Rethinking the Media Audience

The New Agenda

Pertti Alasuutari

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780761950714, 9780761950707
• eBook ISBN: 9781446235775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Pertti Alasuutari provides a state-of-the-art summary of the field of audience research. With contributions from Ann Gray, Joke Hermes, John Tulloch and David Morley, a case is presented for a new agenda to account for the role of the media in everyday life.

PART I

THE SHAPE OF AUDIENCE RESEARCH

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1

INTRODUCTION

Three Phases of Reception Studies

Pertti Alasuutari

The key idea of this book is to argue that a ‘third generation’ of reception studies and audience ethnography is presently taking shape and will establish itself in the near future. However, the division of the development of reception studies and audience research into three ‘generations’ outlined in this introductory chapter must not be taken matter-of-factly. Rather,. the outline of the suggested division should be seen as a way of pointing out an emergent trend, a direction audience research could take. There are elements in the present research that already lead the way to the new agenda that future research should, in my view, address, but a solid body of research tackling the new field of research is yet to be done. I hope that with the book at hand we can help to address the new questions and outline the basic dimensions of the new field.

The role of this book, in other words, is to act as a midwife: to suggest a ‘story line’ in cultural media research, a way to read its history in such a way that it points to the emergent trend outlined here and illustrated, developed and discussed in the chapters of this book. This of course means that the history of the ‘three generations’ told here is a retrospective view, a history of the present (as Foucault says histories always are) or of an anticipated future. Because media audience and reception research has been a rich and many-faceted field, there would be many other ways to tell its history. Other stories would take up other aspects in the development of the field, and would thus imply different worthwhile future trends. The future is always open, and there will most probably be several future trends in the field. As long as future developments are solutions to problems perceived in past and present research, they will affect history-writing.

The ‘three generations’ talked about here must be understood metaphorically also in the sense that the tradition of cultural media research is at most a loose ‘school’ and has throughout the years since its inception incorporated research undertaken in other fields as influential parts of the ‘tradition’. In that sense, its histories can only be told retrospectively, from the viewpoint of the present and future rather than the perspective of the motives of the researchers counted as part of that ‘tradition’. The influences of James Lull’s (1980a, 1980b) and Janice Radway’s (1984) studies serve as good examples of this.

To recapitulate, the history of cultural media research told here is not the only possible line of development that could be discerned in the field. However, that does not mean that it is totally unsubstantiated. Instead, I argue that many researchers in the field perceive the history in the way it is outlined here. The ‘inscribed audience’ trend of media research is taking its shape. To draw an outline of the emergent agenda, of the questions addressed within it, let us first discuss the three phases of cultural media research.

The first generation: reception research

The birth of reception studies in mass communication research is typically dated back to Stuart Hall’s (1974) Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, which in its earliest version came out as a ‘Stencilled Occasional Paper,’ No. 7 in the Media Series of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. What became known as reception research in media studies was from the very beginning associated with cultural studies and the Birmingham Centre, although it has later been pointed out that reception theory also has other roots. First, in a sense it carried on and readdressed the themes already raised in what was known as the ‘uses and gratifications’ paradigm. Second, reception studies in mass communication research was historically preceded and later influenced by German reception theory developed in late 1960s literary criticism.¹

Despite other roots and influences, Hall’s encoding/decoding article laid the foundation for and articulated the problems to be addressed in the ‘reception paradigm’ of what became known as ‘media studies’. Media studies was understood as a branch of the broader intellectual movement called cultural studies. Hall’s article really presents a fairly simple model, but it was partly just because of its elegant simplicity that it gained a reputation as a key text.

When compared to earlier communication models (e.g. Gerbner, 1956; Lasswell, 1948; Shannon and Weaver, 1963), Hall’s encoding/decoding model is actually not a very radical change. Like the older models, it approaches (mass) communication as a process whereby certain messages are sent and then received with certain effects. For instance, it does not approach television and other mass media in themselves as part of modern society and its structures, and neither does it address the fact that the media are constitutive of or at least affect the communicated events. However, the reception paradigm Hall promoted did involve a shift from a technical to a semiotic approach to messages. A message was no longer understood as some kind of a package or a ball that the sender throws to the receiver. Instead, the idea that a message is encoded by a programme producer and then decoded (and made sense of) by the receivers means that the sent and received messages are not necessarily identical, and different audiences may also decode a programme differently. Hall does not altogether dismiss the assumption that a message may have an effect, but the semiotic framework he introduces means that one moves away from a behaviouristic stimulus–response model to an interpretive framework, where all effects depend on an interpretation of media messages.

At a certain point [. . .] the broadcasting structures must yield an encoded message in the form of a meaningful discourse. The institution–societal relations of production must pass into and through the modes of a language for its products to be ‘realized’. This initiates a further differentiated moment, in which the formal rules of discourse and language operate. Before this message can have an ‘effect’ (however defined), or satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded. It is this set of de-coded meanings which ‘have an effect’, influence, entertain, instruct or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioural consequences. (Hall, 1974: 3)

With this linguistic or semiotic turn that Hall proposes, the arguments about effects are effectively swallowed up or at least made dependent upon people’s interpretations or thought processes. This turn could have led directly to a kind of radical phenomenology where everything – including, say, the ‘structures of production’ Hall talks about – is conceived as a social and linguistic construct. Instead of such a big leap, Hall concentrates on applying the semiotic perspective to what he calls the ‘determinate moments’ of first ‘encoding’ and then ‘decoding’.

In the moment when the historical event passes under the sign of language, it is subject to all the complex ‘rules’ by which language signifies. To put it paradoxically, the event must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event. In that moment, the formal sub-rules of language are ‘in dominance’, without, of course, subordinating out of existence the historical event so signified, or the historical consequences of the event having been signified in this way. (Hall, 1974: 2)

Questions about the role of language and signification are a can of worms in social sciences. Keeping the can firmly closed leads to a mechanistic and simplistic understanding of social phenomena, but once you open it there is the danger that the worms will eat the whole theoretical structure and notion of society. Hall’s solution to just peek into the can is clever: he is able to take the role of rhetoric into account to some extent, but otherwise – for instance as far as his notion of social structures is concerned – he sticks to a realistic conception of language.

However, this solution led to an obsession with ‘determinate moments’, especially the moment of ‘decoding’, in reception research. From the perspective of the encoding/decoding model it appears that the ideological effects of programming are dependent on the particular strategic moment when the encoded media message enters the brain of an individual viewer.

Hall (1974) suggests that there are four ‘ideal-type’ positions from which decodings of mass communication by the audience can be made: within the dominant or hegemonic code the connotative level of the messages is decoded in terms of the dominant of preferred meanings; the professional code is what the professional broadcasters employ when transmitting a message which has already been signified in a hegemonic manner; the negotiated code contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements; and finally the oppositional code is the position where a viewer perfectly understands both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but determines to decode the message ‘in a globally contrary way’.

The encoding/decoding model suggested by Hall created a series of empirical studies about the reception of television programmes by different audiences, the first one of which was David Morley’s The Nationwide Audience (1980).² By selecting different groups of people and showing them the Nationwide public affairs television programme, Morley could more or less confirm and develop Hall’s idea about the four codes discussed above. For instance, the art students whose reception of the programme Morley studied more or less represented the ‘professional code’. An innovative, schematic theory had led to the beginning of an empirical project to be carried on by an enthusiastic group of new researchers.

The second generation: audience ethnography

Morley’s seminal study was soon followed by studies about the reception of, especially, romantic serials (Ang, 1985; Hobson, 1982; Katz and Liebes, 1984; Liebes, 1984; Liebes and Katz, 1990). What became known as qualitative audience reception studies meant that one analyses a programme and studies its reception among a particular audience by conducting ‘in-depth’ interviews of its viewers. However, along with an increasing number of empirical reception studies, there occurred a series of gradual shifts in the whole reception paradigm, so that we could say that a new audience ethnography paradigm was created.

First, there was a move away from an interest in conventional politics to identity politics, particularly to questions about gender. This can be seen, for instance, in the fact that a slackening interest in the reception of public affairs programmes was balanced out by a growing interest in fictional programmes, particularly romantic serials. These studies concentrated on the politics of gender, on the discourses within which gender is dealt with in the programmes, and how women viewers interpret and make use of the offered readings against the background of their everyday life and experiences. As Ann Gray points out in Chapter 2, feminist scholarship especially has had an important role here in breaking new ground and addressing new questions in reception research.

Second, at the expense of a diminishing interest in programme contents, much more emphasis was laid on the functions of the medium, as is the case with, for instance, James Lull’s (1980a, 1980b) analyses of the social uses of television or David Morley’s Family Television (1986). The growing interest in the functions of television in the family could be seen partly as a rebirth of the older American uses and gratifications paradigm. However, unlike the old paradigm, in the new audience ethnography one focuses on television as a social resource for conversation or on the way in which television use reflects and reproduces (gendered) relations of power in family life. A large project about the role of information and communication technologies in the home also reflected the increased interest in the social uses of television and other media (Silverstone, 1991; Silverstone et al. 1991).

Third, even when the studies of this second generation dealt with a particular programme or serial, researchers started to look at reception from the audience’s end of the chain. One does not try to explain a reception of a programme by probing into an ‘interpretive community’ (Fish, 1979). Instead, one studies the everyday life of a group, and relates the use of (a reception of) a programme or a medium to it. One studies the role of the media in everyday life, not the impact (or meaning) of everyday life on the reception of a programme (e.g. Gray, 1992; Hermes, 1995).

People representing the second generation of reception studies like to emphasize that they are doing or that one should do proper ethnographic case studies of ‘interpretive communities’. One even talks about an ‘ethnographic turn’ quite comparable to the previous ‘linguistic turn’. Like classic anthropologists such as Malinowski (1961 [1922]), it has been argued that a proper ethnographic study in audience ethnography entails at least several months’ stay in the ‘field’ (Drotner, 1992) – a demand which, strangely enough, is presented at a time when anthropologists and qualitative sociologists are increasingly questioning the whole notion of a ‘field’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997). On the other hand, what is called an ‘ethnographic study’ often simply amounts to qualitative ‘in-depth’ interviews of a group of people, which is of course quite understandable as one bears in mind that most television or video viewing takes place in very small and private settings. There are restrictions to an ethnographer’s possibilities of doing a long-term participant observation study in a home.

The third generation: a constructionist view

The starting point for the new agenda of cultural audience studies could be dated back to the late 1980s, when a number of writers began to question and discuss the premises of audience ethnography (Allor, 1988; Ang, 1989, 1990; Fiske, 1988, 1990; Grossberg, 1988; Lull, 1988; Radway, 1988). For instance Allor (1988), Grossberg (1988) and Radway (1988) emphasized that there isn’t really such a thing as the ‘audience’ out there; one must bear in mind that audience is, most of all, a discursive construct produced by a particular analytic gaze. As Grossberg puts it, ‘media audiences are shifting constellations, located within varying multiple discourses which are never entirely outside of the media discourse themselves’ (1988: 386). Radway (1988) emphasized that, instead of one particular circuit of producer, text and audience, people’s daily lives must be the point of departure and object of research. Traditional ethnography was heavily criticized. On the other hand, other researchers, such as Lull (1988), were concerned with a development where some cultural...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: The Shape of Audience Research
• Part II: The New Agenda: The Inscription of Audiences
• Index