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Mass media: effects research - recent developments
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Mass media: effects research - recent developments
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... once the images distributed by the telly and the time spent in front of the TV have been analysed, we are still left with the question of what the consumer constructs (fabrique) with these images and during these hours. The 5,000 purchasers of Information-Santé [a French magazine], the supermarket users, .... the consumers of journalistic stories and legends, what do they construct out of what they 'absorb', receive and pay for? What do they do with it? .... The enigma of the consumer-sphinx.
de Certeau (1990) p.52
That passage pretty much sums up the focus of de Certeau's concerns. De Certeau points to the fundamental error of assuming that the public is shaped by the products imposed on it. It would be more appropriate to focus on the uses which people make of the commodities they are offered.
De Certeau sees ordinary people as developing 'tactics' (an 'art of the weak') that he contrasts with the 'strategies' of the dominant élite, tactics for carrying out 'raids' on the dominant culture. 'Strategies' are used by total institutions such as the army, cities, supermarket chains to create and delimit their own place. Tactics are the response of the powerless. De Certeau sees ordinary people as 'poachers', pinching the meanings they need from the cultural commodities which are offered to them.
Whether it's today's Sun or a major novel, the text only acquires signification in its readers. Hence the consumer of media texts cannot be identified according to the journalistic or commercial products she assimilates - it all depends on the use made of those products.
This view of the way readers construct their own meanings is reminiscent of Stuart Hall's idea of preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings, often referred to for short as Hall's encoding/decoding model). Nevertheless, there tends, in the 'radical' (or Marxist) approach, to be an emphasis on the analysis of media texts, rather than the analysis of the way readers receive those texts. As Anderson and Sharrock (1979) put it, there is a tendency in the 'radical' approach to see readers as 'witless and uncritical'. De Certeau, in contrast, emphasises that 'it's always a good thing to remember that one shouldn't think of people as idiots' (de Certeau (1990) p. 255).
Examples of reception studies
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