Page 161 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

MODE OF ADDRESS

refers to howboth media texts and media organisations address
audiences. While it originates from the study of face-to-face
communication, mode of address can also refer to textual features
beyond verbal language.
Mode of address is reliant on the genre in which it appears. In
everyday communication, the way the same story is related will often
alter when told to a friend, a parent, a policeofficer or via an office
document. So it is with media texts, where the mode of address will
alter between, for example, news and current affairs and game shows.
While there are differences in the processes involved, mode of address
allows media texts to invent a fictional image of their preferred
audience. Discourse analysis is useful here in uncovering the
characteristics of this imagined viewer.
Relevant to notions of address is Althusser’s theory of interpella-
tion. Interpellation refers to howsubjects are ‘hailed’ by the discourse
of a text. Consider the example of sports reporting. Here,
interpellation works through the ideology of nation (or city, etc.).
The commentator’s mode of address assumes or even requires (hails) a
national subject. To understand the force of interpellation, then, you
only have to watch sports coverage from someone else’s nation or city
– they are clearly not addressing you at all, and what is more, they are
getting excited about things that are unimportant; it’s all too obviously
ideology. The Althusserian position is that all media discourse is
ideological in this way, because no matter what it is about, it must
employ a mode of address that interpellates a subject.
Consideration of mode of address need not be limited to individual
texts. Entire television stations will utilise different modes of address in
order to differentiate themselves and make unique the types of
programming they offer. This feature can be noted most obviously in a
station’s own promotional advertising. The same can be said of
newspapers, where what differs between one title and another is not
the content (they cover the same stories) but the mode of address –
one is aimed at women, one at lads, another at business leaders and so
on. Thus the difference between the Daily Mail, the Sun and The
Financial Times is at least in part a difference of mode of address
creating a special relationship between addresser and addressee through
discursive strategies.

See also: Genre, Ideology, Interpellation

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