The Case Study of Sherlock Holmes (2009) - Scholarly Commons ...

two and turn them into action” (Gerbner, 1999, p. x). Gerbner (1999) finds instigation to
be commonly used in commercials; the message is used to instigate an active response
from the viewer, turning them into a consumer. In hindsight, however, after my own
ethnographic journey, instigation does not appear to be a one-way process. Its
commercial function is only successful so long as the recipient is willing to accept and
embrace the instigation. Gerbner (1999) believes that storytelling, “once hand-crafted,
home-made [and] community-inspired … is [now] mostly mass-produced and profit-
driven” (p. ix). As a result, fandom becomes the modern response to storytelling, one
which enables viewers to re-infuse a product with “hand-crafted, home-made,
community-inspired” (Gerbner, 1999, p. ix) elements, and in turn, reclaim the product
and its narrative. I agree with Gray et al. (2007) that “fan consumption has grown into a
taken-for-granted aspect of modern communication and consumption . . . [and that is
why] it warrants critical analysis and investigation more than ever” (p. 9).
Methodological position: The objectivist and relativist debate
“[From] the 1920s . . . through to the . . . controversies of the 1980s and 1990s,
academics and non-academics alike have remained fascinated by the mass media‟s
ability to manipulate the public mind” (Ruddock, 2001, p. 4). At the beginning of my
journey, I needed to address whether I would even be able to capture the process by
which media manipulate their audiences. This led me to consider Ruddock‟s (2001)
summation of Bernstein‟s (as cited in Ruddock, 2001) objectivist and relativist debate
theory:
There is a division between those who argue that we can come to know the truth
about the effects of the media on society because there is a truth that we can
discover through the use of the right measuring tools, and those who would
argue that our images of the media‟s impact on society depend upon the
questions we ask and the methods we use to answer them. That is, our
understanding of the media‟s role in contemporary culture is a product rather
than a discovery. (pp. 4-5)
I agree with Ruddock (2001) that truth is often relative to one‟s perspective; with our
media saturated society a third-person examination of media influence would be almost
impossible. However, I find that each perspective over time must surely contribute to a
genuine understanding of the media‟s effect. Therefore, I believe that our understanding
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