Page 135 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

124 Chapter Four

When “minimal effects”—belied by methodological problems, conflicting
evidence (as provided by Hovland, Lasswell, Gerbner, and many others), and
its overdrawn conclusions—finally waned as mainstream doctrine by the late
1960s, another theory, namely uses and gratifications, promptly took its
place. Actually, audience uses and gratifications had been studied by Lazars-
feld in the 1940s as a way of helping clients garner larger audiences. In the
1960s, though, it blossomed from being merely a market research tool into
becoming “one of the most popular theories of mass communication.” 40
Simpson attributed this remarkable renewal and ascendance to a 1959 paper
by RAND Corporation researcher W. Phillips Davison. 41 In any event, by
1968, with the publication of Television in Politics: Its Uses and Influences by
Blumler and McQuail, uses and gratifications were mainstream.
Unlike the law of minimum effects, uses and gratifications theory did not
deny the possibility of profound impacts of media on audiences. What it as-
serted, rather, was that those consequences are anticipated and actively sought
42
out by audiences in light of their preexisting needs and desires. As formu-
lated by its innovators, uses and gratifications can include: attaining informa-
tion, gaining a sense of personal identity (as through role modeling), facili-
43
tating social interaction, and being entertained. Uses and gratifications like
these, however, for a political economist, raise a host of serious questions: for
instance, what types of information are and are not made available to curious
audiences and by whom—issues addressed with telling results by such mar-
44
ginalized researchers as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Explosive
questions like these, however, cannot even be thought if and when the re-
search paradigm is that of audience “uses and gratifications.”
By the 1980s, uses and gratifications, too, had waned in influence, but only
to be replaced by yet another media power-denying doctrine, namely Stanley
Fish’s active reader. As Paul Cobley summarizes:

For [Stanley] Fish, the reader supplies everything; this is because there can be
nothing that precedes interpretation. As soon as human beings apprehend an
item in the world they have already embarked on a process of interpreting it.
There can be no ‘given’ as such. 45
As noted in chapter 3 and again in chapter 8, the “active audience” and the
primacy of interpretation form a cornerstone of poststructuralist positions.
The flip side of the doctrine of the active reader/active audience, of course, is
denying the power of message senders, whose role is reduced, in effect, to
compiling Rorschach tests for audiences to interpret as they will. Fish’s posi-
tion, as Anthony Easthope summarizes, is “resoundingly conservative.” 46
Again, however, real world events and practices belie mainstream postur-
ings. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 was one notable instance of the triumph