Media Reception Studies

Janet Staiger

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814708545
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media.

Janet Staiger traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. She offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. She explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory in spectatorship.

Providing an organized and lucid introduction to a staggering amount of work, Media Reception Studies is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding the effects of mass media.

1

Introduction

The history of reception studies begins at the moment speakers attempted to figure out what listeners might understand about messages. Hoping to influence, persuade, or merely enlighten their audiences, speakers needed to know whether or not their intentions matched interpretations and whether those interpretations would produce the hoped-for outcome in the other people. Rhetorical studies provides an excellent survey of theories and tactics for communicating ideas to narrow the gap between expectations and consequences. Literary studies has as well a history of speculation about these desires.

This book will present the dominant theories and findings in contemporary media studies focused primarily on fictional film and television, although these theories and findings have application to nonfictional texts and, with some revisions, to other media such as popular music, literary texts, and comics. This book’s purpose is to provide one mapping of the field that might give directions for travel to others attracted to the landscape. Centuries of humanistic thought about oral and written communications have influenced what media studies offers. The introduction of social scientific approaches to individuals in a communications environment also has produced a variety of theories and approaches to audience analysis. Yet, because of both the addition of moving images to messages and the mass commodification of very powerful combinations of audiovisual materials, media studies has been a magnet during the past century for contemplation around questions of audiences and effects of communication.

In turn, media studies has influenced rhetorical, literary, and social scientific scholarship with its research on implications of the gaze, representations of sexuality and violence, and easy access to images and texts by children and all classes and cultures. Every few years from at least 1915 in the United States, individuals have sought at a federal level to regulate moving images. This drive to control exists in every country (see, for instance, Kuhn, 1988). In discussing moral panics, Martin Barker (1998:137) points out that concerned citizens tend to create “others” for portions of the society. These others are “incomprehensible and dangerous”; they are vulnerable (and need protection) or monstrous (and require control).

Obviously, media reception is an area of public policy that requires thoughtful research and wise counsel to balance free speech rights with social needs. This brief introductory chapter will provide some initial terminology and concepts that will interweave throughout the rest of the book. While some of these definitions and schemata may seem far from the most pertinent issue of what spectators do with media (or media do to them), I hope you will bear with me.

Definitions and Implications of Reception Studies

Terry Eagleton refers to reception studies as “a social and historical theory of meaning” (1983:107), while Jonathan Culler, describing one theorist’s approach, explains that it “is not a way of interpreting works but an attempt to understand their changing intelligibility by identifying the codes and interpretative assumptions that give them meaning for different audiences at different periods” (1981:13). As Wolfgang Iser puts it in one of my favorite characterizations, “The ‘stars’ in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable” (1972:282).

All these definitions of the field underline that reception studies is not a hermeneutics or truth-finding of the meaning of the text. The enterprise it engages is historical and theoretical. It asks, How does a text mean? For whom? In what circumstances? With what changing values over time? Reception studies does not presume a meaning as an essence to be extracted by an insightful critic. Such a position is not to suggest that a text does not exist: stars are there. Nor does asking about how a text is meaningful to various readers imply that texts do not have effects on their readers or viewers. What the meanings are for readers may be quite pertinent to their behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. So reception studies asks, What kinds of meanings does a text have? For whom? In what circumstances? With what changes over time? And do these meanings have any effects? Cognitive? Emotional? Social? Political?

In this book, I will use spectator, reader, viewer, and audience interchangeably. Other scholars have debated the implications of each of these terms (Bennett, 1996; Blumer, 1996:100–101). Vocabulary matters, but in casual usage I will treat the terms as compatible. Most of the research and debate does not hinge on distinctions among these words.

What does matter is the value of this research for the social world. Klaus Bruhn Jensen (1987:23) emphasizes that research on media audiences is of consequence to political and socioeconomic research. Moreover, the question of media meanings and effects is particularly one of judgment and evaluation. I would ask, Why is it that almost always it is “bad” effects that consume public attention and policy? Perhaps we should pay more attention to the apparent good effects of media, such as teaching young children reading at an early age or marshaling youth to care about civil rights or informing all citizens about political controversies. Indeed, the evaluation of effects is significant for all social and political views. Both conservative and progressive individuals want to know about outcomes from engagements with movies and television. For instance, Étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey declare, “‘The least one can ask of a Marxist theory is that it begin to produce real transformations, practical effects, either in the means of production of literary texts and art works, or in the manner in which they are socially consumed’” (quoted in Kuentz, 1976:92).

Implications of reception studies research also include related judgments about valuable (or not) texts. Once reception studies theorized variable meanings, it also “open[ed] the door to rewriting literary history and to redefining the literary canon” (Silberman, 1984:250). No natural, universally “worthwhile” texts exist. All interpretations are subjective, and all texts have political and social meanings and values—“positive” or “negative,” “reinforcing” or contrary to the beliefs of their various readers.

Reception studies scholarship also points out that these variable tastes and the canons of the laudable must be debated in new ways. Lawrence Levine has written an extremely influential study of the division of taste cultures into highbrow and lowbrow in which he notes that this split in American culture in the 1880s produced a “sacralization,” a reverence for some works (such as Shakespeare’s plays), and “increased the distance between amateur and professional” (1988:139). Audiences with education in certain sorts of culture learned particular ways to engage that culture, often deemed “correct,” versus the “untutored” audiences who either had no skills to access that culture or responded in ways the educated audiences considered inadequate.

While earlier divisions (regional, class, and so forth) among American citizens were significant, any division has political implications. As Ian Angus explains, any division of culture produces two issues for all democracies: “the monopolization of access to relevant social knowledge” and “the inability of listeners to transform themselves into speakers” (1993:233). Thus, in a situation in which owners and managers of culture industries have monopolies by which to express themselves and to be labeled the “professionals,” Angus argues that we must insist that the “right to speak” be equal to the “right to be heard.” So-called amateurs can be closed out of the public sphere, with their tastes and values diminished as secondary to the preferences of only part of the social formation. Free speech is now being argued as necessarily including equal access to make heard the speech of the listeners.

Thus, reception studies is not just about the consumption of media messages but also about access to producing them. As I shall discuss in chapters about fans and minorities, the articulation of personal reactions to mass media is part of the field of research. Reception studies matters for our individual and our social and political lives. It is a particularly pragmatic field even if at times reaching specific conclusions is difficult.

General Theories beneath Media Reception Studies

Media reception studies turns to the same sorts of theories for human behavior and history as do most social sciences. It looks to political science and linguistics. It relies heavily on psychological and sociological propositions developed during the past century. Throughout this book, I will refer occasionally to these theories as underpinning a more detailed proposition about media reception and effects. While I believe my understandings of these theories are typical, a short outline of what I mean will probably facilitate communication. I turn first to psychological theories and then to sociological ones.

Three lines of psychological research have dominated twentieth-century psychology. Although Wilhelm Wundt’s introspectionism turned philosophical investigation of the mind into experimental science, the first strong contender for a theory of how the individual responds to the social world is behaviorism. While most people associate behaviorism with the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, his theory involved certain mental categorizing. Rather, behaviorism uses the notions of conditioning and of stimulus and response to found a positivist approach usually attributed to J. B. Watson. Successors include B. F. Skinner and Albert Bandura. Behaviorists argue that because scientists have no direct access to the individual’s mind or experiences, we should investigate behavior that is observable. Thinking and affect are interpreted as implicit behavior. What is considered is visible stimulus-response behavior. The proposition is that a stimulus (S) produces a feeling or attitude (Rf) that produces an action response (Ra). Conditions exist for responses. The stimulus has to be at a threshold for the subject to perceive it. Factors can contribute to or interfere with an S/R relation. Repetition should improve the response rate. Contradictory stimuli decrease the probability of a response. Systems may be self-regulating.

This point-to-point model is atomized, as if the world were always in a simple mode. It also easily permits statistical output. One of the main problems with behaviorism is that it has no large-scale theory of learning complex ideas. However, some communication theorists have used it. As I shall discuss in chapter 2, post–World War II mass communication scholars applied it to argue that fears of threats from propaganda were exaggerated. Changing people’s opinions was not an easy task. Behaviorism has also underpinned much of the social science research on possible media effects from watching violence or sexually explicit materials (see chapter 7).

The second major psychological theory is psychoanalysis. This is a depth model of the individual. A simple depth thesis would assume that the individual has a consciousness. However, psychoanalysis is a complex depth model because it holds that individuals develop an unconscious as well. Moreover, distortions in associations of ideas exist, although these distortions are organized in relation to an individual’s experiences with the social world. Scholars widely use Sigmund Freud’s story of the typical development of a heterosexual male in Anglo-European culture as a touchstone for how such an unconscious develops and what might be characteristic distortions (castration anxiety, fetishisms).

The usual complaints about psychoanalysis are the difficulty in verifying the individual’s unconscious representations, the generalization of the typical story, the negative portrayal of women (as inferior to men), and the unclear theorization of same-sex desires for men and women. Still, the power of the theory to explain bodily symptoms, affective responses, and (at least) heterosexual male actions in an Anglo-European context has made it a favorite of communication scholars, with the theory dominating film studies for several decades (see chapter 3).

Cognitive psychology is the third psychological theory. Coming out of research in Gestalt psychology, Soviet psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence, this approach has improved in power over the past forty years as a theory of human consciousness. Employing the proposition that individuals develop schemata (mental scripts, frameworks, prototypes, templates) from social experience, cognitive psychology has recently attempted to overcome the criticism that it focused nearly entirely on thinking and had little to contribute to understanding affect. With an increased attention to emotion, cognitive psychology is a strong competitor with psychoanalysis. Some individuals see the two theories as potentially able to be merged (Rosenfield, 1985; Damasio, 1994). Scholars in both social sciences and cultural studies use cognitive psychology (see chapters 2 and 3).

The other major theories are sociological ones that focus on the individual within a social group. Ultimately, this is much like any figure/ground problem. In looking at the optical illusion of a woman or a vase, what one sees depends on which is foregrounded: here, the social unit or the individual. In social theory, scholars analyze both institutional and informal groups for how they come together, are maintained, or dissolve and how individuals function within such groups. The rules governing the behavior in the group (norms), the relative status and duties of the group members (roles), the kind and amount of control that members have over each other (power), the degree of attachment (cohesion) to the group, and the degree of agreement (consensus) are typical matters for attention.

Two major perspectives typify social theory: functionalist and conflict theory, characterized by their views of the fundamental nature of society. Functionalist theory assumes that society is primarily harmonious. Homogeneous values produce a basic consensus. Shared culture shapes social structures. Functionalists focus on what produces stability and continuity in a society. Conflict theory (often produced out of a Marxist or other radical perspective) operates from the premise that society is conflictual. Heterogeneous values exist, primarily because individuals are not equal in power or do not have equal material resources. Dominant and subordinate groups battle over norms and resources, with dominant groups seeking to engineer consent through producing representational systems that may attempt to convince subordinated individuals to adopt beliefs and perspectives that ultimately are not in their best interest (hegemony). Conflict theory focuses on what produces change or alterations in society.

These theories produce recurring debates. These debates include claims about:

• Inherent, essential, or innate processes versus learned or ideological ones.

• Universal processes versus group processes versus individual processes. Group processes include the issues of “identities,” which are complexly organized for some theorists into “communities” with possible sociological hierarchies and functions for the individuals within the group or for others in “matrixes of domination.”

• The spectator being “active” or “passive,” “normative” or “resistant”; or generally around questions of “agency” (who or what is in control or has what kinds of power).

• Whether the individual or the text explains the meanings made and any effects. This debate produces four models of the individual/text relation: education, reinforcement, mediation, and power (see chapter 2).

• Sources of causality. The four models of the individual/text relation produce different subquestions about foundational causes for the relation. In the case of those models that assume great influence from the text, scholars focus on what the nature of the text is and what the viewers will do as a consequence. When the models give some or great agency to individuals, researchers consider what the source of the readers’ power is and how variable the readers may be. For theorists who consider historical context as well, research broadens into what contextual factors in history produced the features of spectators.

• The place(s) of cognition and emotion in the process.

• Metaphors to describe the interpretive event. These metaphors imply specific theories.

• Methodological maneuvers.

These recurring debates generally reduce to differences in theories of the psychological individual and the individual in society. The theories also tend to associate with particular methods. Consequently, although in the next chapters I will not address every one of these debates for every theory of meaning-making and effect, I will try to summarize notions of (1) the psychological individual, (2) the social individual, and (3) the preferred methods of research.

Media communication research is a history of debates over not only functionalist versus conflict sociological perspectives and theories of the psychological individual but also the philosophical premises about research that underpin inquiry. Empiricism, positivism, materialism, idealism—each of these epistemologies also produces schisms and debates. As I shall discuss in chapter 2, these psychological and social theories employ four different models of the relation between individuals and media representations. No simple correspondence exists among the theories. Psychoanalysis has been combined with both functionalism and critical sociology, and so on. Yet all researchers are seeking to explain media reception and effects. What is the place of how we think of our selves as individuals and our imagined communities in our media experiences? How does our engagement with media provide an ability to reflect on culture and society, and our continuity with or distance from them? Do we have agency in our media consumption, our reception, and our actions? If so, how? All these questions matter for public policy, as I shall discuss particularly in chapters 6 and 7.

The Methods of Research and Textual Analysis

Certainly one of the earliest and still the most prevalent method for finding evidence about the reception of media texts is scholarly analysis of written and oral texts from which the critics then make claims about what readers do. (Readers always make the meanings that the critics want them to turn out!) Initially applied to novels, poetry, speeches, and theatrical performances, the textual methods of literary and rhetorical analysis have the common attribute of considering a speaker’s or writer’s expression of words to audiences of one or many. Beyond this common research method of textual analysis, many differences exist.

As I outlined in Interpreting Films (1992), presumptions about how meaning is determined can vary from theses that the texts’ characteristics are the most important feature to propositions that the readers or the context is what matters when people experience media. Examples of contemporary “text-activated” theorizing are found in the work of textual critics as seemingly diverse as Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Gérard Genette, Michael Riffaterre, Meir Sternberg, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser. I include in the “reader-activated” category the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Social Scientific Theories
• 3 Linguistic and Cultural Studies Theories
• 4 Fans and Fan Behaviors
• 5 Viewers of Stars, Cult Media, and Avant-Garde
• 6 Minorities and Media
• 7 Violence, Horror, and Sexually Explicit Images
• 8 Memories
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author