MEDIA/SOCIETY
Study Guide
CHAPTER EIGHT: Active Audiences and the Construction of Meaning
Purpose and Goals
This chapter is intended to explore the ways that audiences interact with and make
use of mass media. The chapter focuses on various forms of audience activity, with a
particular emphasis on the ways that audiences interpret media messages. In accordance
with our sociological approach, the chapter examines both the interpretive activity of
audiences and the ways that social factors shape the discursive resources available to
audiences in different social locations. The chapter also explores the pleasures of media
consumption and considers the possibility that audiences can "resist" dominant meanings
in mass media.
Chapter Outline
The Active Audience
Interpretation
The Social Context of Interpretation
Collective Action
Meanings: Agency and Structure
Agency and Polysemy
Structure and Interpretive Constraint
Decoding Media and Social Position
Class and Nationwide
Gender, Class, and Television
Race, News, and Meaning Making
International Readings of American Television
The Social Context of Media Use
Romance Novels and the Act of Reading
Watching Television With the Family
Active Audiences and Interpretive “Resistance”
Interpretive Resistance and Feminist Politics
Resistance and Identity
The Pleasures of Media
Pleasure and Fantasy
Celebrity Games
Pleasure and Resistance
Key Themes
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Audiences are active, not passive, in their relationship to media.
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Different audiences, drawing upon different interpretive frameworks, can
construct different meanings from the same media text; media texts are at least
partially open to such different readings.
Social structure shapes the distribution of cultural resources that audiences use to
interpret media texts.
The social context in which we use media helps to constitute the meaning of those
media.
Audiences can produce oppositional readings of media texts; when coupled with
collective activity in the social world, this "oppositional decoding" is sometimes
defined as a form of "resistance."
Media consumption is a source of pleasure for many audience members; how and
why we enjoy media needs to be part of our explanation of the role of media in
society.
Key Concepts and Terms
Active Audience: intelligent, autonomous readers of media who interpret meaning of
texts.
Interpretation: the act of interpreting, explaining or elucidating the meaning of a
creative or artistic work.
Collective Action: a group of people engaged in creating social change, usually in the
form of protests, boycotts, marches, strikes, etc.
Polysemy: the notion of multiple meaning in media texts
Openness: media texts have this quality in their structure, making possible many
different meanings.
Excess of Meaning: term associated with John Fiske; texts have many pieces of
information in them, more than is needed to reach the dominant interpretation.
Reading Against the Grain: when audiences interpret texts in ways that defy the
dominant reading.
Interpretive Free Agents: the notion that audiences could make an unlimited number of
meanings from a text.
Preferred Reading: some meanings are easier to construct than others because they draw
on widely shared values and assumptions.
Encoding-Decoding: term associated with Stuart Hall, highlights both how messages are
constructed and their interpretations by audiences.
Dominant Meaning: the interpretation that will most likely follow from a decoding,
based on dominant assumptions ingrained in social life.
Oppositional Reading: when audiences draw on other resources to construct meanings
that oppose the dominant or preferred readings.
Discursive Resources: cultural tools, such as language and concepts, associated with a
particular subculture or political perspective.
Focus Group: social scientific research method, often used on audience members, where
a group are interviewed at the same time about their attitudes.
Lowbrow: opposite of highbrow, derogatory term associated with lower classes referring
to tastes in mass or popular culture.
Interpretive Community: texts are interpreted in groups, and cannot be understood
outside of cultural assumptions about what they should mean.
Semiological Guerillas: audience members who fight the daily war against the symbolic
power of the media industry.
Game Players: term associated with Josh Gamson; audience members who neither
embrace the reality of celebrity nor see it as simple artifice, but who adopt a playful
attitude toward world of celebrity.
Essay or Discussion Questions
•What does it mean that audience members are "active" readers? What kind of
activities do they participate in?
•How does class influence how one interprets television? How does it impact the
degree of "realism" one sees?
•Using Liebes and Katz's study of the television program Dallas, discuss how
one's culture can influence one's interpretation of media. What does this
suggest about the meaning of mass media images?
•What does Radway mean by the act of reading ? Why does she distinguish
between the act of reading and the texts of romance novels?
•What does it mean that individuals create "oppositional" readings of media texts?
What are they "resisting"? What are the social consequences of
"oppositional" readings?
•What is the role of pleasure in media use? How and why should media
researchers incorporate pleasure into our understanding of media?
•What are the ways in which media texts are "encoded and decoded"? What tools
help individuals to decode media texts? What (if any) are the constraints on
decoding media texts?