The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Active Audience Theory - Essay Example

Topic:  In what sense are media audiences (a) active and (b) powerful? Discuss with reference to the strengths and weaknesses of active audience theory. I. Media Audiences, Who Are They? In order to understand how powerful and active the media audience is, we must first take a closer look of the meaning of the word ‘audience’. The word ‘audience’ collectively means the ‘receivers’ based on the explanation of the mass communication process. Audiences are both a product of social context (which leads to shared cultural interests, understandings and information needs) and a response to a particular pattern of media provision. Thus, an audience can be defined in overlapping ways: a) by place, b) by people, c) by type of medium or channel, d) by content of its messages (e.g. genre, subject matter, style), e) by time (e.g. primetime or daytime) a) Audience by place can be referred to as ‘the people assembled’ in one particular area. These are known spectators who are paying attention to a given media presentation at a given time. b) Audience by people are the ‘people addressed’ or referring to the group of people imagined by the communicator and for whom content is shaped. c) Audience by type of medium is based on the medium used such as film, television, radio, print, etc. where the receivers are shaped. d) Audience by content of its message basically refers to diversity of messages conveyed; By genre in such case can refer, to either or any of comedy, drama, action, fantasy, etc. e) Audience by time refers to those people who watch or listen from the early morning, noontime, primetime, midnight, etc. (Mcquail 1983). Audiences originate both in society and in media and their contents: either people stimulate an appropriate supply of content, or the media attract people to the content they offer. To create the media audiences, we consider audience as often brought into being by some new technology as in the invention of film, radio or television or attracted by other channels such as newspaper or radio. Through the media source, the audience is thereby defined. (Mcquail’s Mass Communication Theory p.396) II. How Media Audiences are Created No one could possibly wrong to say that one cannot finish a day without encountering the media in any form. You may wake up to the sound of the radio, play an MP3 on your way to school, read billboards in the street and watch television or DVD movies in the evening. We are all therefore part of the audience if in any other way we experience such activities. In the early times, the media is used to persuade people to buy products through advertising, or to follow politicians through their propaganda. There have also been fears that the contents of media texts can make their audiences behave in different ways- become more violent for example. The effect of media to audience is highly influential. As agents of knowledge, the media is transforming its audience. (Hartley, 2007.). The ‘media’ that we think of today are actually the latest inventions. To go back through centuries and decades, things like computers, television, film, and photography would have seemed impossible to olden days. One hundred years ago is what we call the pre-media times where people made their own sort of entertainment such as reading, watching plays, or simply stroll around a park and mingle with some people getting some fresh air. Today, media has evolved in a great extent. The effect on the audience can be positive and negative. Theatre-sized audiences are accommodated so that films can be watched. If you read an article of a big celebrity or even look at his picture, chances are that millions of people in a certain country or even the world (if you are reading an online paper) will have experienced the same media event. However, this poses a fear that because so many people are experiencing the same things alone without anyone to explain the media event, the media can affect us negatively. Moreover, since most people are split up because of the arrival of video games, children do not do the usual outdoor plays anymore. What Have We Become-Audience According to many theorists, when we listen to news on TV or watch a concert, we become part of an audience-a mass audience. If you look at the early history of the media, it is easy to see where the idea of a mass audience came from. Within less than a hundred years photography, film, radio and television were all invented. Now suddenly films and radio particularly were available to all. Early media theorists struggle to understand this and found it easiest to compare the media audiences with the kinds of crowds they were used to from the world before the media. The members in a media audience come from all lifestyles. It may include people from different class position, different cultural attainment, or wealth. Where the mass is composed of anonymous group or individuals, the members of the media do not know each other. There exists little interaction between them because they are separated physically from one another. However, the audiences, no matter how much anonymity exists between them, are powerful if they are used to move people, to make propaganda, to promote products, to change the society and the like. According to Blumer (1950), Hitler and Stalin attempted to use the media as propaganda through posters, radio announcements and film in order to persuade the mass audiences to adhere to their policies. Audiences are both a product of social context (which leads to shared cultural interests, understandings and information needs) and a response to a particular pattern of media revision, when a medium sets out to appeal to the members of a social category or to the residents of a certain place. Media use also reflects broader pattern of time use, availability, lifestyles, and everyday routines. The Encoding/Decoding Model of Communication In order to understand the meaning of visual images, it is important to know the methods used by audiences in detail. A radically different approach to understanding how audiences engaged with the mass media, critic Stuart Hall offered a model in which two parallels were going on. He published the models in a mimeographed form in 1980 to revise the traditional linear process through which the meaning was transmitted, from producer (of messages) to the audience. This sort of assumption remains at the heart of much discussion in the contemporary media of its own effects; witness the effects of violent movies and videos on computer games on the young children who watch them or engage in them. (Rose 2007). In the encoding model the message is transferred between the moment of its production while decoding is the process of receiving the message. In Stuart Hall’s essays, he challenged all three components of the Mass Communication model, arguing that: a) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; b) the message is never transparent; c) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. The moments of encoding and decoding are points, respectively, of entrance into and exit from the systems of discourse. While the message is not an object with one real meaning, there are within its signifying mechanisms which promote certain meanings, even one privileged meaning, and suppress others: these are the directive closures encoded in the message. The message is capable of different interpretations depending on the audience reception. As Evans (1990) emphasized, audiences do not see only what they want to see since a message is not simply a window on the world, but a construction. In his notes, media studies works on recent audience can be characterized by two assumptions. First, that the audience is always active. Second that the media content is ‘polysemic’, or open to interpretations. In the olden days, audiences were characterized as ‘passive’ consumers, to whom TV’s miraculous power affected them. But as time progressed, passive audience is a thing of the past. (Morley 1986). For an audience to be ‘active’ could simply mean that people are not cultural dopes who believe everything they are told in the media. This clearly suggests that different audiences can understand a media message but can have different responses to it. Based on man’s rational thinking and logic, modern audience may accept or not what is being conveyed in the media message. Somehow, such rational gift gives them the freedom to criticize what is being said. Hence, this falls under two theoretical assumptions that first, messages can mean whatever the audience want to mean—and that they only have the meaning with each new interpretation; second, the producer of text can describe the message in an indefinite number of ways. Hall argues further that the message sent is seldom the one received and that communication is systematically distorted. (Procter 2004). III. Media System Dependency Theory (Source of Power of Audience) Dependency theory was originally proposed by Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Melvin DeFleur (1976). This theory merged out of the communication discipline. This theory states that the more dependent a person is on having his or her needs gratified by the media use, the more important will be the role media play in the person’s life; and therefore the more influence those media will have on that person. In a media dependency theory, people have come to depend heavily on media outlets for information about all topics. This theory is based on the Uses and Gratifications Theory and ties into the Agenda Setting Theory. The Uses and Gratifications Theory identifies how people use and become dependent upon the media. People use the media for many reasons. Information, entertainment, and social relationships are just a few of them. The Dependency Theory states the more a person becomes dependent on the media to fulfill these needs, the media will become more important to that individual. The media will also have much more influence and power over that individual. As outlined by Defluer and Ball-Rokeach (1989) in Giles (2003) Media Psychology, there are three key ways in which individuals develop “dependency relations” with the media. Dependency theory proposes an integral relationship among audiences, media and the larger social system. This theory predicts that you depend on media information to meet certain needs and achieve certain goals. But you do not depend on all media equally. Two factors influence the degree of media dependence. First, you will become more dependent on media that meet a number of your needs than on media that provide just a few. The second source of dependency is social stability. When social change and conflict are high, established institutions, beliefs, and practices are challenged, forcing you to reevaluate and make new choices. At such times your reliance on the media for information will increase. At other, more stable times your dependency on media may go way down. One example of media dependency is the weather forecast. The audience entirely trusts the media in observance of the weather situation. They turn on the TV almost twenty-four hours as they are vigilant with the changing weather especially if experiencing calamities during strong typhoon and other extreme weather conditions. Another illustration that explains media dependency is on game results like boxing. Whenever there is a scheduled big fight, different forms of media, aside from television, are being accessed in order to witness the world event. The media caters the worldwide audience who are watching in all detail about the game (as in the case of Filipino boxing champ Manny Pacquiao and Golden Boy Oscar dela Hoya dream match, which was aired in pay-per-view TV, cinemas, local TV, and cable). While the audience were fanatics of these two boxing icons, even the non-fanatics were vigilant about the much-anticipated show in history. Based on this study, dependency theory is more psychological than many aspects of media theory in that it draws on several psychological theories notably cognitive processes, symbolic interactionism, and ecological psychology. Going back to Giles’ Media Psychology, there are three key ways in which individuals develop “dependency relations” with the media. First, media gives us information that allows us to understand the world; it helps us understand ourselves with the information we receive; it helps us build our self-identity by interpreting our behaviour and compare ourselves with others. Second, helping us decide on certain actions like voting or dieting and dealing with social situations—which is interactive, media makes us dependent for orientation. And the third important key in which we develop media dependency, media provides us with opportunities for play. Play implies social relaxation or engaging in social activity like watching a concert or a movie. Media Dependency Theory is Relatively Scientific in nature. It predicts a correlation between media dependence and importance and influence of the media, but each person uses the media in different ways. Also, the media affects each person in different ways. This is relatively easy to understand. If a person is not dependent on the media, the media will not be of great importance to that individual. IV. The Active Audience Theory Active Audience Theory is a recent development in cultural studies. The trend emerged from the application of ethnographic (ethnography-systematic recording of human culture) research methods to the study of television audience viewing practices (Seaman & Wiiliams,1992). In media studies, the term “audiences” is preferred rather than “passive to active media users”. Audience theory treats media users as social groups that are strongly influenced by media, rather than seeing them as an isolated television viewer entirely dependent on it. Hall suggested that there are three ways in which audiences could ‘decode’ media messages: first, the dominant code, by which viewers select the preferred reading intended by the producers of the message; second, the negotiated code, by which audiences modify the message; perhaps as the basis of personal experience (e.g. thinking that some documentary’s criticism is a little harsh); and third, the oppositional code, by which the message is treated with deep suspicion, as biased establishment propaganda. Active audience theory explains how viewers interpret media messages, especially in mass media like television. Most theories about the interpretation of mass media messages and images can be boiled down to indoctrination in ignorance: audiences accept and interpret the messages that mass media distribute like robots or sheep, exactly the way that the message makers want. Active audience theory plays an active role in interpreting the messages using their own social contexts, and is capable of changing the messages themselves through collective action. It’s important to notice that active audience theory is not only more important because it attributes power and agency to the audience, but it also takes into account that not everyone has spent their life submerged in the uncontested dominate messages of our culture. The one aspect of the active audience theory that seemed to fit is the social context aspect. As an example, American Idol has ever had people talking about it as much in a social context. This kind of show is the ultimate “water cooler talk” type of program. When it comes to the “active audience” theory, television is not the only socialization tool the populace is subject to. Everyone brings a different “outside” context and lens to mass media, which they then use to interpret it, and this leads to multiple interpretations of the same content. However, television is the medium most people depend on information and entertainment. That’s why the world entirely depends on TV and it has become a very powerful tool to influence. But because the audience has other means and lenses through which they can interpret the messages they receive, they interpret these messages differently based on their behaviors and sometimes interpretations and conclusions are conflicting. The postmodernist theory has argued for dissolution of the concepts of audience and texts altogether. Stated in Fiske (1989), “There is no text, there is no audience, and there are only processes of viewing.” Giles (2003, pp 26) The most exciting research carried out in the active audience tradition is closely examined, (in where important studies of soap opera, talk shows, and cartoons) and discussed along with works on fandom by Henry Jenkins. This work of Jenkins credits the audience with much more interpretative power. Viewers and readers can construct their identities where media messages are viewed not as political propaganda or disturbing imagery, but instead as cultural material. Debates Concerning the Active Audience Theory 1. By Micahel Strangelove For Schiller, the active audience theory serves an ideological function. This widely accepted theory places the audience in a privileged position of immunity from the influence of the economy’s definitional control, but for media theorist David Morley, the individual cannot escape the influence of the social order, and the contemporary social order is firmly in the grasp of a globe-spanning economic system. The active-audience thesis, according to Morley, presents little threat to the maintenance of the established order. Contrary, Strangelove stressed that in any medium, especially TV, the audience is the master of the machine and the remote control. Keeping on watching TV could never destroy the power of viewers to interpret meanings and messages. 2. From Herbert Schiller by Richard Maxwell In the 1980s, media theory revived a notion of limited effects along two lines of argument. The first argument explains that new technologies (e.g. cable TV, Internet, and VCRs) freed up the audience to become more actively involved in determining their menu of media items. This theory proposed the existence of an “active-audience” that was technically savvy at creating “individualized viewing packages,” and therefore free from the influence of dominating media. The second line of theory came from cultural studies writers who proposed that meaning making was not a one-way message system but rather one in which and active-audience made up of diverse cultural sub groupings, created a range of meanings, some of which were oppositional to the dominating media messages. It was theoretically feasible to deny the influence of disinformation and propaganda, the existence of strong media effects, and the reality of cultural imperialism. This elaborated the theory of active meaning making as proof of audience power to resist cultural imperialism. 3. By Jack Bratich Using Micahel Hardt and Toni Negri’s concept of the ‘mutiltude’, Jack Bratich argues that active audience theory of cultural studies also emphasized the constitutive power of audiences. Consequently, he denies the idea that the cultural industry makes the audience passive and the cultural studies claim that, as consumers, active audiences resist the industry and make their own choice. Bratich asserts that active audience theory and practice conceptualize audiences not so much as active but reactive. By contrast, he further argues that help investigators define, explore, and understand more productively the complexity and nature of audience power. (Goldstein , Machor, 2008, Introduction, xv) V. Television Culture as the Powerful Source of Media The television is unquestionably one of the central features of modern life. Television confronts us when we are alone. It entertains us. It helps us sleep. It gives us pleasure but sometimes bore us and sometimes challenges us. It provides us with opportunities to be both sociable and solitary. TV, absolutely, is a part of everyday life. TV reaches out in all directions and it is unparalleled in the history of media both in terms of numbers and geography. (Mullan, Bob, 1997) We live in a culture surrounded by people who watch TV. We even memorise the lines of some advertisements as we see or watch them everyday. Television has cultured our lives. Modern psychology comments that young children are much more influenced by TV than an adult. This is especially true during the imitation stage of their lives, when they are still picking up what is good or not primary from the outside. Most countries have regulations against advertising to young children. But as for adults, debates on the power of audience have reversed the culture that TV is the most influential tool of media. Effects of television then may be social or psychological and developmental. They may also be short-term and long term. “Walter Weiss, writing in the second edition (1969) of the Handbook of Social Psychology, discussed effects literature under ten headings: (1) cognition, (2) comprehension, (3) emotional arousal, (4) identification, (5) attitude, (6) overt behavior, (7) interests and interest-related behavior, (8) public taste, (9) outlook and values, (10) family life.” (Fletcher, 2009) For the most part, such effects, however they are characterized, have been studied in the haphazard fashion characterized by the funding priorities of governments and non-profit foundations. For example, there have been many efforts to assess the effect of the availability of television upon the developmental processes in children. In 1963, for instance, the British Home Office established its Television Research Committee with sociologist J. D. Halloran as its secretary. The effects of television were to be studied as both immediate and cumulative, with separate attention paid to perceptions of TV, its content and its function for viewers. Just as the presence or absence of a medium or some particular of program content (e.g. violence) can be considered capable of producing effects in an audience, so can such technological innovations as pay-per-view, satellite delivery, three dimensional presentation, stereo sound, interactive television, etc. Any of these technological innovations may be linked in a research question with special viewing populations and special samples of program materials in attempts to determine whether or not the shift in technology has an effect on subsequent behavior or attitude. Reader’s liberation movement (Fiske’s concept) The reader’s liberation movement involves a theory of audience reading which asserts the reader’s right to make out of the programme, the text that connects the discourses of the programme with the discourses through which he/she lives his/her social experience, and thus for programme, society and reading subject to come together in an active, creative living of culture the moment of reading. David Morley argues that this concept is problematic; in so far as it s perhaps less a question of the readers’ rights to make out of a programme whatever meaning they wish than a question of power. For example, the presence or absence of the power or cultural resources necessary in order to make certain types of meaning, which is, ultimately, an empirical question. New Revisionism (From Acknowledging Consumption by Daniel Miller, 304) By the end of 1980s, it certainly seemed that the new conventional wisdom of media studies was a very optimistic one, so far as the position of the media consumer was concerned, and the passively consuming audience seemed to be, definitively, a thing of the past. New revisionism is a highly critical account in Mass Communication Research on media audiences. This concept amounts to old pluralist dishes being reheated and presented as a new cuisine. It was assumed that technological advances (e.g. the video, remote control, channel-hopping in cable TV) were empowering the media audience on important new ways. This further proves that the ‘interactive’ capacities of recent technological developments fundamentally transfer the position of the viewer. In Curran’s (2000) view, ‘revisionists’ are presenting as ‘innovation’ what is in reality a process of rediscovery. As far as Curran is concerned, misrepresenting this revisionism in assertive terms as an example of intellectual progress, in which hitherto mired in error have been confounded and enlightened when, in fact, the revisionists are actually engaged in an act of revivalism-reverting to the discredited wisdom of the past. Curran’s argument is also supported by Evans (1990), who claims that authors within the interpreter’s tradition have tended to set up the faults of the earlier hypodermic effects’ model of communications rather than as a “straw man,” by contrast to which other positions would more easily seem sophisticated. What the Media can Do to the Audience and Vice Versa The media affects the audience in different ways. While the TV for example, encourages violence. Certainly repeated exposure to anything desensitises a person. Not so much that what they do will become infused with anger and commit violent acts, but it is not surprising if studies find that people view violence more casually than before. It can be said that this is a very age dependent topic. Show it to 5 years old and he/she will much more likely to imitate whats on the screen than showing to someone whos 25. Advertisements further, is highly influential to the audience. But the liberal thinking of the consumers has given them wisdom to think and choose and to decide, thereby, exercising their power of the influence of media. This generation has only begun to scratch the surface of what psychology and mass media can do. As both psychology and method of broadcast develops, it will only be more influential in future generations. Bibliography Ball-Rokeach, S.J., & DeFleur, M.L. (1976). A dependency model or mass-media effects. Communication Research, 3, 3-21. 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