Page 28 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

INTRODUCTION 17

complex and problematic character of audiences (cf. Allor 1989 and the
responses to him in the same issue, and Erni 1989). All the same, it may
well be easier, both conceptually and empirically, to deal with
audiences, rather than publics, but we should be clear about the
relationship between them.
The last decade has witnessed an enormous development in media
reception studies and other forms of qualitative audience research,
which helps to fuse the moment of being an audience member with other
social practices which may be relevant for the constitution of publics.
This work, falling mostly within the broad field of Cultural Studies, has
had the encouraging consequences of emphasizing the active sense-
making processes of audience members, both in terms of social
interaction and media decoding. Such research has intertwined the
domains of social and cultural practices together with the textual, via an
emphasis on language, consciousness and subjectivity as constitutive
elements of social reality. (For some recent surveys of this large
literature, and overviews of the theoretical and methodological issues,
see Morley 1989, Moores 1990, Höijer 1990, Silverstone 1990, Jensen
and Jankowski 1991.)
In terms of understanding media output and the media audience
interface, these developments, together with current lines of inquiry in
the humanities generally, help us get beyond some of the rationalistic
premises of Habermas. We see now a strong tendency to problematize
and emphasize such issues as—to indulge in an orgy of alliteration—
representation, realism, ritual, reception and resistance. To this we can
add polysemy and the pluralistic subject. These concerns are often
associated with postmodernist positions, but it seems that by now the
debates are beginning to lose some of their character of trench warfare
and that these developments are contributing to the further refinement
of critical and interpretive orientations (e.g. Hall 1986, Wellmer 1986,
Kellner 1989a, b). For example, such themes as pleasure and resistance
(De Certeau 1984 and Fiske 1987a, b), combining critical and
postmodern sensibilities, now move to the fore, even in relation to such
ostensibly rational discourses as news programmes.
The a priori distinction between, say, information and entertainment
becomes highly problematic from the standpoint of audience sense-
making. (Media culture itself seems to be catching up with media
theory, as we witness an increasing mélange of traditional genres, e.g.
the pervasive ‘infotainment’.) These newer intellectual currents alert us
to important considerations such as the subject as a site of negotiation
and contestation. Meaning is thus never fully fixed. Incorporating this