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The cultural context of media interpretation 329

the common culture of the Latin American audiences and providing ways of en-
gaging with cultural issues (such as the position of women in the culture) com-
mon to those audiences. Wilkinson (2003) refers to this cultural setting as the
‘cultural linguistic market’. Within this market, researchers have examined the
role of the telenovela in issues of national and cultural identity and the role they
play in the everyday life of the culture; and, indeed, how they are contributing to
the public debate of social issues within a culture (Acosta-Alzuru 2003)
Yet the qualities of both language and culture are altered when a production
is exported across both language and time. So we do not have the same cultural
context for a Mexican programme produced for the home market in the late
1970s when it is shown dubbed in Russian in the early 1990s. Hence the ques-
tion arises: what does the programme mean to the Russians in contrast to the
Mexicans or is there simply enough common power of the storyline to engage
audiences across time and culture?
We can examine two aspects of the way an audience interprets a programme.
First, we can examine the meanings that they give to the programme. How, for
example, do the Russians interpret the storyline of a Mexican soap opera? What
happens when a television programme from one country is shown in a different
country? Are their differences in audience interpretation? Secondly, we can exam-
ine the aesthetic enjoyment of the programme. It is possible that an audience in
one country may thoroughly enjoy a programme from another country for differ-
ent reasons, such as the exotic ‘otherness’ of it, compared to those of the audience
in the original country, which may be reflecting their everyday concerns.
Within the analysis of communication, early models presented the flow of
communication as a process that would result in an effect upon the audience
member (based on the communication model of Shannon and Weaver, 1949).
Developments of this model have been more sophisticated: for example, watch-
ing a lot of television is seen to have a ‘cultivation effect’, in that it provides ma-
terial for shaping the beliefs of the viewer (Shanahan and Morgan 1999). For
example, if television programmes showed a higher rate of youth crime than
existed in the actual criminal statistics, then a heavy television viewing audience
might, through cultivation, develop a belief that the rate of youth crime was
higher than it actually is. We could argue that through the watching of television
programmes from another country its values may be cultivated within the host
nation. This would also provide a theoretical explanation for the concerns that
through the export of its media a country could be engaging in cultural imperi-
alism (e.g., Schiller 1976; Dorfman and Mattelart 1975).
Within cultural studies, however, it was argued that an audience might pro-
duce a number of alternative meanings to a programme. Hall’s (1980) model
focused on the way in which programmes were encoded (by the producers) and
decoded (by the audience). In this model audiences may decode the messages
within the programme in terms of the preferred meanings (i.e., presented in the