Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Subject: Englis h
Principal Investigator: Prof. Tutun Mukherjee, University of Hyderabad
Introduction:
There are two aspects to Audience Reception studies: Audience Theory and Audience
Research. While audience theory refers to a set approaches that help us decode an
audience, audience research looks for evidences to validate the assumptions of a
particular approach with regard to the relation between media and audience. Thus
every research into audience is backed by a certain theory on the sa me. The fact that it
is difficult to define audience makes its study harder. Plus there are different motives
that govern the study of audience which in turn determine the methodology used, i.e.
the ways of looking, measuring and understanding audiences.
According to David Morley the history of research into media audience alternates
between two major theoretical standpoints, termed as active and passive. The various
approaches to audience fall under either of the two.
Under the first, the audience is perceived as passive where the media (or its message)
is seen to have a greater power over the audience. Such an approach assumes a linear
process of transmissions of messages, from the media to the audience, where audience
is seen as passively consuming what the media provides. The fundamental concern
here is what media can do to people. The second perspective take an opposing stance
as it perceives the audience as actively engaging with the media and examines what
people do with media.
Passive audience theory or effect theory constitutes the early phase of audience
research that focused on the effects of exposure to mass media. Under this, the media
was perceived as ‘all powerful’ that was capable of controlling the way people think
and act. The audience accordingly was considered as ‘passive’ recipients who
uncritically absorb the media message and act upon them.
The theoretical models based on passive audience are best embodied in the tradition
of Effect theories, popular in American and Britain in the 1950s. It is based on the
premise that media has cultural effects and proposes to explain how media achieves it.
There are two dominant approaches to explain the media effect, which has its origin
in two antithetical political standpoints. The first is a right-wing perspective which
argues that media, especially the popular one, can affect the audience adversely as it
leads to the breakdown of traditional cultural values and can have a negative impact
on the people’s psychology. So for instance watching the hero smoke or drink in a
movie can result in the audience taking to similar habits. The second is a left-wing
attitude, which insists that those in power largely control mass media and therefore
the representations within such a media will serve to retain the political status quo.
Also, it believes that such media through ideological indoctrination turns the audience
into inert beings, by instilling in them a false perception of reality. So for instance,
Bollywood commercial cinema, espcially under the banner of Yash Raj, often projects
a view of India that is rich and thriving thereby creating a false impression of the
actual reality.
The second phase of effect studies, in the 1940s and 60s, was more formal and
scientific and it revised some of the extremist conclusions of early phase. For one, it
claimed that the effect of media on the audience was ‘limited’ or ‘minimal’ and that
the idea of media brainwashing the public was nothing short of exaggeration. Thus
during this phase the ‘powerful effect’ paradigm was replaced by ‘limited effect’ or
‘indirect effect’ paradigm that came up with a more nuanced model of influence, that
downplayed the role of media and deemed it as one among the several factors that
contributed to opinion formation.
However, the powerful effect paradigm was revived in the 1960s due to the increasing
depiction of violence and sex in mass media generating situations of ‘moral panics’
and the role of media was reinstated in socializing the public mind. Though effect
theory is critiqued as a narrow and conservative approach to audience analysis, it is
still used as a model of analysis especially when it come to the study of the effects of
depiction of violence and sex on children and young adults who are perceived as
‘vulnerable’ to it. Effect model is also criticized for being selective in its attacks on
effects of media focusing only on the negatives.
1. Hypodermic Model: Stems from the belief that mass media has an
overwhelming effect on the individual or mass psyche and could bring about
behavioral or attitudinal changes in the person. Also known by terms like
‘magic bullet’, ‘stimulus response’, etc. the hypodermic needle model explains
the effect of media on the audience using the analogy of syringe and drug.
According to this the media injects ‘message’ into the mind of the viewer like
a syringe injects drug into the body, driving them to behave in certain ways.
Advertisements, socio-political propaganda can be targeted at the viewer or
listener like a ‘magic bullet’. The effect is immediate, direct and addictive.
The injected audience here is seen as powerless and passive against the force
of media.
The model was attributed to political scientist Harold Lasswell who studied
the influence of propaganda on mass audience. His study focused on the
manipulation of symbols with multiple associations to influence mass opinion
during the First World War. His was one of the earliest scientific studies on
mass persuasion. The theory is similar to Adorno and Horkheimer’s
‘pessimistic mass society thesis’ articulated through the pehnomenon of
culture industry. Later advertising industry made use of psychological and
stimulus response techniques, which added further impetus to the model. One
of the key pitfalls of this hypothesis was that it perceived the relation between
the media and audience as unidirectional; it did not account for the ways in
which people might use media and manipulate it to suit the ir purposes.
Moreover, the effect of media is not always as simple, direct and all-powerful
as purported by the hypodermic model. It works in much more complex ways
and other factors might come to play in the mediation process. Though the
model has been strongly critiqued owing to its narrow conservative approach
to the relation between media and audience, it is still used as a template when
it comes to the study of the media effect in relation to children and youth.
2. Cultivation Analysis : Cultivation model, proposed by George Gerbner and
Larry Gross in the late 1960s, was based on the assumption that television had
considerable effect on the social psyche and that exposure to television on a
regular basis can distort the viewer’s perception of reality. Cultivation analysis
began with a focused research on the impact of the depiction of violence on
television on the audience’s mind. They argued that primetime television,
especially dramatic entertainments that are excessively violent, affect our ‘first
order judgment’ by creating an exaggerated view of the degree of violence in
society. Such views in turn cultivate insecurity, fear and mistrust in the public
mind affecting their ‘second order judgments’ like how to manage society and
consequently giving in to suppressive measures that serve to retain the
hierarchy of social power.
In contrast to traditional effect models that focused on the attitudinal and
behavioral changes in the individuals brought about by exposure to certain
genres or messages in media, cultivation model examined television in its
totality as a cogent system of messages that had a cumulative effect on the
audience attitudes and perceptions. Thus while hypodermic model examined
the way violent visuals resulted in aggressive behavior, cultivation analysis
focused on representations and patterns of images that appear on television
and get absorbed by the audience over a period of time.
Unlike early effect models that saw the impact of television as linear,
unidirectional and mechanical, cultivation model perceived it as a continuous,
dynamic process of interaction between the media message and the audience’s
context.
Cultivation analysis introduced the concept of ‘mainstreaming’ in order to
explain the manner in which media serve as a means to streamline a
heterogeneous audience to think in similar fashion. According to this, media
provides a restricted set of choices to a divergent audience of different likes
and tastes. The programs on television are tailored in such a way that it
eliminates barriers of class, age, sex, region etc so that everybody can watch it.
Mainstreaming thus refers to the phenomenon whereby media streamlines the
heterogeneous choices and perceptions into television mainstream resulting in
the homogenization of viewer’s choice and likes.
Cultivation analysis is thus concerned with the overall ideological
consequences of commercialized television industry that uphold the values of
culture industry like consumption, materialism, individualism etc. and
engineer social attitudes and perceptions which invariably works to sustain
hegemonic forces.
3. Two-Step Flow Model: The two-step flow model, popular in in the 1950s,
was designed by a group of American researchers namely Herta Herzog,
Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfield and later Elihu Katz, as an alternative to
hypodermic needle model. Theirs was a quantitative approach, using empirical
data in place of the qualitative philosophical analysis of the Frankfurt school.
They replaced the ‘all powerful’ media effect paradigm that saw media having
a direct and unmediated effect on its audience with a more nuanced ‘limited
effect model’ that perceived this unidirectional flow being curtailed by several
factors and emphasized role of human agency in mediation. The two-step flow
thesis stated that the influence of media on its audience was neither direct nor
all-powerful but critically mediated by ‘gatekeepers’, ‘opinion leaders’ and
‘opinion followers’ within the audience community. So according to this, the
messages or issues broadcast on radio and television pass through
intermediaries like opinion leaders who pass on their interpretation as well as
the content to the larger mass. Audiences are selective who absorb messages
over a period and the reception of these views or messages are often screened
or filtered through social groups and networks. They saw the role of media as
that of reinforcement than direct influence and supplanted the mass persuasion
theory with an enduring question in audience research as to ‘What do people
do with media?’. They rescued effect studies from strictly focusing on
psychological responses to a more contextualized approach to media effect,
seeking links between media and social system and examining the
intermediate factors that diffuse the message to audience. Merton’ Mass
Persuasion and Katz Lazarsfield’s Personal Influence are two of the
influential works under this.
1. Uses and Gratification Model: The approach was associated with the works
of Elihu Katz (US); Jay Blumler, James Halloran (Britain) and that of
Leicester Centre for Mass Communication Research, in the 1960s. It argued
that audience are not merely passive consumers of the media and its message
but actively engage with it to satisfy their needs. They claimed that audience
uses media to gratify their needs, which could range from – to form personal
identity (lifestyle magazines), help gather information (news, weather
forecast), or gratify the desire for entertainment (escape from reality, pleasure)
or assist social interaction, keep us company (Radio, soap opera) etc. The uses
and gratification discredited the effect theory, which conceived the media
message as having a homogenized ‘effect’ on the mass audience suggesting
that all would be affected by it in the same way. The present model allowed
space for variability of interpretation, though it was criticized for being overtly
individualistic.
Using insights from several of these theories, Stuart Hall put forward the basic
premises of Encoding/Decoding Model which are:
Every media texts have certain meanings encoded within them.
However it’s the audience, who receive these texts that determine how
the messages are to be interpreted.
A text can encode the same event in different ways.
Every message has potentially several ‘readings’.
Messages suggest and ‘prefer’ certain readings; but they can never be
restricted to a single reading. In other words every message text is
‘polysemic’ which means, capable of varied interpretations.
Reception of messages can be problematic as an encoded message can
be decoded in a different way.
Based on these premises Hall explains the complex manner in which messages
in media texts, especially in television, gets encoded and decoded. According
to Hall television is a complex sign, which has layers of potential meanings
inscribed within. There is a preferred meaning that every text encodes, which
if decoded differently can communicate a different message altogether. Thus a
message, Hall says, is a structured polysemy. However it has to be noted that
not all the meanings exist ‘equally’ in the message but are structured
according to dominance. Having said that, the text does not allow ‘total
closure’ of meanings.
Within the circuit of mass communication there is always a possibility of
disjuncture between the encoding and decoding of messages as the process
takes place under the influence of several other factors. Given this, the key
concern of encoding/decoding model is to identify as to what extent a message
gets decoded away from its ‘preferred’ or dominant meaning. Alongside this,
it also analyses the extent to which such decoding reflect on or is inflected by
the structural discourses that several sections of concerned audience inhabit.
Thus Hall’s theory redefined the activity of audience in two ways—one, it saw
the activity as interpretative rather than psychological and two, it was political
rather than personal.
Scholars like David Morley found this sort of research that was solely textual,
unacceptable and sought to rectify it by empirically investigating how
audiences read and interpret messages. In order to do this Morley adopted
Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to investigate how sets of viewers
belonging to different social and educational backgrounds (what Morley
describes as ‘interpretative communities’) engaged with the British
Nationwide public affairs television program. In this study of text-reader
encounter, Morley was not so much concerned with process of negotiation of
meaning between the text and its reader, but instead using Hall’s model,
examined the phenomenon of encoding and decoding of messages within a
media text by contextualizing the process. In other words audience
ethnography tried to unravel the interaction between the media and its
audience in the natural context where the action occurred. They tried to
understand how viewers create meaning within specific social contexts and
how the audience derive pleasure and make sense of their daily interaction
with their favorite media, television events and characters. The purpose of
audience ethnographic research is to ‘help us to make things out’ in the
context where they take place. Thus according to Morley to understand the use
of media and its engagement with the audience, the researcher should get to
the primary site where this interaction takes place.
Case Study
2. Negotiated Reading: A negotiating reader would say AAP and the efforts
of Aravind Kejriwal are commendable. They are the much needed change
and bring much hope to the jaded Indian politics. There fight against
corruption will surely alert corrupt leaders to be more wary. They have
shown that politics is not just meant for family dynasties but even for the
common man. But having said that, Kejriwal is only a novice in the Indian
politics and to remain in politics you need to master its art. Kejriwal and
his battalion has a long way to go. The spirit of his team is praiseworthy
but I (reader) would vote for someone (in fact surveys suggested that
people wanted Kejriwal as the Chief Minister of Delhi and Modi as the
Prime Minister)who has sufficient experience in governance. After all
what we need urgently is a stable government. But we definitely support
his crusade.
3. Oppositonal Reading: Aravind Keriwal’s politics is nothing but an
outcome of a collective frsutration of the seething Indian populace.
However his party is not the right answer to the nation’s problems.
Kejriwal through his rhetoric against corruption has managed to raise high
hopes in mainstream but their vision is too idealistic and utopian, and
never practically attainable. An ‘aam admi’ can never become a a good
politician as he/she lacks in sufficient skills for the job. Moreover
Kejriwal’s charisma is built on a mass support system, which is only a
temporary phenomenon; whether the nation truly wants a leader like him,
only time will tell. Kejriwal is highly inconsistent and unreliable as he
departed from Anna Hazare and left India Against Corruption movement
in lurch, drawing the media glare onto him by launching a new party. This
despite his earlier promise, that he would never venture into politics. Their
electoral promises are unrealistic and some of their slogans calling for
revolution, border on anarchism. Kejriwal and AAP is nothing but a
fleeting magic, and his party is not the answer to our prayers as it lacks a
long term vision (it confines merely to the issue of corrruption) or a proper
ideology, plus is close to zilch when comes to experience in governance.
Definitely voting for Kejriwal and AAP is a risky proposition.
Audio/Visual Quadrant:
Fig 1
Fig 2
References:
Eichner, Susanne. Agency and Media Reception. Springer VS. 2014. Print.
http://www.museum.tv/eotv/eotv.htm