives, I have decided to embrace a notion of the self and the concept of ‘a moral career’ borrowed from the work of the British sociologist Romano Harré (1979).

In Social Being, Harré suggests that all human beings, whatever their different social context, are in a continual process of managing their conduct in relation to the competing moral orders in their lives. Following Harré, I’m convinced that central to human agency is a person’s capacity to imagine different courses of action and how these might affect their future, even if such futures may not be acted upon. As Harré, suggests, this is a social theory that sheds light on the dialectic between individual experience and the soci...