Page 45 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

36 Cultural change and ordinary life

There are a number of problems with this paradigm, including its
restricted understanding of social life, its inattention to power relations and its
lack of attention to the textual nature of media products. The behavioural
paradigm was extensively criticized by the ‘critical’ approach to audience
study (Hall 1980), or what can be termed the incorporation/resistance
paradigm.
The incorporation/resistance paradigm, based on a sophisticated Marxist
theory of capitalist and class exploitation, took power in society as crucial. The
unequal structuring of society, especially in the earlier work done within its
parameters in terms of class, but subsequently with respect to gender, race and
age, was at the heart of the analysis. Its key research problem (with respect
to audiences) concerned the extent to which and ways in which such social
structuring and social location influenced the decoding of media texts. Media
form and content have thus been reconsidered as text, rather than media
messages or stimuli, in ideological terms. A critical research issue in this para-
digm therefore is the extent to which audiences incorporated by dominant
ideologies in media texts or to what degree they are able to resist them.
Influential studies carried out in this context examined the forms of
incorporation to, negotiation with and opposition to dominant or preferred
meanings in the main in ideological terms (Morley 1980). However, while a
number of problems with this approach were recognized rapidly (Morley
1981) such as the tendency to overemphasize the coherence of the response to
different texts, often in accord with one of the social bases, such as class or
gender, or to conflate an active response to media with a critical one, the
paradigm was hugely influential in audience research in the 1980s and 1990s.
It had set the context for ‘normal science’ and ‘puzzle solving’. The problem is
that the findings from this normal science (as well as social and cultural
changes) destabilized the paradigm. Empirical studies should have led to a
potential questioning of their initial premises as interpretation was becoming
increasingly strained. In this context, these empirical findings and changed
audience processes can better be understood in the context of a new paradigm
for audience research.
The argument for the spectacle/performance paradigm (SPP) rests on
ideas that both audiences and conceptualizations of the audience were
changing. It can be argued that there are three different and coexisting types of
audience: simple, mass and diffused. The simple audience as exemplified by
that at a theatre or at a sports event involves: relatively direct communication
from performers to audience; a performance that takes place in a confined
locale; and high ceremony as it is a special event, within a ritualized setting
that is highly meaningful for participants. The performance and the audience
response are public events and performers are separated from the audience by
physical or social boundaries. The attention level of the audience with respect
to the performance is high.
Mass audiences come with increasingly mediated communication. The
best example of a mass audience is for television, although popular music
and film also have mass audiences. Communication is highly mediated as
the performance takes place a long way from the audience spatially and
is now usually recorded at an earlier time and place. The text is edited for