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Mass media: effects research - recent developments
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Mass media: effects research - recent developments
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Many of the recent approaches to the mass media are influenced, or at least informed by, postmodernism. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of postmodernism, it would be as well to familiarise yourself with it now, either by taking a look at the brief summary or proceeding to the more extensive discussion.
If you have already read the criticisms of the Marxist approach to the mass media, you will know that one criticism is that the Marxist commentators generally assume that media texts have one meaning. As Jensen puts it,
A very large proportion of international communication research is still informed .... by Lasswell's formulation of 'Who / Says what / In which channel / To whom / With what effect?', in which the 'what' of communication is conceived of as some message entity that maintains a simple presence in the world, linking two minds with reference to an already shared reality.
Jensen (1995) p.8
Partly because of the influence of the postmodern mood, that 'already shared reality' can no longer be assumed. It can no longer be assumed that a text has a single meaning which can be uncovered by analysis of the text.
If you have read the section on Postmodernism, you will be familiar with the view that cultural studies has reached a crisis, largely due to the collapse of the 'grand narrative' of Marxism. Even Gramsci can come to be seen as 'the last bulwark of totalizing theory' (Bill Schwartz quoted in McRobbie (1994). It has been fashionable for some time to speak of our era as post-Marxist. Fair enough, I suppose, if you take on board the post-modern rejection of grand narratives, since Marxism is indubitably such a metanarrative, but there seems also often to be an assumption that much Marxian cultural studies is invalidated by the 1989 collapse of Eastern bloc states, the whole rotten edifice of barbaric, depotic and corrupt East European communism being presented as an indictment of Marxism. It seems a little odd to see cultural studies as in some way implicated in that communism, since cultural studies largely developed from the New Left, much of whose original West European brand of radicalism derived from a reaction against the East's Stalinism - unless maybe you take the view that Marxism must inevitably lead to oppressive state communism, which is arguable, at least. If Marxism is invalidated, then surely by Popper's clinical demolition in The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945, long before the collapse of East European Communist states.
In recent years, research has turned increasingly to the way that audience members generate their own meanings from their readings of media texts, often resisting the preferred readings suggested by those texts.
Much of this research is coloured by the ideas of the French sociologist, Michel de Certeau, whose views have been enthusiastically disseminated and applied in the English-speaking world by John Fiske.
Personally, I am not so convinced that current research is taking a radically new direction. As Curran points out,
That audiences perceive mass-communicated meanings differently has ... been a central finding of media effects research for nearly half a century
quoting research from the 40s which reached the conclusions that we are selective in our exposure to the media, that the meanings we take from the media are influenced by our attitudes, our experience, our peer groups, membership of sub-cultures and so on. (Curran (1990))
Whether it is genuinely so new or not, many of its practitioners clearly consider this approach so new that they have taken to referring to it as the New Audience Research. As a very rough and ready assessment of the turn taken by some areas of cultural studies in recent years, I would suggest that the area of cultural studies represented by the New Audience Research is blurring the boundaries between cultural studies and anthropology, paying increasing attention to ethnographic studies of audiences, though still paying a great deal of attention to 'theory', which is probably what distinguishes this research from anthropology proper.
If you would like to read more about these recent developments, we have two sections which give a quick overview of de Certeau's and Fiske's views. Those are followed by sections on reception studies, which investigate the meanings which audiences generate and how they generate them.
De Certeau's views
Fiske's views
Reception analysis
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