ARTICLES CONCEPTUALIZING
AUDIENCES
WEEK 1: AUDIENCES AS A CONSTRUCT: MASS, CONSUMER, USER
LIVINGSTONE, 2005. MEDIA AUDIENCES, INTERPRETERS AND USERS.
There are two competing claims about audience:
1. Liberal discourse (pluralist)
selective audiences and limited effects. Liberal wants to know how to use media to appeal to the
public
the audience is in the development of Western industrialized society, arguing that the media must
reach the citizens if they are to gain the information, understanding and shared cultural values
required to sustain the informed consent of that underpins democratic governance. But audiences
also are unreliable: what happens when audiences do not act in a selective or rational manner?
2. Critical discourse (radical)
manipulated audiences and strong effects. Critics fear that the media have considerable power over
their audiences.
this unreliability is the starting point for the critical discourse. Audiences are consumers rather than
citizens. They are the subject of powerful institutional interests, vulnerable political manipulation and
commercial exploitation by the culture industries through subtle and pervasive strategies of mass
communication. The doubt here: is the population really so pleasure-seeking, with herd-like behaviour
and there is no defence of the media?
Moral panics are the fears that rise with the introduction of each new medium, such as violent or pornographic
content about internet now, and tv when it was introduced. This is because we undergo a ‘historical amnesia’
about previous panics. Each panic has the same path: it starts with a pessimistic elitism and goes then to an
optimistic pluralism.
Cohen argues that moral attacks on the media rest on social inequalities and so should be deconstructed and
resisted rather than taken as the starting point for research investigation.
McQuail argues that the features for audiences now are the same as the features for audience in the Roman
times:
- Planning and organizing of viewing and listening, as well as the performances themselves.
- Events with a public and popular character
- Secular 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
Butsch: audiences are institutionally planned for, and managed. Audiences know that is expected of them, and
they develop habits or conventions which fit these expectations.
There are two mediating factors which stand between the media and their audience (Katz):
1. Selectivity
what people do with the media. Research shows that people are motivated, selected, active in their
, use of the media. Others take this further, arguing that people are selective also in their interpretation
of the media, guided by their prior knowledge as well as by the media text.
2. Interpersonal relations
because people talk to each other about the media, any media message must pass through the lens of
these conversations. Some people in a community (the opinion leaders) are influential in mediating
the effect of the media themselves.
This shows Katz that the audience is active > passive, but neither is effective.
Media can be shown to have a variety of modest and inconsistent effects on some segments of the population.
Only in controlled experiments, one can research media effects. There are 2 crucial features to this:
- Random assignment
- The independent variable precedes the dependent variable
Reviews of the literature agree that viewers learn both pro-social and anti-social attitudes and behaviour from
television portrayals
Seiter argues that a cultural approach is better than an experimental in media research because
- Ethnographic research offers a very different methodology from the laboratory experiment
- Only through ethnographic research can key features of the context of media use emerge
- Interpreting these key contextual features leads to very different research conclusions
We need an approach that assumes that: (1) audiences are plural, diverse and variable, (2) the meanings of
media texts are a matter of interpretation
The consequences of media exposure or use depend on the social context
Media institutions: broadcasters, producers, regulators, advertisers
Media forms: technologies, channels, genres, contents
There are two approaches to the relationship between production and audience:
1. Liberal-pluralist approach
there is a linear communication process to discover who says what in which channel to whom and
with what effect. The audience is at the end and thus is it easy to ask what the effect on an audience
is. It makes it particularly hard to see how audiences play an interpretative role in co-constructing the
meanings of media messages.
sender -> message -> receiver
but there is not empirical support for this, and thus it is now:
sender -> (other factors) -> message -> (other factors) -> receiver
2. Encoding-decoding model
it proposes a cyclic rather than linear view of communication and centres on processes rather than the
actors. Sender = encoder, receiver = decoder.
Audiences are embedded in a social context which shapes their engagement with media and that they
engage in an active task of interpreting or decoding media messages.
The syntagmatic dimension of the text is the sequence of events as they unfold.
The paradigmatic dimension is the set of possibilities from which any particular character, event or outcome is
selected.
Audiences are written into media texts themselves.
, Audiences may actively resist dominant media messages. Local meanings are so often made within and against
the symbolic resources provided by global media networks (Morley). Reception analysis offers insights into the
interpretive process and everyday context of media use, where audiences rearticulate and enact the meanings
of mas communication. The life of signs within modern society is in large measure an accomplishment of the
audience (Jensen).
Audience interpretations depend on viewers socio-economic position, gender, ethnicity, etc.
Hall proposes a division of audience reception: dominant, negotiated and oppositional positions.
There are three arguments for the active engagement of audiences with the mass media:
1. Audiences must interpret what they see even to construct (or decode) the message as meaningful and
orderly, however routine this interpretation may be.
2. The experience of viewing is socially and culturally located, so that viewers everyday concerns,
experiences and knowledge become a resource for the interpretative process of viewing
3. Audiences diverge in their interpretations, generating different readings of the same media text. These
differences may be anticipated by an open text, though at other times they are readings against the
grain of a closed text.
Audience researchers have come to agree on several points:
- One should not make assumptions about how audiences will perceive a text from knowledge of the
text alone, and thus you should combine the studies of production, text and audience
- One cannot talk of the audience in the singular meaning or impact of particular media contents:
audiences must always be located within specific everyday social contexts
- Media power is a 2way interactive process
There is a debate about the theoretical and empirical claims of reception studies:
- Identifying the implied reader
- The limits of audience activity
- The problem of contextualization
- Competing theories
- The end of the audience
With new media, audience may not be the right word anymore. Audience refers to someone passive. We could
say user, but this is more individualistic and instrumental, losing the idea of a collectivist which is central to the
audience. There are three broad phases in audience history:
- The simple audience
face to face, direct communication, in public (e.g. theatre)
- The mass audience
highly mediated, spatially dispersed, often in private (e.g. newspaper readership)
- The diffused audience
strongly dispersed and fragmented, yet at the same time embedded in or fused with all aspects of
daily life, characterised by routine and casual inattention and yet always present, as in the always on
internet.
Thus, instead of coming up with a new term for audience, we just add to it.
There are several consequences of the transformation of media:
