Studying Media Audiences - Research Proposal Example

The study of media audiences is connected with sociology, psychology and media studies. The history of studies of the media audiences is witnessed asa sequence of oscillations between textual audiences and perspective which have barriers shielding the audience from the probable effects of the message. The researchers from the centre for contemporary’s cultural studies formed pragmatic research on the interaction between the television and the audiences as well as to study the encoding-decoding model which was a part of the reception theory which was developed by Stuart Hall. The Nationwide Project was a significant media audience’s programmed conducted in the late 1970 and early 1980 by David Morley, a sociologist who researched the screening patterns of audiences and challenged the scrutiny that texts invariably position viewers ideologically as well as determine meaning. Nationwide was a popular news and current affair programmed which was broadcasted on BBC. It was broadcast throughout the Unite Kingdom including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the programmed host being Michael Barratt. The Nationwide Audience has been commended as the most significant experiential work in audience studies Morley conducted his research with various participants from different educational and occupational backgrounds. Different responses were produced and research continued to seek whether these findings would construct dominant, oppositional or negotiated readings- the three groupings of readings projected by Hall. Hall stated “the mass media are central to modern capitalist culture since they are the primary resource for the meaningful organization and pattering of people experience. In this they are intimately related to the technico-economic and social processes of modern capitalism.”(Tomlinson,1991). Further media texts are positioned amid its producers and its audience, and it is they who decode the text in a comportment that might be correlated to specific social conditions. Halls model included a conceptualization of three theoretical ideological positions of audience members. The first was the dominant hegemonic position, which represented the ideological perspective of the dominant elite and was the framework in which the broadcast message was encoded and decoded, or interpreted by the viewer. The negotiated position was conceptualized as occurring when the viewer privileged the dominant ideological definitions in the abstract while reserving the right to negotiate the meaning of specific situations. In the third case, viewers who took an oppositional position dismantled the broadcast message in the dominant code in order to request it within an alternative frame of reference. (Dworkin,1999). David Morley’s study was to research the relationship between the dominant reading of a news text and the viewer’s social class. Morley employed two distinct modes i.e. semiotics and sociology. His main concern was to what extent the individual interpretation of the programs could be revealed to diverge systematically in relation to the socio artistic milieu. Morley wanted to research the grade of complementarily between the programme codes and the interpretive codes of the socio cultural groups. As Ann Gray pointed out that Morley’s Nationwide study "sought to combine textual construction and interpretation, it granted viewers interpretative status and developed ways of conceiving of the audience as socially structured, suggesting that decoding is not homogeneous. Thus, the text and audience are conceptualized within and as part of the social structure organized in and across power relations of dominant and subordinate groups, of which the media were seen to be occupying a crucial position and role."(Gray, 1999). Morley realized that audiences were linked to the text and that communiqué within the conventional social groups, at times played a significant part in the individual interaction with the media. Morley stated: "the value of ethnographic methods lies precisely in their ability to help us " make things out" in the context of their occurrence - in helping us to understand the television viewing and other media consumption practices as they are embedded in the context of everyday life." (Morley, 1996). Morley suggested that audience research would be more effective if it was a genre based hypothesis of interface thus focusing on the kinds of literary competencies that would be learnt as a corollary of social formations. The analysis of the two distinct type of constrains on meaning production i.e. interior structure of the text which promotes definite readings and barricade others; and the socioeconomic and edifying contexts of the viewers which have to be explained sociologically. The aim was to explore the positive parts in the televisual texts and their functions surrounded by a fastidious chronological conjuncture, in exacting institutional spaces, and in relation to particular audiences. Investigation was performed in which different audiences interpreted the program. Two episodes were shown to about 12-18 groups from diverse social backgrounds and interviews were conducted with them. The groups were chosen on the base so that they might be expected to diverge in their decoding from dominant to negotiate to oppositional. Further Morley analyzed the various findings in terms of Halls typology of decoding and tried to relate them to the socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds of the viewers. Morley research exposed that there were effects of over fortitude of various social conditions such as class, gender, race and age. Morley’s research found three theoretical positions which could be utilized by a reader of a programmed. The theories are: Dominant or hegemonic reading: The viewer accepts the programmed code, its meaning, ethics, philosophy, assumptions and accepts the programmed as ‘preferred reading’. Negotiated reading: Here the viewer partly shares the programmed code and generally accepts the favored reading. But at the same time, having accepted the reading, modifications are done to mirror the viewer position and interest. Oppositional or counter-hegemonic reading: Here we find total rejection with the programmed code as well as rejection with the preferred reading as well. This results in an exchange frame of construal. Morley found, for instance that bank managers occasionally remarked on the actual content of the program. It looked as though they possessed the commonsense scaffold of supercilious within which Nationwide operated. While for the other groups the aspects of the program were much more prominent. The group of management trainees saw the program on trade unions as being biased towards the unions, while on the other hand a group viewed the same item on trade as rabidly anti union. University art students were conscious of the methods deployed by the program unit in constructing the discourse of Nationwide. The group of apprentices showed cynicism and alienation thus rejecting the whole system but agreed with the assumptions made by the program unit. Morley research on the dominant value system, adopts three dominant meaning systems. This dominant value system is the foundation of the foremost institutional array which forms the agenda and promotes the support of obtainable inequality in reverent terms. Further the subordinate value system, the societal source of which is the working category community, wherein this framework promoted the accommodative responses to the dissimilarity and low rank. The radical value system was the spring of which are the mass political party based on the working class and this outline promoted an oppositional elucidation of division inequalities. Morley further states that the members of a particular sub culture will definitely share a cultural compass reading towards decoding codes in a certain matter. The individual readings or the individual formation of messages will be positioned by communal cultural ideas and practices. The groups tending towards a dominant reading included bank managers and apprentices, while those rejecting Nationwide and producing an oppositional reading included black further education students and shop stewards. In between having a negotiated reading was teacher training and university students and trade union officials. (Dutton, 1997). Morleys research confirmed itself to Halls suppositions. The middle-class bank Managers and working-class apprentices both produced dominant readings which further lead to the question the correlation between class and reading position. Morley asserted that decoding was not solely indomitable by class position but rather social position plus particular dissertation positions. Further research into these viewing patterns of audiences led to the development of reception theory. The meaning of reception is what sense audience actually makes of their texts or programs. The reception theory was developed by theorists such as Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Reception theorists hub on the idea that audiences i.e. readers of texts and decoders of texts, take part in a scheme of things and not on the texts themselves. In different theoretical paradigms the reception theory is also known as consumption and reading theory. According to De Certeau: ……the analysis of the images broadcast by television(representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer “makes” or “does” during this time and with these images. The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspaper, and so on. (De Certeau, 1984). David’s analysis on the reception theory, after a study of a BBC program by diverse social groups revealed of how social groups responded to the preferred meaning prescribed in the program. The result i.e. the two types of social group showed a different reaction to the favored conceived and structured, underlying the program and presenting an alternative perspective. Here the preferred meaning is looked at as somewhat ordinary, negotiated or resisted. The second group comprised of those who are unable to articulate this ideological theory and accepted the meaning of the program at face value though that was not their original thought. In opposition to the Marxist version of the mass media as perpetuating a dominant ideology, reception theory postulates the notion of resistance audiences. The audiences are no longer viewed as a single homogeneous mass rather seen as a complex collection of overlapping sub cultures. (Ward 1995). Morley theory "... proved very effective in’re-empowering the audience and returning some optimism to the study of media and culture". It also "... led to a wider view of the social and cultural influences which mediate the experience of the media, especially ethnicity, gender and everyday life“. (McQuail, 2000). David Morley stated that he did not take a social determinist position in the individual decoding of television program. As Morley declared: “Whether or not a programme succeeds in transmitting the preferred or dominant meaning will depend on whether it encounters readers who inhabit codes and ideologies derived from the other institutional areas (e.g. churches or schools) which correspond to and work in parallel with those of the programme or whether it encounters readers who inhabit codes drawn from other areas or institutions (e.g. trade unions or deviant subcultures) which conflict to a greater or lesser extent with those of the program. (Morley, 1983) Morley emphasized the importance of different sub cultural formations within the same class. He stated: “To understand the potential meaning of a given message we need a cultural map of the audience to whom that message is addressed- am map showing the various cultural repertoires and symbolic resources available to differently placed subgroups within the audience. Such a map will help to show how the social meaning of a message is produced through the interaction of the codes embedded in the text with the codes inhabited by the different sections of the audience”. (Morley, 1983) Further, “…..in interpreting viewers readings of television attention should be paid not only to the issue of agreement (acceptance/rejection) but to comprehension and relevance. He also adds enjoyment. (Morley, 1992). At the end of the Nationwide project, a series of responses to material which is not necessarily salient to the respondents……Clearly the question of whether they would make a dominant, negotiated or oppositional reading of a certain type of program material is less relevant than the question of whether or not they would choose to watch that type of material in the first place. (Morley, 1992). Finally Morley states, “Current affairs TV presumes, or requires, a viewer competent in the codes of parliamentary democracy and economics….The competences necessary for reading current affairs TV are most likely to have been acquired by those persons culturally constructed of access to these forms of cultural competence are being white and being middle or upper-class. (Morley, 1981). Finally one must perhaps, distinguish the fact that there are so many different interests which is required to take wager in media. Today’s television gratifies different requirement and tries to cater to the needs of all interests of the masses. And this proves to be a common goal for all television crew. The general individualization process in societies is strong in media and consumption and is always witnessing a development in personalized media as well as including television. The social and cultural values of sociability may be enhanced in digital interactive television and involving users in the design process may influence the development of new sociable genres based on common interpretation and collaborative interactivity in the situated community. This has become a challenge for the mass media in the form of new media and narrowcasting. This development is able to target specific audiences as well as appealing to the advertisers. According to Morgan survey the new media exhibits greater age diversity and higher income than commercial television users. Bibilography Gray, A. Audience and Reception Research in Retrospect- The Trouble with Audiences. 1999. London. Sage Publishers. Tomlinson, J. Cultural imperialism: A Critical introduction. 1991. London Nightingale, V. Studying Audiences. 1990. London: Routledge. Hall, S. Encoding, Decoding. In S. During(Ed), The Cultural Studies reader. 1993. London: Routledge. Dutton, B. The Media. 1997. England. Longman. Morley, D. The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding. 1980. London. Morley, D. The Nationwide Audience- A Critical Postscript, Screen Education. 1981. Vol 39. Morley, D and Charlotte, B. The Natonwide Television Studies. 1999. London: Routledge. Morley, D. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. 1992. London. Dworkin, M. Sense Making and Television News: An Inquiry into Audience Interpretations. 9. 1999. 2-4. Read More