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Five Traditions in Search of the Audience 59

Three constituents of such processes are of particular relevance for audience
studies: message, audience and social system, or – in the terminology of the
humanities – text/discourse, recipient and context.
Typically, the tradition of effects research tends to conceive of media messages as
symbolic stimuli having recognizable and measurable physical characteristics.
While originally the interest was often focused on isolated, undifferentiated
stimuli – for example, an act of violence or a programme classified as ‘violent’ –
the insight has gradually grown stronger that what must be studied are configu-
rations of stimuli and stimuli differentiated according to context-oriented theory.
An example is successful versus unsuccessful violence, committed by provoked
or unprovoked agents, against powerful or weak victims. In short, wholes of dif-
ferentiated stimuli have come to take the place of single, undifferentiated stimuli,
the composition of the wholes and the type of differentiation being guided by for-
malized theories (Bradac, 1989; Bryant and Zillmann, 1986; Schenk, 1987).
On the audience side, a similar differentiation has taken place. Effects theories
presently much in vogue – like for example, Gerbner’s ‘cultivation theory’
(Signorielli and Morgan, 1989), or Noelle-Neumann’s ‘spiral of silence’ (1983) –
predict and find very different effects for audience members with different social
and/or individual characteristics. Also the social context (macro, mezzo and
micro) surrounding the communication process has been given increased atten-
tion. For instance, the spiral of silence has been shown to operate only under
certain societal and communicative conditions (Noelle-Neumann, 1983, 1988).
Similarly, cultivation effects have been shown to be different in different social
surroundings and media systems (Melischeck et al., 1984; Signorielli and Morgan,
1989). To take a very specific example: effects of television viewing on children’s
and adolescents’ social interaction with peers and family members have been
shown to be radically different in the USA of the 1950s and in Sweden of the 1980s
(Rosengren and Windahl, 1989). [...]
The majority of studies within literary criticism have focused on the structure
of literary messages, or works. Traditionally, the literary work is seen as a rule-
governed configuration of linguistic and rhetorical structures which in the
aggregate make up genres as defined in aesthetics or hermeneutics (Frye, 1957;
Eagleton, 1983). It is interesting to note that – for literary criticism as well as for
effects research – meaning is taken to be immanent in content structures. While
both specific texts and genres may give rise to different interpretations, literary
analysis may be said to provide the appropriate response according to literary
tradition or, alternatively, it may suggest a new, more insightful reading, some-
times from the viewpoint of an implied reader. Hence, the reader is most often
a critical construct to be deduced from literary discourse or tradition. When
empirical readers are studied, attention is frequently focused on individual read-
ings or general sociological or psychological aspects of literary meaning rather
than historically or demographically specific recipients. The social system in
which literature is produced, then, is most often present as an abstract frame-
work of the analysis, or sometimes as ‘historical background’ provided in an
introductory section.
Work in cultural studies, similarly, focuses on the actual message or discourse
of communication. Like literary criticism it also pays special attention to the