Page 24 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Active audience The concept of the active audience indicates the capability of ‘readers’
to be dynamic creators of significance rather than being understood as simple
receptors of textual meaning. This paradigm emerged in reaction to
communications research that studied audiences as if they simply absorbed the
meanings and messages of popular media (as identified by critics) in a passive way.
This was colloquially known as the ‘hypodermic model’ of audiences because the
meanings of texts appear to be injected directly into the minds of readers without
modification. Overall, the active audience paradigm represented a shift of interest
from numbers to meanings and from the general audience to particular audiences.
The active audience paradigm was theoretically informed by the
encoding–decoding model of communications and by hermeneutic theory.
Subsequent empirical studies by David Morley and Ien Ang in the 1980s argued that
the cultural context in which reading took place provided the framework and
cultural resources for differential understandings of texts. Consequently, meaning
was not to be located in the text per se, but in the interplay of the text and the
audience. Thus Ang’s study of women viewers of Dallas found that they held a
range of understandings and attitudes. Her central argument is that Dallas viewers
are actively involved in the production of a range of meanings and pleasures that
are not reducible to the structure of the text, an ‘ideological effect’ or a political
project.
Various studies of national/ethnic cultural identity and television viewing
provide evidence of divergent readings of narratives founded in different cultural
backgrounds. That is, audiences use their own sense of national and ethnic identity
as a position from which to decode programmes so that US television is not
necessarily uncritically consumed by audiences with the destruction of
‘indigenous’ cultural identities as the inevitable outcome. There is now a good deal
of mutually supporting work on audiences within the cultural studies tradition from
which one can draw the following conclusions.

• The audience is conceived of as active and knowledgeable producers of meaning
not as products of a structured text.
• Meanings are bounded by the way the text is structured and by the domestic
and cultural context of the viewing.
• Audiences need to be understood in the contexts in which they read texts, both
in terms of meaning construction and the routines of daily life.
• Audiences are easily able to distinguish between fiction and reality, indeed they
actively play with the boundaries.
• The processes of meaning construction and the place of texts in the routines of

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