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Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
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Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
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A great deal of recent work has focused on the way that audiences resist the constructions of reality preferred by the mass media and construct their own, often oppositional, meanings for media texts. Since much of this work is concerned with detailed investigation of the audience's reception of media messages, it is generally known as reception analysis.
In reception analysis, audiences are seen, as Fiske and de Certeau suggest, as active producers of meaning, not consumers of media meanings. They decode media texts in ways which are related to their social and cultural circumstances and the ways that they individually experience those circumstances. The new emphasis on this approach has led to its being called the New Audience Research.
Rather than using solely the questionnaire technique generally used in uses and gratifications research, reception researchers will normally also use qualitative methods on a smaller scale. For example, in-depth interviews and group interviews as a means of uncovering the meanings which small groups of readers generate for media texts, focusing on the audience's 'situatedness' within a particular socio-historical context.
Broadly speaking, reception analysis has developed from a combination of traditional qualitative research strategies in sociology with some of the ideas of reader response theory in literary criticism. From the area of literary criticism Fish's understanding of the interpretive community seems to have been quite fruitful. The focus on interpretive communities means that the researchers in this vein examine issues far beyond the media text itself.
Over the past few years, as reception analysis has come to reveal more of the fine detail of our reception of media messages, an ethnographic approach to audience studies has become steadily more popular, using interviews and participant observation, a methodology owing much to the research of David Morley, and Michel de Certeau's theorizing on the practices of everyday life, both in the early 1980s. Audiences
What an audience is and what audience members are may seem fairly straightforward. Certainly, the huge amounts of money which are ploughed into commercial and other research (for example, Nielsen, BARB and so on) into audiences' media usage and behaviour seems to suggest that media producers believe that we know what audiences are and how to measure them.
However, when you look back over the history of the conceptualizations of audiences and research into them, it pretty soon becomes evident that 'audience' has always been a rather woolly concept. In the popular imagination, media corporations and advertising agencies conduct intensive research into audiences. They identify the audience members' socio-economic class, lifestyles, motivation, disposable income, fantasies etc. and that knowledge enables them to 'target' their audience precisely. In fact, though, as Fiske points out,
The advertising industry is undoubtedly successful at persuading manufacturers and distributors to buy its services: its success in persuading consumers to buy particular products is much more open to question - between 80 and 90 per cent of new products fail despite extensive advertising. To take another example, many films fail to recover even their promotional costs at the box office.
Fiske (1989)
Because it's a mass audience - it's an unimaginably large audience - the audience tastes are so diffused and so general that you've got to be guessing. You can work off precedents about what's worked on TV before. You can work off whatever smattering of sociological information you gleaned from whatever sources. You can let your personal judgments enter into it to some extent ... But you never really know.
(Scott Siegler, former CBS vice-president for drama development, quoted in Ang (1990))
We have access to huge amounts of statistical data about audiences, but the audience remembers remain 'statistics with skins' (Tracey
(1988), cited in Jeffrey
(1996)). 'Watching television' is not necessarily the same activity for you as it is for me. In fact, my
'watching television' is probably not the same for me today as it was yesterday. Our use of the media is closely tied up with the rest of our daily lives and will be conditioned by what we want to get out of it, who we're with, who we discuss it with, where we happen to be and so on. The statistics tell us very little about that. In fact, As Ang expresses it:
in a multitude of ways, sometimes routine, sometimes exceptional, television plays an intimate rôle in shaping our day-to-day practices and experiences .... However, our understanding of what all these practices and experiences mean, what they imply and implicate, has remained scant. .... Given television's conspicuousness in contemporary culture and society, this poverty of discourse, this lack of understanding is rather embarrassing indeed, if not downright scandalous
(1990,153)
With new methods of accessing TV (satellite, cable, video rental, 'time-shifting' using the VCR and so on), audience research is not simply a problem for academic researchers, but a burning issue for media professionals who need to be able to persuade advertisers that they are getting value for money.
An influential study was Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1987), a study of an interpretive community of women readers of devalued fiction.
A particularly important study which is frequently referred to is Watching Dallas by Ien Ang (1985). Ang reports how different audience members may receive Dallas quite differently.
Major studies in this approach to communication research were conducted by David Morley. His The 'Nationwide' Audience (1980)was a very significant step away from a cultural studies which n some respects had come to concentrate too much on texts. Semiotics had come to be seen as a sort of science of the text, from which experts could discern underlying messages and ideological effects, without engaging with the messy business of readers' uses of those texts in the everyday.
Another particularly important study, frequently referred to by modern researchers is Morley's Family Television of 1986. It falls somewhat out of the general run of reception studies, since it is less concerned with people's meanings for TV messages than with the use of television as an instrument of patriarchal power in the household. Nevertheless, it was certainly a seminal study and so frequently referred to by contemporary researcher that we have included it here.
Since the ideas of Michel de Certeau, popularized by John Fiske, underlie much of this type of research, often referred to as the New Audience Research, we have included sections on de Certeau and Fiske, as well as examples of reception studies.
de Certeau's views
Fiske's views
Ang on Dallas
Brown on soap operas
Fiske on Madonna
Hermes on women's magazines
Morley: The Nationwide Audience
Morley: Family Television
Radway: Reading the Romance
Criticisms of reception studies
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