Page 27 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

AUDIENCES

selected groups, identities or constituencies among the overall
audience. They make such selections according to their own research
and political priorities (this is why audiences are a ‘construct’ in media
research). What is of interest is not the self-understanding of the
audience as a collective ‘knowing subject’, if such a thing could exist,
but answers to questions generated by the intellectual agenda. In
particular, media ethnography has concentrated on the way that social
variables such as class (Morley, 1980), gender (Ang, 1985), age
(Buckingham 2000), family circumstance (Morley, 1986), ethnicity
(Gillespie, 1995), etc., cause audiences to interact variously with media
texts.
For regulatory bodies, media audiences (unlike those for ‘cultural
pursuits’ such as live theatre) are normally equated with the public at
large. They are at once consumers in need of both exploitation and
protection, citizens (voters!) and ‘society’ – subject to moral, welfare
or educational policies. Regulators therefore occupy a governmental
position in relation to audiences (see power). Legislation may be
restrictive (censorship, pornography) or enabling (freedom of speech).
It may be conducted at the highest level of national policy (Rupert
Murdoch deals with prime ministers and presidents) or much lower
(an usherette enforcing age restrictions in cinemas). But in all of this,
audiences do not self-regulate in any organised way.
For all of these institutional bodies, the audience is the ‘imagined
community’ that enables the institution to operate. It is rare to see or
hear the views of the audience ‘itself’, except in letters pages and on
talkback radio. Semiotic versions of audiences are included in
entertainment formats, where they act as a kind of guide to the
appropriate or desired response – enjoyment, laughter, applause,
euphoria. These include game showparticipants, studio audiences,
laughter/applause tracks on sitcoms, etc.
Notably absent from the formal process of gaining, and gaining from,
knowledge of audiences are ‘consumer’ groups – the audiences
themselves. People rarely self-identify as audiences, and are only thinly
represented directly by their own organisations, which are normally
single-issue associations devoted to, for instance, ‘cleaning up’ the
apparent propensity for sex, violence and bad language on the TV
(Hartley, 1992a: 105).

See also: Discourse, Effects, Meaning, Public

Further reading: Ang (1996); Hartley (1992b)

12