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genre in question, its implied reader positions and associated social uses. Unlike
literary criticism, however, cultural studies are not centred on just high culture,
but on popular cultural discourses as well. Thus, media messages are conceived
of as generically structured discourses which are relevant for audiences in
different cultural and social practices.
With the exception of some recent work (see, for instance, Morley, 1980;
Radway, 1984), cultural studies have not examined empirical audiences, instead
deducing them from media discourses as analytical constructs. Such analyses,
however, are substantiated with extensive reference to the social and historical
context. This context represents a social system of diverse practices which are
said to mediate the flow and interpretation of communication, for example,
through the existence of sub-cultures based on gender, class or ethnicity. This
same social system also helps to generate interpretive strategies supposedly
shared by individuals belonging to specific audience groups or publics which
are referred to as interpretive communities (Fish, 1980; Lindlof, 1988; Jensen,
1990). In this way, cultural studies seek to combine a text-centred perspective
with a social-systemic conception of reception.
Reception analysis has drawn the components of its theoretical framework from
both the humanities and the social sciences. Like cultural studies, reception
analysis speaks of media messages as culturally and generically coded dis-
courses, while defining audiences as agents of meaning production. Like U&G
research, reception analysis conceives of recipients as active individuals who can
do a variety of things with media in terms of consumption, decoding and social
uses. What characterizes reception analysis is, above all, an insistence that studies
include a comparative empirical analysis of media discourses with audience
discourses – content structures with the structure of audience responses regard-
ing content. The results of this analysis are then interpreted with reference to the
surrounding socio-cultural system, which, again, is conceptualized as a histori-
cal configuration of social practices, contexts of use, and interpretive communi-
ties. A common assumption of reception studies is that cultural practices as well
as individual acts of interpretation are relatively autonomous, for example in
relation to political and economic structures. Within this complex theoretical
framework of social semiotics, the question to be addressed empirically by recep-
tion studies is how specific audiences differ in the social production of meaning.
Trying to sum up present theoretical developments in the five research tradi-
tions discussed, we note, first of all, how in all five traditions the audience mem-
bers have come to stand out as increasingly active and selective in their use and
interpretation of mass-media messages. In metaphorical terms, we could say
that audiences, rather than ‘reading out’ messages from media, are seen to ‘read
in’ quite diverse meanings into mass-mediated texts. In classical terms, eisegesis
may be a more important aspect of audience activities than exegesis. At the same
time the social context has also come to appear as ever more important in shap-
ing both audience, mass-media genres and institutions, as well as the interaction
between media and recipients.
Despite such conceptual differentiations within each tradition, however, the
scope of each one of the two main types of theories – oriented towards the
humanities and social science, respectively – stands out as somewhat limited