Week 1 – Audiences as a Construct
Livingstone (2005) – Media Audiences, Interpreters, Users (F)
file:///C:/Users/manon/Documents/RUG/Master/Semester%201B/Conceptualising%20Audiences/
Literature/Week%201/Livingstone%20(2005).pdf
Introduction: What is the audience and why is it important?
- Although most people consider it desirable in practice to be part of the audience – believing
that citizens ‘should’ watch the news, that it’s wrong to ‘deprive’ a child of television, that
someone is ‘weird’ if they don’t follow the music scene, at the same time, people are
reluctant to acknowledge the implications of this ‘media-dependency’ for domestic practices,
social relationships, political participation, for their (our) very identity.
- Audiences are seen as mindless, ignorant, undiscriminating, defenceless, naïve, and so as
manipulated or exploited by the mass media. Although we, and our children, it may be
proclaimed, are discerning, sensible, critical members of the audience – other people and,
especially, other people’s children in the audience give cause for concern.
• This chapter takes exactly this ambivalence about the audience as its starting point.
It shows that throughout the history of the media – and the history of the audience –
the idea of the audience has been far from taken for granted.
- Rather, it has been subject to the competing claims of (at least) two dominant discourses,
one liberal, one critical.
• Liberal/pluralist discourse: locates the audience within the development of Western
industrialised society, arguing that the media must reach the citizens – in their role
as audiences – if they are to gain the information, understanding and shared cultural
values required to sustain the informed consent that underpins democratic
governance.
▪ Doubt: what happens when audiences do not act in a selective or rational
manner, or when the media don’t provide fair or balanced information?
▪ Selective audiences and limited effects
• Critical/radical discourse: positions audiences as consumers rather than citizens,
seeing them as the managed subject of powerful institutional interests, vulnerable to
political manipulation and commercial exploitation by the culture industries through
subtle and pervasive strategies of mass communication.
▪ Doubt: can the population be castigated so contemptuously for its
apparently naïve, pleasure-seeking, herd-like behaviour, and is there no
defence of the media?
▪ Manipulated audiences and strong effects
Moral panics, media effects and the audience research agenda
Popular anxieties about the media audience
- Not only are the questions about audiences wide-ranging but there are many policy makers,
commercial organisations and academic disciplines that have a stake in debating the power
and effects of the media.
- Historians of the media have pointed out that, typically as each new medium is introduced, a
surprisingly similar set of hopes and fears arise each time: moral panics
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, - At present, these ‘moral panics’ centre on the internet, with anxieties being expressed about
violent, stereotyped, commercially exploitative or pornographic content and about the
reinforcement of individualistic, lazy, prejudiced, uncritical or aggressive actions.
- (Drotner, 1992): each panic tends to follow a predictable path, starting with a 'pessimistic
elitism' associated with calls for technocratic and legalistic measures such as censorship or
legal age restrictions to minimise dangers and moving to an 'optimistic pluralism' associated
with a tolerance of audience diversity along with moral education or media literacy teaching
to optimise benefits.
- This does not mean, of course, that the concerns expressed in moral panics are necessarily
improper, though it does make them less ‘new’ than their proponents often suppose
- But often they are misguided, particularly when they seek to blame the media for the wider
social ills of society such as social unrest, crime, family breakdown or political apathy,
thereby displacing attention from alternative or radical solutions.
Taking the long view: active and passive audiences in historical perspective
- The idea of the audience is much older than often believed (stemming from TV and generally
the 20th century)
- BUT throughout most of history, the idea of the audience has meant a face-to-face audience
in the presence of a communicator or entertainer, whether at a political meeting, the theatre
or a concert.
- Denis McQuail (1997, p. 3) suggests that the same features which defined the classical Greco-
Roman audience still define audiences today:
• Planning and organization of viewing and listening, as well as of the performances
themselves
• Events with a public and “popular” character
• Secular (thus not religious) content of performance – for entertainment, education,
and vicarious emotional experiences
• Voluntary, individual acts of choice and attention
• Specialization of roles of authors, performers, and spectators
• Physical locatedness of performance and spectator experience
- The history of the audience, therefore, is one of historical continuities as well as
discontinuities
• Discontinuity: The innovation of the mass media was to eliminate the need for
physical colocation, for mass communication is communication at a distance,
institutionalising a crucial break between performer and spectator or, in today’s
terms, producer and audience.
- Butsch (2000) is at pains to stress some theoretical points also, particularly the notion that
audiences are institutionally planned for, and managed
• Audiences themselves know what is expected of them, and they develop habits or
conventions of behaviour which fit these expectations.
• The audience is discursively constructed within a strong moral framework highly
concerned with the consequences of the key break between producers and
audiences → It is this break, this gap, which holds the potential for things going
wrong – for messages being distorted, for audiences not paying proper attention, for
producers losing touch with their audience, in short, for the unintended
consequences of communication.
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,Twentieth century debates: oscillating between active and passive audiences
- Looking back over the history of media, and media research, it is evident that research is
strongly framed by the cultural and historical concerns of its time.
- Elihu Katz (1980) describes an oscillation between the two dominant views of the audience
identified earlier (liberal-critical), in accounting for the swings of the pendulum, Katz stresses
two mediating factors which stand between the media and their audience.
• Selectivity: based on uses and gratifications theory: not what the media do to
people but what people do with the media because, as research readily shows,
people are motivated, selected, active in their uses of the media + some argue that
people are selective also in their interpretation of the media (Hall, 1979), guided by
their prior knowledge as well as by the media text.
• Interpersonal relations: based on the two-step flow hypothesis; because people talk
to each other about the media, any media message must pass through the lens of
these conversations. Consequently, some people in a community – the ‘opinion
leaders’ – are influential in mediating the effect of the media themselves.
- Both of these factors led Katz and others to think that the audience is more active than
passive
- The influence of the media may also be expected to vary for particular segments of the
audience, for people vary in their prior knowledge and interests, and in their access to
alternative influences, including face-to-face communication + vulnerable audiences e.g.,
women and children
Setting the agenda: public concern and research on media effects
- The majority of public interest and public funding, especially in America, has concentrated
experimental research examining the short-term effects of media exposure on behaviours or
attitudes – and most of it has focused on the child audience + cognitive effects on adult
public opinion of political news + the reinforcing effect of media coverage on public attitudes
and stereotypes of women, ethnic groups, crime and so forth
- Each of these research traditions has produced roughly the same outcome: it seems that the
media can be shown, under specific circumstances, to have a variety of modest and
inconsistent effects on some segments of the population.
What are the effects of the media?
- The 'effects tradition' focuses predominantly but not exclusively on the effects of television
rather than other media, on effects on the child audience especially, on the effects of violent
or stereotyped programmes, and on effects on individuals rather than on groups, cultures or
institutions i.e. tests the idea that exposure to particular media content changes people's
behaviour or beliefs (while other research examines whether media reinforce existing
beliefs).
- Media effects researchers have argued that only in controlled experiments can causal
inferences be drawn concerning an observed correlation between media exposure and
behaviour
• People are randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions, so that any
third causes that matter under everyday circumstances are neutralised, for they
would apply equally to experimental and control groups.
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, • The independent variable (the hypothesised cause – the media exposure) precedes
the dependent variable (the hypothesised effect – the measured behaviour), so that
the direction of causality within the experimental setting is established.
- However, none of this [controlled experiments] need imply, and it certainly does not show,
that beliefs or behaviours learned under experimental conditions can be generalized to
viewers’ ordinary lives
• Problematically, results which are relatively consistent under experimental
conditions are poorly replicated under naturalistic or everyday conditions. This has
led critics to argue that the experiment represents such an unusual situation that the
results cannot be generalised
Making sense of television: texts, audiences, meanings
From media effects to audience reception
- Given that the media are thoroughly embedded in our lives, a major source of images and
information, especially of social and political phenomena beyond our daily experience, how
could we conclude that they have no effect on how we think or act?
- Media researchers have always known that context matters, so that different groups in the
audience, for various reasons, interpret media differently, making diverse uses of its content.
- Given both the difficulties of establishing direct media effects and the evidence for indirect
or contingent effects of the media, a different approach to audiences is warranted.
- Instead of assuming that all members of the audience are influenced by media messages in
the same way, we need an approach which assumes that
• Audiences are plural, diverse, variable
• The meanings of media texts are a matter of interpretation
• The consequences of media ‘exposure’ or use depend on the social context
Contrasting models of the communication process
- Questions about audiences should be connected to questions about media institutions
(broadcasters, producers, regulators, advertisers) and about media forms (technologies,
channels, genres, contents) [to be able to ask about media power]
- Liberal-pluralist tradition: asserts a linear communication process, following from Harold
Lasswell’s (1948) influential challenge to early communication research, namely to discover
‘who says what in which channel to whom and with what effect’
• Sender → message → receiver
• Many researchers acknowledge the contingent and contextual factors which
complicate the process, framing these as intervening variables in the same linear
process, albeit now a more indirect one: sender → (other factors) → message →
(other factors) → receiver
▪ The number of stages in the communication process, and the number of
factors which must be examined, is increased.
• It makes it harder to see that audiences also have intentions or – better – that they
too are socially located, motivated and selective in their approach to (rather than
their ‘response’ to) the media + It makes it particularly hard to see how audiences
play an interpretative role in co-constructing the meanings of media messages.
- The critiques levelled at this model stimulated the development of an alternative model e.g.
Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding
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