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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
Cultural studies, especially their approaches developed in the field of media
studies, conducted by Stuart Hall and David Morley (as well as other scholars
engaged in this school of thought) are of crucial importance in the understanding of
the aforementioned concept of media audiences. In this mode of understanding of the
complex nature of media and communication, the old paradigm – according to which
media represent mere channels of dissemination of information and messages of
information communication – is replaced by a new paradigm within which media
play an important role in the construction of reality; however, with various modes of
reception. The accent is thus transposed from the question of media effects and media
manipulation to the question of meaning, interpretation and reception of media texts.
In his seminal text Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse published in
1973 (“encoder” being the producer of the message, and “decoder” being the “reader”
of the message), Stuart Hall defines three possible responses to text – dominant mode
(accepting the preferred reading created by the author), negotiated mode (questioning
attitude, with partial acceptance) and the oppositional mode (rejecting the
message). 12 These different modes of “reading” the message showed that an active
relation between media content/text and media audiences occurred. Because
messages are interpreted and “read” differently, depending on the social context and
the individual, personal experience of the “reader”, the media audience could no
longer be comprehended in a singular form, but in the plural. In addition, the analysis
of particular media practices showed diverse modes of media usage in the context of
everyday practice. One scholar who has, perhaps, gone furthest in highlighting the
creativity of audiences is John Fiske, who argues that the audiences create the
meaning that they want or need out of TV programmes. In his view, audience power
is strong and they are capable of redirecting the meaning of the media in progressive
or recalcitrant ways, partly because media content is accessible to divergent
interpretations and also because the market pressure forces the media to connect to
the social experience of people (Fiske in Curran and Morley, 2006: 136-137).
Audiences respond selectively to the media by drawing upon the social discourse of
their everyday world.
There were certainly other approaches to media studies at the time: the “Uses and
Gratification Theory” also placed the audiences in focus, but from a rather
individualist perspective. The theory, developed in the 1960s by Elihu Katz (USA)
12 David Morley was the first to empirically test this encoding/decoding model in the study
first conducted in 1978, with Charlotte Brunsdon: Everyday Television “Nationwide”. The
second project was conducted by Morley, two years later in “Nationwide” Audiences, in
which Morley explored how media output was decoded by groups with diverse social
backgrounds and socio-demographic marks (more specifically race, party-political
orientation, class, gender and ethnicity). These are two important examples of studies that
have had a tremendous impact on further audience reception research in which the active
and creative potentials of audiences have been put forward.
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