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The cultural context of media interpretation 335

provide communications that can enter the discourse of the audience and inter-
pretation becomes a complex process of structuring and developing that dis-
course within their culture.
Whilst concepts such as ‘media violence’ or ‘women’s consumption of
melodrama’ can be examined without reference to the cultural setting, a focus
on the cultural context reveals a richer understanding of an audience’s engage-
ment with the media. With respect to both media violence and television soap
operas, they are more than simply different media communications. Rather they
are cultural products. A key feature of soap operas or telenovelas is that they be-
come part of the communication within the culture, both through magazines and
television reporting on them, and through the everyday conversations of the
audience. Within the original culture the specific cultural references, as in Oshin
or The Country of Women, can offer representations that are linked to ideas that
develop the viewer’s sense of national and cultural identity (Acosta-Alzuru
2003). To the host culture, some programmes may be rejected (such as Dallas in
Japan) but others may be used within the culture to develop their own represen-
tations of themselves, within the frameworks of their own lives (Kotzeva 2001).
Across cultures there may be shared concerns about, and pleasures in, the media
products but media interpretation takes place within a cultural context.

Notes

1. The research interest in media violence goes back to the 1920s with the public con-
cerns about the effect of the cinema in the United States of America (Gunter 1994).
2. Stone (1993) cites an example of a Chinese film comedy that was viewed by Western
critics and audiences as a melodrama.

References

Acosta-Alzuru, Carolina
2003 Tackling the issues: meaning making in a telenovela. Popular Communi-
cation 1(4): 193–215.
Alasuutari, Pertti
1999 Introduction: three phases of reception studies. In: Pertti Alasuutari (ed.),
Rethinking the Media Audience, 1–21. London: Sage.
Ang, Ien
1985 Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. New
York: Methuen.
Ang, Ien
1990a Melodramatic identifications: television fiction and women’s fantasy. In:
Mary E. Brown (ed.), Television and Women’s Culture, 75–88. London:
Sage.