Reappraising Reception Studies: Understanding Audiences' Interpretation of Media Content, Slides of Media & Society

Download Reappraising Reception Studies: Understanding Audiences' Interpretation of Media Content and more Slides Media & Society in PDF only on Docsity!

Presentation Topic

Reappraising Reception:

Aims, Concepts and Methods

Mass Media and Society – II

Course Code: 5762

Presented By:

Faiza Siddique

MPhil Mass Communication

Semester Autumn 2021

 Reappraising means "to examine a situation or activity again in

order to make changes to it”

 Reception means “the action or process of receiving something

sent or given.”

 Reappraising reception means “ audiences' sense-making of

media content in context, how audiences interpret the messages

of media.

 “Reception studies are a particular kind of audience research,

distinctive in the amount of interest they show in questions to do

with the symbolic and discursive organization of media output and

those processes of meaning production by which understanding,

significance and pleasure are generated. Simply it can be said that

reception is the way in which media messages are received. "

 (^) During the 1970s, work at the Birmingham Centre had, under the directorship of Stuart Hall, moved further away from its origins in literary cultural criticism towards a more politicized analysis of capitalist culture.  (^) For its 'macro' theories this analysis drew extensively on structuralist Marxism while for its study of cultural products it was influenced strongly by the complementary ideas of semiotics.  (^) The result was an intensive focus on how media forms and meanings contributed to the reproduction of ideology and thereby served to sustain the relations of inequality and of oppression upon which the capitalist economic system depended.  (^) ‘Ideology’ was itself the subject of lengthy definitional dispute, but what the term pointed to was the largely hidden patterns of meaning and value which, it was claimed, served to make what might seem to be 'politically innocent' cultural forms (e.g. a newspaper travel feature, a film comedy, a sports bulletin) into communications uncritically supportive of existing systems of power.

 (^) Such an approach in part reflected structuralist-influenced work going on elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, where links between language and politics and between culture and power were being newly explored.  (^) Unlike much social scientific analysis, it was an approach which registered the complexity and the multilayering of images and words and accorded discourse a constitutive importance - (it was not to be seen as simply expressing (correctly or otherwise) pre-existing social reality, it was an important part of the fabric of that reality. Indeed, the formation of individual identity was itself largely seen to be a product of representation.  (^) The view of media-audience relations which followed from structuralist Marxist theory was one often trading heavily on assumptions. Compared with the new 'ideology critique' researchers in the social science tradition may often have had some rather crude ideas about what ‘influence' was, but they usually went to considerable efforts in attempting to check things out from the point of view of audience members themselves.

 He empirically open up to the question of how the ideological

effects of media output were or were not secured.

 The paper undertook to 'reconceptualize' the media audience

both in relation to the unsatisfactoriness of current ideological

analysis and the inability of social science research to engage

with questions of meaning.

 Ranging suggestively across a number of studies of class,

meaning and power) and drawing on Stuart Hall's emerging

ideas about 'encoding' and 'decoding” relationships in media

communication, it put forward the case for ‘mapping the

audience by adopting some of the principles of ethnography

that is to say by giving serious address to the detail and the

contexts of ordinary people's engagement with television.

 (^) Encoding : “Media text is produced by producers means whoever produces the text fills the product with desired values and message.”  (^) Decoding: “The text received from media is decoded by spectators in their own interpretive way”  (^) Ethnography: “The scientific description of peoples and cultures with their customs, habits and mutual differences.”  (^) That is to say, ‘analyzing reception' was not to be a matter of checking out whether or not audience members had managed to get the meaning of items but, instead, a matter of looking at the different meanings which they constructed from items. Such an emphasis considerably loosened up the model of ideological communication.

 In his Nationwide study, Morley gave these ideas application.

 He took the "question of ideology' as it related to the

complexities of news signification and engaged directly with the

matter of just how sample audiences understood and evaluated

what they saw and heard.

 He did the latter by convening what were, in effect, 'focus groups'

a method which, in its basic format, had already been extensively

used both in social science and in market research.

 Small groups of people were brought together to view and then

discuss media materials. The researcher chaired the session,

raising questions and pursuing follow-up queries. The sessions

were taped, and the transcripts were the subject of interpretation

by the researcher, who sought to identify diagnostically the

assumptions and associations at work in respondent accounts as

well as noting their explicit descriptions and assessments.

 (^) This diagnostic element(imputing underlying interpretative positions to viewers; ones which were neither articulated nor, perhaps, even available to consciousness) gave the project an extra element of methodological risk-taking, in addition to the more familiar problems of sociological sampling and data categorization.  (^) However, it was a necessary and productive part of the attempt to reconnect developing theories about media meaning and the reproduction of power relations with actual, situated instances of viewing and interpretation. Morley's work has acted as the single most important point of reference for the 'reception studies' strand of inquiry.

Public Knowledge Project

 The 'public knowledge' project involves a primary concern with the

production and dissemination of information throughout a society.

 News, current affairs and documentary-style programmes are key

categories here, though by no means the only ones.

 Research tends to be focused on specific themes (e.g., war

coverage, economic news, policy issues and realms of public

concern such as health).

 The treatment (sample group) tends naturally to have a strongly

cognitive character; that is, it is concerned with what people know

and how they know it.

 Book length studies would include Morley (1980), Jensen (1986),

Corner et al. (1990), Livingstone and Lunt (1994).

Popular Culture Project

 Those working within the terms of the popular culture' project are

primarily concerned with the patterns of tastes and pleasures to

be found in contemporary media output and use, and with how

these patterns connect with more general factors to do with

wealth, social class and the variables of disposition and opinion.

 A far broader range of media products is included here, with

considerable importance being given to dramatic and

entertainment genres. Though a concern with 'social knowledge

the primary aim is to find out what people like and why. Book

length studies here would include Radway (1984), Ang (1985),

and Press (1991).

 (^) There are three main aims which have been variously pursued by reception researchers. These are:

1. Confirmation of the effective transmission of dominant political and cultural values;
2. The counter-evidencing' to this of levels of immunity and/or resistance among audiences; and
3. The indication of complexity and variety in of mediated meanings. It is also worth pointing out that these aims indicate only the underlying hypotheses pursued.

Propagation of Dominant Values  (^) The concept of Ideology has been central to a concern with the media as acting in the interest of the powerful by disguising, displacing, mystifying political and social inequalities.  (^) The questions posed for research then become ones about the 'reproduction' of ideology - how its effects are exerted upon media readerships and audiences, who attend to the media of their own free will and derive their 'own' pleasures and understanding from so doing. The most direct and crude theory of reproduction has often been called the 'false consciousness' theory.  (^) Certain ways of looking at the world and of evaluating it are virtually 'implanted in them by the sheer representational

 (^) From this perspective, the question would be: 'Given that people work to make meanings from what they see and hear using their various interpretative schemas, how is it that what they finally end up making is so often conducive to maintaining inequalities and is so often antagonistic to clear, critical analysis of the way things are?’ A schema is a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information.  (^) The broader concern with the social distribution of interpretative schemes and frameworks of understanding fits in better with theories, such as those. Gramsci about 'hegemony' (Gramsci, 1968),which attempt a more subtle explanation than 'false consciousness' affords of just how the political regulation of meaning and value is achieved at specific historical moments. Theories of 'hegemony', about the complexity of the competing social forces out of whose competition and combination a (temporary) dominance is achieved by one group.

Counter Evidencing of Immunity / Resistance  (^) This more recent goal of reception studies, arising partly out of perceive problems (theoretical and empirical) with the one discussed already, places its emphasis with a significant difference. Rather than positing an audience the media politically and culturally victimized by the strategic appeal and then seeking to determine the limits of this process, it suggests not only that things are more complex but that they are a good deal healthier. Either through a skepticism or an active opposition to certain dominant media formats or political/cultural values (most likely a mix of both), audiences are hypothesized to be subjecting media output to a whole range of interpretative transformations. Some of these are self-