Page 55 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Aud ence Power to Res st

often been criticized for underestimating the mental capacities of youth and
children in particular, but also for a patriarchal elitism that frequently posits
women and the “uneducated” working classes as easily influenced, with images
of screaming teenage pop music fans, obsessed soap opera fans, and high school
dropouts who believe anything the television says, working to assure the rest
of us that we are a sage, enlightened group. Many allegations of media effects
therefore mask culturally based attacks on taste, whereby it is others’ media that
worry us, not our own.
The fact is, though, that many media messages are far less persuasive. If media
messages were more successful, and if media audiences were as gullible as some
critics contend, complaints from the advertising industry of the difficulty of per-
suading consumers would be nonexistent. Instead, after any television ad break,
all viewers would feel the need to buy everything advertised and we would simi-
larly feel the need to wear everything we see stars wearing, and to behave exactly
as our favorite film and television characters behave. The absence of “total effects,”
and the complex nature of media effects is further illustrated when millions of
high schoolers who watch gory horror films, play violent video games, and lis-
ten to countercultural music, for instance, exhibit no need or desire to engage
in mass murder. Many audience members resist thousands of media messages
weekly.

ThE “aCTivE auDiEnCE”
Belief in the freedom of audiences to read against the grain of media mes-
sages came to a head with the work of media theorist John Fiske. Fiske posed
that audiences are “active,” by which he meant that we actively make sense of all
that we consume, thinking through what the messages mean, choosing what to
accept and what to reject, rather than watching passively, mindlessly accepting
everything that comes our way, as if the media injected their messages into us
with a virtual hypodermic needle. Whereas a belief in media effects looks at the
construction of a message, and then its journey to the consumer via a process
that oftentimes suggests that the consumer is a mere receptacle, a belief in active
audiences looks at the consumer first, as an individual who approaches a media
message with certain desires and needs, thus suggesting that individuals have
control over media messages, not vice versa.
The process of media consumption can also be seen as communal and social,
not just individual. Thus, instead of seeing both media message and consumer
as isolated in a vacuum together, we should realize that many messages are dis-
cussed afterwards (or beforehand), thereby subjecting them to scrutiny. Many
studies of media effects find that effects are strongest immediately following
consumption, meaning that when audience members stop to talk or think about
media messages, the effects often diminish. Media effects studies are also often
conducted in artificial environments, hence overlooking the corrective effects of
familial or friend discussion and debriefing. Media literacy helps us to see the
strategies and patterns behind media messages, and with so much everyday talk
being about the media, we often share our media literacy with others, ensuring