Media Representations and Audiences

8 Key excerpts on "Media Representations and Audiences"

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  Representing the Environment

  • John R. Gold, George Revill(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Representations in context

  This chapter:

  • examines strategies for studying the audience’s consumption of environmental representations;
  • considers the contexts in which representations are produced;
  • explores the concepts of cultural politics, ideology and discourse;
  • provides a range of basic approaches for the study of the discursive role of representations in society.

  Audiences and the media

  The media occupy a central place in any study of environmental representations. Traditionally, ‘media’ meant the ‘media of mass communication’, by which technologically based systems transmitted content (or messages) through print, broadcasting, posters or film to remote and scattered audiences. More recently, though, the idea of what constitutes ‘media’ has expanded dramatically. If media transmit content in symbolic form to an audience, then architecture, clothes, recorded music, food packaging, jewellery and skin tattoos are legitimately media. Moreover, many new media no longer conform to the established model. The convergence of television, computers, wireless technology, digital networks and mobile telephones brings patterns of use that bear little resemblance to the ‘fireside’ consumption of early radio and television programmes.

  The word ‘consumption’ needs clarification. We stressed the importance of the audience’s active participation in shaping the meaning of environmental representations at the end of Chapter 2 . In this context, it might seem that media research has much to offer, given that audience studies have preoccupied media researchers since the 1920s (McQuail, 1997). Sadly, however, the findings of that research have proven continually disappointing. Researchers have often attempted to trace direct and measurable audience response to communication, usually finishing by either showing no discernible effects or recognising that any effects are very difficult to assess and quantify. The problem lies partly with conceptual understanding and partly with methodology. In terms of the former, researchers reluctantly accept that the media do not function in isolation and that, in most circumstances, any impact that they might have is itself mediated

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  Communication Yearbook 14

  • James A. Anderson(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  reception, mass communication studies of the 1980s began to reexamine some fundamental issues con- cerning the nature and origins of meaning in human communication. Whereas audiences have been the object of continuous and substantial study since the beginnings of the field, current work implies a reconceptualization of mass communication processes as everyday practices producing and circulating meaning in society, particularly emphasizing the constitutive role of audiences as interpretive agents. The attention given to the decoding and social uses of media content has been apparent both in empirical research on audience responses and in cultural studies about media discourses. Further, it has entailed a dialogue across the critical-empirical, qualitative-quantitative boundaries of the field (Jensen, 1987; Jensen & Rosengren, in press; Schröder, 1987). The turn toward reception is, perhaps, most distinctively articulated in the recent tradition of qualitative empirical audience studies (Ang, 1985; Jensen, 1986; Katz & Liebes, 1984; Lindlof, 1987; Lull, 1988b; Morley, 1980, 1986; Radway, 1984), which have accumulated evidence that mass media audiences make their own sense of media content in complex and unexpected ways. Audiences may, to a significant degree, modify or oppose the specific meanings that appear to be proffered by mass media, and may, furthermore, appropriate those meanings for alternative ends as they engage in a questioning and reconstruction of social reality.

  Behind this reconceptualization lies the as yet undeveloped assumption that meaning is simultaneously a social and a discursive phenomenon. On the one hand, meaning may be defined as the outcome of an interest-driven, situated act of interpretation performed by a social agent. This definition locates meaning in the real world of people, power, and pleasures. On the other hand, meaning traditionally is associated with particular vehicles – texts or other discursive forms. Discourse theory may be said to suggest that subjects and social realities are primarily functions of the operations of discourse, so that, for analytical purposes, media audiences should also be conceptualized as discourses or, perhaps, discursive strategies of interpretation. It is this duality of the concept of meaning that may, in part, account for the major ambiguities and conflicts over how to approach communication, both theoretically and methodologically, that have emerged in some recent attempts to take stock of reception analysis (for instance, see Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 5, no. 3, 1988; and Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1988). (The reader may also wish to see Jensen, 1986, Chapter 10

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  Literacy in Multimedia America

  Integrating Media Education Across the Curriculum

  • Ladislaus M Semali(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  To get at the values, interests, and desires in media representations, one has to examine the use of language, or signs and images that stand for or represent things. I suppose to do this is complex simply because the meaning so produced or constructed by representation is not a universal truth or neutral fact and cannot be read in a straightforward manner. As explained in previous chapters, meaning is entangled in social, cultural, economic, and political settings, which preside over the context through which both the reader/viewer and the communicator engage in an exchange and interpretation of messages. Hall (1997) reminds us that when we decide to examine the representation of an event or people, we are in fact entering into the very constitution of things; this is a constitutive process, as important as the economic or material “base” in shaping social subjects and historical events—not merely “a reflection of the world after the event” (p. 5).

  For Hall, therefore, media representation is a way of giving things meaning by how we represent them—the words we use about them, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and conceptualize them, the values we place on them (p. 3). In other words, media representation refers to the way images and language actively construct meanings according to sets of conventions shared by and familiar to makers (producers) and audiences (viewers). In this sense, it is a continuous struggle over meaning.

  CRITICAL LITERACY AND MEDIA LITERACY CURRICULUM

  Critical literacy is a contested educational ideal. Even though “critical” pedagogy has been en vogue for the past fifteen years, scholars continue to question what it means to be critical and how such a concept can be implemented across the curriculum. As I explained in Chapter 3

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  McQuail’s Media and Mass Communication Theory

  • Denis McQuail, Mark Deuze(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Audience as ‘the people addressed’. Referring to the group of people imagined by the communicator and for whom content is shaped. This is otherwise known as the ‘inscribed’ or ‘interpellated’ audience.
• Audience as ‘happening’. The experience of reception alone or with others as an interactive event in daily life, contextualized by place and other features.
• Audience as ‘hearing’ or ‘audition’. Essentially refers to the participatory audience experience, when the audience is embedded in a show or is enabled to participate by remote means or to provide a response at the same time.
There are other possibilities for defining a distinctive kind of audience, depending on the medium concerned, the activity under investigation, and the perspective adopted. Online and mobile media provide for a variety of communicative relations that do not always neatly fit the typologies created for mass communication. Among the key challenges of contemporary audience theories and definitions are the ubiquity of media (leading to a ‘high choice’ media environment), the multi-sited and global spread of media options, and audiences becoming increasingly media-literate, critical and reflexive. Audiences are increasingly drawn into the production process of media industries too, which further complicates their existence as more or less ‘passive’ readers, viewers, listener or users. Correspondingly, as Napoli (2011, 2012) notes, relatively straightforward measuring and valuing audiences merely on the basis of their exposure to media content is making way for more complex ways of measuring and valuing audiences on the basis of their ‘engagement’ with the content.
A fundamental debate regarding the notion of ‘audience’ concerns on the one hand its existence as (a group, network or community of) individuals using, responding and giving meaning to mediated messages, and on the other hand the engagement of people interacting with an open text (incorporating any kind of medium or channel). The first perspective warrants research into media effects, while the second emphasizes various processes of interpretation, struggle and resistance.