Page 37 - Decoding Culture

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30 DECODING CULTU E
building blocks. Finally, at the most general level, a broadly consen­
sual culture ensures the continued functioning of the whole system.
Such a social ontology can be realized in a variety of ways. At its
simplest it embraces vulgar normative determinism, giving rise to
media research concern with the direct individual effects of mass
communications on the formation and change of attitudes and
values: classically, exposure studies conducted in terms of attitude
scaling. Its tendency to presuppose what Wrong (1961) famously
described as an 'oversocialized conception of man', to accept a view
of the social actor as, in Garfinkel's (1967) phrase, a 'cultural dope',
lies behind the passive manipulated audience conception of mass
society theorists and their successors. More complex versions may
somewhat loosen the normative bindings - as does the Uses and
Gratifications approach, for example, with its emphasis on audi­
ence choices made to gratify needs - but even then the source of
those needs and the criteria of choice remain fundamentally nor­
mative. Theoretically this may be an 'active audience' composed of
social actors negotiating the terms of their media use, but they
can only do so within the normative framework provided by the
culture in question. The tacit picture remains one of socialized
individuals who, as a consequence of their social circumstances,
develop and seek to gratify certain needs.
Broadly, the social ontology informing effects research is one
already familiar in the mainstream sociological tradition. It legit­
imizes a research practice which neglects questions about the
social construction of meaning, seeing such issues as either tech­
nical problems of content analysis or as taken-for-granted views of
the general cultural context. V a riability in meaning construction
and heterogeneity of culture and social practice were thus effec­
tively excluded from consideration. Later effects research
successfully sought to correct some of these limitations, but still
embraced a basically top-down view of the relation between

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