Page 25 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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The battle between television and its audiences

Recently, television studies has been confronted with the difficulty of reconciling two
theoretical approaches, the histories of which have largely been unfolding independently
from or in opposition to each other: the ‘sociological’ and the ‘semiological’ approach.
Whereas the sociological approach (embodied in such diverse research trends as the
political economy of the media and the uses and gratifications paradigm) has traditionally
been dominant in mass communications theory, a semiological point of view has gained
popularity during the last two decades or so, as a result of the limitations felt in the
preoccupations of the ‘sociologists’. In summary, these limitations concern the neglect of
the specificity of television as a system of representation, and an over-simplistic idea of
communication as the transmission of transparent messages from and to fully
autonomous subjects.
Instead, semiological approaches have put forward the conception of media products
as texts. The analysis of the construction of meanings in and through televisual discourses
is stressed, as are questions relating to the modes of address presented in televisual texts,
influencing the way the receiver (‘reader’) is positioned in relation to those texts. Thus,
the semiological approach has attempted to overcome any notion of conscious
institutional or commercial manipulation, on the one hand, and of free audience choice,
on the other.
However, discontent with this relatively new theoretical point of view has also been
voiced. The nearly exclusive attention to textual structures is seen to have created new
blind spots: the established semiological approach tends to ignore the social, political and
ideological conditions under which meaning production and consumption take place. As
a way out, more and more researchers insist nowadays on the necessity of combining
sociological and semiological insights. As Carl Gardner and Julie Sheppard have recently
put it:

analysis of any mass medium has to recognise its complex dual nature—
both an economic and industrial system, a means of production,
increasingly turning out standardised commodities and at the same time a
system of representation, producing meanings with a certain autonomy
which are necessarily multivalent and unpredictable.
(Gardner and Sheppard 1984:38)

This new credo in television studies has usually been translated into a formulation of the
so-called text/context problematic. It is stressed that an analysis of a text must be
combined with an analysis of its social conditions of existence. One important dimension
of this text/context problematic refers to the delicate relationship of texts and viewers,
theorized by Stuart Hall (1980a) and others in the so-called encoding/decoding model.
One of the goals of this model was to undermine the implicit assumptions of many
sophisticated, semiologically based analyses, according to which the subject/ viewer of a
text coincides with the subject position constructed in the text. For instance, David