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Mass media: effects research
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Mass media: effects research
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The inception of this concept is usually attributed to the American literary theorist Stanley Fish
(Is There a Text in This Class? (1980)). If we take the view that the meaning of a text arises at the point of encounter between the text and the reader, then there can be as many meanings as there are readers. If we take the view that the text contains its own meaning and all we have to do is look to the text to find that meaning, then there should be only one, or at least very few meanings. What intrigued Fish was that we don't, in fact, find either of those extremes. Why, as Fish put it, if the text contains its own meaning, do we find so much disagreement; if the meaning is created by individual readers, is there so much agreement? To answer these questions, Fish developed the notion of the interpretive community. For Fish, there can be no objective knowledge, knowledge is always socially conditioned. Fish takes a strong view of the social construction of reality, according to which the reality one knows is the function of the community one is a part of. The thoughts one has are conditioned by that community and one cannot think beyond the limits imposed by the culture. Thus, an interpretive community is
not so much a group of individuals who shared a point of view, but a point of view or way of organizing experience that shared individuals in the sense that its assumed distinctions, categories of understanding, and stipulations of relevance and irrelevance were the content of consciousness of community members who were therefore no longer individuals, but, insofar as they were embedded in the community's enterprise, community property. It followed that such community-constituted interpreters would, in their turn, constitute, more or less in agreement, the same text, although the sameness would not be attributable to the self-identity of the text, but to the communal nature of the interpretive act. Of course, if the same act were performed by members of another community - of some rival school of criticism informed by wholly different assumptions - the resulting text would be different, and there would be disagreement; not, however, a disagreement that could be settled by the text because what would be in dispute would be the interpretive 'angle' from which the text was to be seen...
Fish (1989)
Although, as you can see from that quotation, Fish's concern was with literary criticism, the idea of an interpretive community is one which has been taken up in media and cultural studies. One of the first to attempt to apply the concept was Janet Radway in her ethnographic study of a group of women readers of romantic stories in the mid-western town of 'Smithson' in the US: Reading the Romance (1987). Like Fish, Radway was also concerned to explain how it happened, that although the number of possible interpretations of the stories was theoretically infinite, in fact it turned out to be quite limited.
Similar readings are produced, I argue, because similarly located readers learn a similar set of reading strategies and interpretive codes which they bring to bear upon the texts they encounter.
Radway1987 ( p.8)
she explains in her introduction to the British edition, but she goes on to explain that, in her view, the concept turned out to be insufficiently theorized.
In fact, the idea is one which seems very suggestive and has been widely used in reception research over the last ten years or so, and yet is still ill-defined and the subject of controversy amongst researchers. As Schrøder explains, when he presents in his teaching a study of how black and white teenagers produce different readings of a Madonna video,
I ascribe the difference to their membership of different ethnic interpretive communities. When the boys and girls in this study differ in their decodings I say that this is due to their membership of different gendered interpretive communities, adding that the meanings of the ethnic and gendered interpretive communities somehow 'overlap', 'criss-cross' or the like.
Schrøder (1994)
It's the 'somehow' in that quotation that is of course the problem with interpretive communities. How exactly do they 'overlap' and 'criss-cross'? Schrøder points to the problems inherent in using focus groups to determine how people receive and interpret media messages because the group dynamics may well exert influences which are not at all present in people's everyday situations and because a number of otherwise completely unrelated individuals are brought together into the focus group. Equally, research where the researcher does engage with naturally occurring groups such as the family or the peer group may be inadequate because the members of those groups belong to many other groups as well.
I don't know how Fish views this 'criss-crossing' and 'overlapping', though. Such notions are reminiscent of Wittgenstein's idea of 'language-games'. Wittgenstein's builders, calling for bricks to be passed to them are engaged in one kind of language game, which criss-crosses and overlaps with other language games. Fish's idea of the linguistic community, however, seems to be much less open and more strongly deterministic than that. His view of the operation of language is similar to Wittgenstein's in that he sees language as a tool, he sees words as having meanings which are dependent upon and arise from the uses we make of them, he sees language as being heavily conventionalist. Whilst, like Wittgenstein, Fish insists that in understanding a text, in getting the meanings for a text, we must use the methods appropriate to the language game being played, he differs significantly from Wittgenstein in his apparent insistence, if I have understood him correctly, that the players of one language game can't play with the players of another:
. . . how can any one of us know whether or not he is a member of the same interpretive community as any other of us? The answer is that he can't, since any evidence brought forward to support the claim would itself be an interpretation (especially if the "other" were an author long dead). The only "proof" of membership is fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community. . . . I say it to you now, knowing full well that you will agree with me (that is, understand) only if you already agree with me.
Fish (1980): 173
What this appears to me to deny is Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances between the possible language games, resemblances which allow, say, a religious adherent and an atheist to discuss religion or physics. 'If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,' Wittgenstein famously stated in the Philosophical Investigations, but he also stated:
Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them and so on?
The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.
Wittgenstein (1958): para 206
whereas Fish seems to be suggesting that interpretive communities are as utterly alien to one another as the lion is to me, a contention which strikes me as perhaps usefully provocative, but ultimately unproductive.
Recent developments in media research
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