MEDIA/SOCIETY
Study Guide
CHAPTER EIGHT: Active Audiences and the Construction of Meaning
Purpose and Goals
This chapter is intended to explore the ways that audiences interact with and make use of mass media. The chapter focuses on various forms of audience activity, with a particular emphasis on the ways that audiences interpret media messages. In accordance with our sociological approach, the chapter examines both the interpretive activity of audiences and the ways that social factors shape the discursive resources available to audiences in different social locations. The chapter also explores the pleasures of media consumption and considers the possibility that audiences can "resist" dominant meanings in mass media.
Chapter Outline
The Active Audience
Interpretation
The Social Context of Interpretation
Collective Action
Meanings: Agency and Structure
Agency and Polysemy
Structure and Interpretive Constraint
Decoding Media and Social Position
Class and Nationwide
Gender, Class, and Television
Race, News, and Meaning Making
International Readings of American Television
The Social Context of Media Use
Romance Novels and the Act of Reading
Watching Television With the Family
Active Audiences and Interpretive “Resistance”
Interpretive Resistance and Feminist Politics
Resistance and Identity
The Pleasures of Media
Pleasure and Fantasy
Celebrity Games
Pleasure and Resistance
Key Themes
- Audiences are active, not passive, in their relationship to media.
- Different audiences, drawing upon different interpretive frameworks, can construct different meanings from the same media text; media texts are at least partially open to such different readings.
- Social structure shapes the distribution of cultural resources that audiences use to interpret media texts.
- The social context in which we use media helps to constitute the meaning of those media.
- Audiences can produce oppositional readings of media texts; when coupled with collective activity in the social world, this "oppositional decoding" is sometimes defined as a form of "resistance."
- Media consumption is a source of pleasure for many audience members; how and why we enjoy media needs to be part of our explanation of the role of media in society.
Key Concepts and Terms
Active Audience: intelligent, autonomous readers of media who interpret meaning of texts.
Interpretation: the act of interpreting, explaining or elucidating the meaning of a creative or artistic work.
Collective Action: a group of people engaged in creating social change, usually in the form of protests, boycotts, marches, strikes, etc.
Polysemy: the notion of multiple meaning in media texts
Openness: media texts have this quality in their structure, making possible many different meanings.
Excess of Meaning: term associated with John Fiske; texts have many pieces of information in them, more than is needed to reach the dominant interpretation.
Reading Against the Grain: when audiences interpret texts in ways that defy the dominant reading.
Interpretive Free Agents: the notion that audiences could make an unlimited number of meanings from a text.
Preferred Reading: some meanings are easier to construct than others because they draw on widely shared values and assumptions.
Encoding-Decoding: term associated with Stuart Hall, highlights both how messages are constructed and their interpretations by audiences.
Dominant Meaning: the interpretation that will most likely follow from a decoding, based on dominant assumptions ingrained in social life.
Oppositional Reading: when audiences draw on other resources to construct meanings that oppose the dominant or preferred readings.
Discursive Resources: cultural tools, such as language and concepts, associated with a particular subculture or political perspective.
Focus Group: social scientific research method, often used on audience members, where a group are interviewed at the same time about their attitudes.
Lowbrow: opposite of highbrow, derogatory term associated with lower classes referring to tastes in mass or popular culture.
Interpretive Community: texts are interpreted in groups, and cannot be understood outside of cultural assumptions about what they should mean.
Semiological Guerillas: audience members who fight the daily war against the symbolic power of the media industry.
Game Players: term associated with Josh Gamson; audience members who neither embrace the reality of celebrity nor see it as simple artifice, but who adopt a playful attitude toward world of celebrity.
Essay or Discussion Questions
•What does it mean that audience members are "active" readers? What kind of activities do they participate in?
•How does class influence how one interprets television? How does it impact the degree of "realism" one sees?
•Using Liebes and Katz's study of the television program Dallas, discuss how one's culture can influence one's interpretation of media. What does this suggest about the meaning of mass media images?
•What does Radway mean by the act of reading ? Why does she distinguish between the act of reading and the texts of romance novels?
•What does it mean that individuals create "oppositional" readings of media texts? What are they "resisting"? What are the social consequences of "oppositional" readings?
•What is the role of pleasure in media use? How and why should media researchers incorporate pleasure into our understanding of media?
•What are the ways in which media texts are "encoded and decoded"? What tools help individuals to decode media texts? What (if any) are the constraints on decoding media texts?