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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. 50
Media users: from readership to co-creators and Jay Blumler (UK), emphasized the audiences role by questioning what individuals do with the media, instead of questioning “what do media do to the individual” 13 as previously in focus. Here too, an active role was given to the audiences, viewed as heterogeneous, in their diverse media uses and various gratifications gained by choosing particular media outputs. Hence, the initial phase in the 1960s and the further development in the 1970s and 1980s was a period in which the notion of an active, creative audience was established in opposition to the previously mentioned pessimistic interpretation of the negative effects of electronic media. With this swing – from the effects of media messages created by elites and the withdrawal from the public realm to the private, to the various modes of media reception derived by the audiences, and an active role of media audiences – a logical move occurred in relation to the earlier distinction between “high” versus “low” culture. Instead of this, a more inclusive and affirmative approach to mass culture emerged, which also included a change of focus from the role of the media in the public sphere and citizens debating political matters to the entertaining role of the media and the audiences role as consumers of media products. The dichotomy of media audiences as the public, and media audiences as a market category has been scrutinized by Ian Ang (1991). These two alternative approaches are connected to two major institutional models of the media: as public services and as commercial enterprises. According to the first model, media audiences are composed of citizens who want to be informed, educated and entertained, within the framework of the democratic role of the media. In this sense, this model could be labelled the classical, following the aforementioned concepts of the public sphere and publicity pushed forward by Habermas. On the other hand, the actual, dominant market model of media audiences, lead by profit interests of the media owners, conceived the audiences primarily as potential consumers sold to the marketing agencies. Commercial media seek well-defined recognizable slices or fragments of the audiences, as different from the former indecisive mass audience, which are then used for profit-making. A good example for this thesis is the well known serial Star Trek, which never had a large audience, but the producers discovered that the average profile of a regular viewer of Star Trek is a successful business man, single, young, 13 An approach focusing on “what the media do to the audience” (more specifically television) was also developed in the late 1960s and 1970s but with a focus on long-term consequences (as different from media effects). George Gerbner established the “Cultivation Theory” based on the Cultural Indicators Project, within which a database was created of information related to the interconnection of media content, media policy and media audiences. Gerbner’s research showed that long-term exposure to specific media messages cultivated specific values and worldviews of individuals in accordance with the values displayed in the media. 51
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