Audience Studies

A Japanese Perspective

Toshie Takahashi

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135227791
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Étude des média

This book theorizes the role of media and ICT in today's media-rich global environment and introduces a new argument of audience complexity in an accessible and lively fashion. Based on an ethnography of Japanese engagement with media and ICT in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, Takahashi offers a non-Western case study of some of the world's most advanced ICT users. Integrating non-Western and Western traditions in the social sciences, the book presents a productive new framework for understanding the complex, diverse, and dynamic nature of media audiences in the context of globalization and social change brought on by new media and information technologies. A significant contribution to the 'internationalisation' of media studies movement now underway, the book will demonstrate (1) the multiple dimensions of audience engagement; (2) the transformation of the notion of uchi (Japanese social groups) in a media-rich environment; and (3) the role of media and ICT in the process of self-creation. The study considers the future of a Japanese society caught in the currents of globalization and contemporary debates of universalism and cultural specificity, while at the same time offering a view of globalization from a Japanese perspective.

1
Audience Activity, Everyday Life and Complexity

INTRODUCTION

This chapter sets out the theoretical framework for understanding the complexity and dynamism of audiences in today’s global, rich media environment. At the heart of audience research have lain the most pressing sociological concerns, namely, questions about the relationship between individuals and society. Within audience research these questions have been more specifically concerned with establishing the nature of the power relations between media institutions and audiences. Parents worry about the impact of new media on their children; some scholars argue that audiences gain power through new interactive media while others are interested in the corresponding changes in everyday life accompanying the expansion of the global media environment.

I argue that audience research has too often been understood by employing a dichotomy between active and passive portrayals of the audience, and that the employment of such a dichotomy has led to an oversimplified view of the diversity of both audience research and the real nature of audiences. This chapter outlines a theoretical framework to analyse the complex and diverse ways in which audiences engage with media in the context of rapid social changes and globalisation. By using the concepts of both ‘audience engagement’ and ‘self-creation’, I show the possibilities of the convergence of a variety of active audience studies in regard to the paradigm of everyday life and complexity, in order to understand the dynamism of audiences and the complex interactions between individuals and social and cultural structures.

I start with a survey of the main branches of active audience research coming out of both Western countries and Japan, focusing on the concept of audience activity. Through analysis of active audience studies I then move to the question of their convergence and thereby introduce my concept of ‘audience engagement’. I propose that this concept is most appropriately investigated from the paradigms of ‘everyday life’ and ‘complexity’ and, exploring various scholars’ concepts of self-formation in a framework of micro- and macro-phenomena, describe what such an investigation will look like in considering audiences, social groups and ‘cultures’.

ACTIVE AUDIENCE THEORIES

How can the activities and understandings of the audience be conceptualised in the currently rich media environment? Much research in media studies, in recent decades, approaches this question in terms of the concept of ‘audience activity’. In order, therefore, to find a definition of ‘audience activity’, I begin by presenting the tradition of media audience theory. This reveals a tremendous variety of definitions of audience activity stemming from different research traditions and resulting in a range of research aims, questions, historical, social, political and cultural contexts and normative conceptions of the audience. Thus a single definition of audience activity cannot easily be found. In order to get a workable definition of audience activity a convergence of these diverse and divergent audience theories must be orchestrated.

In the following section, in order to get such a definition of ‘audience activity’, I look at the main bodies of literature within active audience research. I focus mainly on three major active audience approaches in media audience studies, namely (a) uses and gratifications studies within American communication studies, (b) audience reception studies within both British cultural studies and European reception theory and (c) the Joho Kodo (information behaviour) studies of Japanese Joho Shakai (information society) theory.

Uses and Gratifications Studies within American Communication Studies

Within American communication studies, audience activity has been portrayed as filtering the impact of the mass media upon its audiences. As a barrier against the influence of the media, such activity has usually been seen as evidence for limited media effects. Here the concept of audience activity is conceived of as consisting either in selectivity with respect to what audiences choose to view or in interpersonal relationships which mediate viewing. The concept of selectivity has been developed in uses and gratifications studies while the concept of interpersonal networks was proposed within the theory of the diffusion of innovation (cf. Katz, 1980). This latter theory developed from the two-step flow model of media messages with its concept of “opinion leaders” (cf. Lazarsfeld and Stanton, 1944; Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955). Rogers’s (1982, 1986) convergence model of communication, discussed later in this chapter, was a further development in this line. Despite severe criticism over the last half century, ever since gratifications studies emerged in the 1940s, uses and gratifications studies have represented the main body of traditional or administrative research into audience activity.

While effects theories look at what the media do to people, uses and gratifications studies look at what people do with the media (Katz, 1959). Thus uses and gratifications studies have investigated the diversity of uses media have been put to in terms of the gratification of people’s needs. The key idea has been that the media are a source of pleasure and/or information which are ritually or instrumentally used by audiences for purposes such as diversion, personal relation, self-identification and surveillance (McQuail et al., 1972). Effects theories and uses and gratifications studies are regarded, for obvious reasons, as representing different and opposing paradigms, but I will show why I think they share many significant assumptions. I will first look at the historical emergence of these two bodies of research.

Early Uses and Gratifications Studies and Effects Studies

The first uses and gratifications study was ‘Professor Quiz: A Gratification Study’ conducted by Herzog (1940) with the help of Hadley Cantril, one of the leading scholars in studies of propaganda (Cantril, 1965). Cantril presented a conception of the “atomised audience” of radio (Cantril and Allport, 1935) and supported the model of powerful effects (cf. Cantril, 1940). During the early stages of radio it was intended as a tool to educate people who did not read the newspaper (Lazarsfeld, 1940). However, the results of radio research showed that most serious radio programmes did not reach their target audience. Despite classification as entertainment programmes, it was the serial dramas and quiz programmes that people who did not read newspapers considered to be sources of information from which to learn, rather than those programmes regarded by educators to be educational. Hence, radio researchers became interested in investigating why serial dramas and quiz programmes appealed to mass audiences, combining gratifications studies with content analysis and a study of the characteristics of the listeners. The study of Professor Quiz revealed four general appeals: the competitive appeal, the educational appeal, the self-rating appeal and the sporting appeal, together with a variety of gratifications that are fulfilled by listening to Professor Quiz. However, Herzog (1940) warned:

the information [the listener] seeks is disjointed, unrelated, unsystematic. It is preferred so because he does not know how to organize information and does not want to undergo the intellectual discipline necessary to learn how. “Education” for him is rationalized to mean, then, the passive absorption of anything which happens to be presented. (My italics, p. 92)

Here, while Herzog’s study exists within a body of research often considered to portray the audience as active, her conception of the audience is, rather, passive. Similarly, Lazarsfeld’s (1940) study of ‘audience building’, as developed in uses and gratifications studies such as Herzog’s (1940) and Suchman’s (1941), examined the idea of inducing a mass audience to listen to serious programmes so as to educate them with their content. The attempt at audience building also tended to regard audiences as passive and malleable, assuming that audiences could be controlled and influenced to the extent that they would adopt certain beliefs, in this case, educated beliefs about the world and its affairs.

The 1940s are seen as ‘the golden age of radio research’, especially because the tradition of media audience research was becoming much more firmly established at this time in American communication studies. A variety of uses and gratifications studies were conducted following Lazarsfeld’s Radio and the Printed Page. Next were Lazarsfeld and Stanton’s (1949) Communication Research 1948–1949, Waples and others’ (1940) What Reading Does to People and Warner and Henry’s (1948) ‘The Radio Daytime Serial: A Symbolic Analysis’. These and other uses and gratifications studies are usually understood as opposing effects research. However, it seems to me that the 1940s uses and gratifications studies could perhaps be seen as fitting with the effects tradition. Some uses and gratifications studies and effects research share not only similar conceptions of the audience (as somewhat passive), but also similar aims of research (to establish and understand media effects), purposes of research (administrative) and concepts about the audience (audience member’s individual predispositions). While uses and gratifications studies established that audiences use the media in a variety of ways that the media owners had not intended and that people interpret messages from within their own social context (cf. Kaufman, 1944), the purpose of such research was to understand people’s interpretations and uses of media in order to find ways to educate them using the media. In other words, underlying this research aim was the assumption that people can be affected by the media.

In the 1950s, as television developed in Western countries, people became increasingly concerned with the powerful and undesirable influence of the media on children. Television programmes were held to lead to violence, juvenile delinquency, moral permissiveness and other social problems. In the history of American mass communication studies, if the 1940s is the ‘golden age of radio research’, the 1950s can be seen as the beginning of television research, in response to social demand. In the 1950s, many studies of television effects were conducted. At the same time, what are now referred to as 1950s uses and gratifications studies looked not only at media influence on children but at children’s media use from both psychological and sociological points of view. These studies were “not designed primarily to study gratifications but rather the relationship between peer and familial integration and media use” (Rosengren, 1985, p. 13). Audience activity in the 1950s uses and gratifications studies was conceived of as including three activities derived from a variety of needs (cf. Riley and Riley, 1951; Maccoby, 1954; Schramm et al., 1961). These activities were: selectivity (selecting the medium, for example, movies or television, choosing what to watch on television); use (children use television for entertainment, escape, getting information and for social purposes, for example, children’s make-believe games are based around television characters); and interpretation (children interpret the same television character differently depending on their reference groups, for example, children who are members of social groups interpret the main character of a Western television programme for its social utility by incorporating it into their play, while solitary children interpret the same television character as having no relation to their everyday lives). Schramm and others (1961) turned the idea of television acting upon children around and investigated not “what television does to children” but “what children do with television” (p. 169), that is, how children use the same television content in different ways. The 1950s uses and gratifications studies claimed that, due to viewers being “social beings”, media effects are alternatively reinforced or diminished depending on the specific social situation of the viewer. Uses and gratifications studies of the 1950s marked an important break from earlier research insofar as while the 1940s research approached the viewer in terms of his or her individual psychology, the 1950s research treated the viewer from a social perspective, that is, as “a persona interacting with others, participating in cooperative social activities” (Friedson, 1953, p. 230). “The opinion of an individual is a function of his group affiliations” (Riley and Riley, 1951, p. 445). The 1950s uses and gratifications studies are generally seen as belonging to active audience theory. While some scholars emphasised the activity of the audience, they were basically concerned with establishing how different social situations of audiences’ determine different degrees of media influence. Thus, at this early stage of the uses and gratifications approach activity of the audience was not considered to exclude the possibility of effects but rather as concretising effects.

Attempts at Theoretical Unification and Criticism

The body of research called “uses and gratifications” studies emerged as an attempt to save media audience studies. Katz (1959) saw Berelson’s (1959) pessimistic perspective of communication research, that it was “dead or dying”, as applying not to media audience studies in general but only to ‘persuasive studies’—those concerned with the media’s capacity to persuade people—and thus came up with an alternative. Katz integrated the various gratification studies of the 1940s and “children and mass media use” of the 1950s, named them “the functional approach to the media”, or “the uses and gratifications approach” (Katz, 1959, p. 2), and emphasised its importance for the future of audience research. Soon after, uses and gratifications theorists offered a counter-argument to the critique of popular culture which had disparagingly labeled media use as escapism (cf. Katz and Foulkes, 1962; Blumler, 1964; McQuail et al., 1972). Katz and Foulkes (1962) responded by insisting that, even if audiences viewed the same programme, each audience member could use that programme differently, therefore its effects could be different for different people. For example, programmes which are classified as ‘escapist’ can be used for purposes other than escape, and, conversely, programmes which are not seen as ‘escapist’ can be used for the purposes of escape. “It is very difficult to infer uses, or effects, from content” (Katz and Foulkes, 1962, p. 383).

Using quantitative research methods, various researchers developed typologies of gratifications (Blumler and McQuail, 1969; McQuail et al., 1972; Katz et al., 1973; Rosengren and Windahl, 1972) and uses and gratifications studies have become a part of the mainstream in America, Britain, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Israel and elsewhere. Katz and others, in their 1974 study, identified the basic assumptions of this now mainstream approach (Katz et al., 1974).

In the 1970s, the uses and gratifications approach was criticised severely, particularly for its functionalism and also for its theoretical problems. Various aspects of the approach came under attack, such as its mentalism (its reliance on mental states and mental processes, the existence and importance of which are difficult to assess), its individualism (the fact that it deals with processes inside the individual’s head and not social processes), its empiricism (Elliott criticises both its methodology and its lack of foundational social theory) and its static-abstraction (that is, its method isolates the subjects from their social situation thus isolating the mass communication process from other social processes). This latter problem of abstraction leads to the theory having low explanatory power, that is, its ability to explain the real social process of mass communication is weak (Elliott, 1974).

For Elliott and other critical scholars, people cannot be abstracted from their social structures in this manner. Rather, the relationship between audiences and the media must be regarded as a relationship between two socially embedded phenomena and studied as such. Elliott thinks uses and gratifications studies paint a too opti...