 |
 |
 |
Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
|
|||
|
Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
|
Joke Hermes undertakes an ethnographic study directed to uncovering the pleasures which women derive from reading women's magazines (1995).
An important point which she stresses from the beginning is that there has been a steady stream of research about women's magazines, but little of it has ever taken the readers' concerns into account, a criticism which echoes Anderson and Sharrock's attack on media studies as long ago as 1979 (see the section on criticism of the Marxist approach to the media) that researchers failed to pay attention to the various ways in which readers construe media texts. Thus, Hermes argues, we probably know more about the researchers than we do about audiences. Presenting a view similar to Anderson's and Sharrock's Hermes asserts that
Far too often criticism of the text has been extended to its readers; it has led to horrifying stereotypical views of women's magazine's heterogeneous audiences and portrayed them en masse as silly housewives. I hold the view that it simply is not possible to read characteristics of an audience from the surface of a text: there is no single text that has the required monopoly position to exert such influence.
(1995 : 147)
and
My perspective is that texts acquire meaning only in the interaction between readers and texts and that analysis of the text on its own is never enough to reconstruct these meanings.
(1995 p.10)
The certainly unintended consequences of these condensations - isolating specific texts from everyday media use and taking the knowledgeable reader for an average reader - is that popular culture is given the status of high culture. It is made into a discrete text that offers a unique and possibly liberating perspective on the world. ...... general, everyday media use is identified with attentive and meaningful reading of specific texts, and that is precisely what it is not.
(1995 : 14-15)
In Hermes's view, far too much emphasis has been placed, in cultural studies, firstly, on the texts themselves, which are 'lifted from the stream of daily life and media use and given special status' (148) and, secondly, on knowledgeable readers and fans who are falsely presented as average readers.
Thus Hermes stresses what she refers to as the fallacy of meaningfulness, namely the assumption that texts must mean something to their readers. What became very evident to Hermes (in contrast to her other reception studies of popular genres) was that the magazine readers she interviewed actually had very little to say about the magazines, indeed often had great difficulty recalling what they had read. One of the salient characteristics of the magazines seemed to be that they were easily put-downable. She reminds us that media use is not always meaningful, referring us to Morley's Family Television, from which it is apparent that television watching serves to underpin patriarchal power, but is not always meaningful as text.
... the fallacy of meaningfulness, by which I mean the unwarranted assumption that all use of popular media is significant. Although readers may recognize the codes of a given text and accord it limited associative meaning, they do not always accord it generalized significance, that is, a distinct and nameable place in their world views and fantasies.
(1995 p.16)
Hermes is here engaged in a process which she refers to as the 'dethroning of the text'. This dethroning I see, as I have suggested in comments on other studies in the 'New Audience Research' vein, as a welcome corrective to the exclusive focus on textual semiotics which has characterized much cultural studies research. Hermes, however, goes some way beyond such researchers as, say, Fiske and de Certeau who emphasize the 'resistive pleasures' which readers may derive from oppositional readings of texts and the 'semiotic guerrilla warfare' which they wage upon the official culture. I have just mentioned how Morley considers that much of the use of television is to support patriarchy rather than to interpret or use its texts as text. Whilst Morley's studies may in some sense represent a 'dethroning of the text', Morley does not go so far as to suggest that TV viewing is meaningless - far from it, in fact. Hermes, however, suggests that TV programmes and magazine articles may be less important for their texts than for their use in providing 'something to do'. In a sense, it may even be that Hermes's brand of ethnography hardly qualifies as reception analysis at all, since she is far less concerned with the structures or content of texts than with readers' own reports of their everyday lives. To an extent it could be argued that Hermes' 'fallacy of meaningfulness' is nothing new, since Belson (1961) had discovered long ago that reading the newspaper often seemed to serve no other function than filling time and around the same time Kimball (1959) had pointed out that during a newspaper strike people experienced the lack of a newspaper as a 'time vacuum'. When I went to the cinema every Saturday morning as a kid, I didn't go to watch a particular film, but to engage in a social activity known as 'going to the pictures'. Nowadays we engage in 'watching television', rather than necessarily any particular programme which is important as text.
From the point of view of a 'critical' (i.e., broadly, a Marxist') perspective on media use, such a position as Hermes espouses must seem even more offensive than that of the more conventional workers in reception analysis. From that perspective media products are the vehicles of ideology and it is the 'politics of signification' which is central to the struggle for hegemony between competing ideologies. The question of how media artefacts or consumer commodities come to signify and the study of the signifying systems within which they operate are of course central to semiotics. The allegedly uncritical celebration of 'audience resistance' found in much New Audience Research, a celebration allegedely divorced from consideration of the broader social and economic context within which audiences receive media texts has already provoked a number of broadsides from those working within the 'critical' tradition. Indeed, Morley himself, who is often seen as one of the founders of the 'new' approach comments that
The power of viewers to reinterpret meanings is hardly equivalent to the discursive power of centralized media institutions to construct the texts which the viewer then interprets; to imagine otherwise is simply foolish.
Morley (1992)
Hermes's claim, then, that media texts are, simply, meaningless presents an even more serious challenge to the 'critical' view than the 'Fiskean' celebration of resistance.
Is her position tenable? What do you think? While writing this, I have been listening to a Bix Beiderbecke CD. In fact, though, I haven't been listening to it at all. Did I even notice Bix's fine solo on Royal Garden Blues? Or Adrian Rollini's bass saxophone - bass sax, for God's sake! If I did, I can't remember them. What I have just noticed, though, is that the CD has stopped. So - was the experience of (not) listening 'meaningless'? And could a similar 'meaninglessness' be claimed for experience of television, radio etc? Television, radio and the hi-fi would then be just sound-and-vision-emitting furniture. Even if the professional semiotician could accept that the experience of (not) listening, (not) watching is meaningless in the sense of (not) having absorbed a message, I doubt that (s)he would be prepared to consider that there is not at least meaning in the choice of the 'furniture'. Bear in mind, though, that (s)he has a vested interest in spotting meanings everywhere.
I must admit that, at first, coming to Hermes's research after years of exposure to theories of media use and influence which assume the importance of such notions as representation and reception, cultural subordination, the politics of signification etc., I thought Hermes's emphasis on the meaninglessness of exposure to the media was just plain daft. On reflection, however, I have come to consider it at least as intriguing. Once I try to see beyond the habits of a person with a professional interest in analysis of media texts and recognize that even for me much everyday experience of the media is of an undifferentiated 'flow' of vague impressions of sound and vision, then it seems to me that Hermes's thesis is not quite as daft as it first seemed. Many of my students tell me that they write their homework essays in their bedroom with both the hi-fi and the TV switched on. Some are apparently armed with a remote control for each and turn the volume of each up or down depending on whether the TV's images catch their attention, others have the volume up on each, others have the TV volume permanently down. This is surely an example of experience of media as 'flow' and certainly an example which lends support to Hermes's view that it is only researchers who lift media texts out of that flow and lend them special significance, whereas in her view we need to examine the mundane practices of everyday life and examine how the media form part of those everyday practices. This view presents a challenge to the self-proclaimed 'critical' theorists, who must, if they do not simply dismiss Hermes, be obliged to consider the position they speak from about the effect of media on ordinary people.
Hermes position is not without its problems, though. These arise in part from her use of the concept of 'everyday life' and the 'flow' of media communication. Admittedly she rarely uses the term 'flow' herself, but there is an implication in her references to, for example, 'the stream of daily life and media use' (1995 : 148) that the flow metaphor underlies her thinking. Neither of these terms, though well established in media theory, especially in the 'new audience research', has yet been satisfactorily theorized or defined, though media researchers are certainly making progress. Fairly obviously, I think, 'everyday life' can't be constituted by a bundle of certain kinds of activity - a colleague of mine goes to the gym every day, it must be thirty-five years since I set foot in a gym (and I hope it will be another thirty-five!); some people go to work every day, others have no employment; some people work every day at producing television programmes, others watch them. If we try to define 'everyday life' in terms of the activities undertaken, we are unlikely to make much progress towards a definition. Hermes goes some way towards a definition by stressing the routinized nature of the affairs and actions which constitute the everyday. Rather than the actions themselves, it seems to be the actors' attitudes towards them, which constitutes their everyday nature, namely that those actions and routines are seen as self-evident. Everyday life, then, from this perspective, consists of the routines which we perform almost as automata, without thinking about them or reflecting on them.
For further comment on this, see the section on 'everyday life'.
The notion of media 'flow' is derived, as far as I know, from Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1990), which he formulated in part as a result of his culture shock arising from viewing American television which was quite different from British television at that time, when programmes were clearly differentiated from one another. Williams describes the pre-television forms of communication systems as systems in which 'the essential items were discrete' (87), a book or pamphlet being read as a specific item, a play being seen in a particular theatre at a particular time. In contrast, where television is concerned,
What is being offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real 'broadcasting'.
(1990 : 90)
Williams considers that this 'flow', which the TV schedules are designed to create, is reflected in our experience of television, which we commonly report as 'watching television' rather than saying that we have 'watched the news', 'watched a play' or whatever, as well as in our experience that television is difficult to switch off, that it is difficult to escape from the 'flow':
We can be 'into' something else before we have summoned the energy to get out of the chair, and many programmes are made with this situation in mind: the grabbing of attention in the early moments; the reiterated promise of exciting thing to come, if we stay.
(1990 : 94)
The metaphor of 'flow' seems often almost to be taken for granted when combined with discussions of the routines of 'everyday life'. Whether it is a particularly fruitful metaphor is a matter for debate. Where Hermes's research is concerned, although I appreciate the value of her desire to avoid textual semiotics on the one hand and exclusive focus on knowledgeable readers on the other, I tend to agree with Seija Ridell's criticism that, for the sake of respecting her respondents' views, Hermes takes her respondents' descriptions at face value:
Thus it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to study for instance how various 'imagined communities' - like that of 'the nation' - become produced and maintained partly through the very routines of media use.
Ridell (1996)
Using Hermes's approach of 'listening through' her interviewees' reports, rather than actively engaging with them, it is almost impossible to deal with the question of the media's power in people's lives.
de Certeau's views
Fiske's views
Ang on Dallas
Brown on soap operas
Fiske on Madonna
Morley: The Nationwide Audience
Morley: Family Television
Radway: Reading the Romance
Criticisms of reception studies
|