Cultural Studies
By: Jake Dunnington and Curt (The Animal) Dixon
What is Cultural Studies?
 In terms of Television.
 How society's perceptions and beliefs are
influenced by what is on the air
 How media is interpreted.
Developed from Ideological
Perspective
 Cultural Studies
 defines mass media as
 a mechanism for control
 Sites for ideological struggle
 Circulates power relations through hegemony
How does it Work?
 Through Production and Political Economy
 The system of production determines what will be produced and the
audiences targeted
 products are produced within systems of production - rigid generic
codes, formulaic conventions, well-defined ideological boundaries
 Textual Analysis
 “Texts” function to produce meaning
 focusing on Race, Gender, and Class
 Audience Reception
 audience reception & appropriation
 how the audience integrates media into their social life
 how an audience “reads” the “text”
Stuart Hall!!
Stuart Hall developed cultural
studies in the 70s and 80s
Father of Cultural theory
Hall’s Theory!!
 Encoding/Decoding
 Dominant, or Preferred, Reading - how the director/creator
wants the audience to view the media text;
 Opposition Reading - when the audience rejects the
preferred reading, and creates their own meaning of the
text;
 Negotiated Reading - a compromise between the
dominant and opposition readings, where the audience
accepts parts of the director's views, but has their own views
on parts as well.
Audience Studies!!
What is Audience Studies?
 Who watches a program? How do they watch
it? Why do they watch it?
 Analysis of that…
Walter Ong
 Walter Ong suggested that the audience is a construct
made up by the rhetoric and the rhetorical situation the
text is addressing.
 -Father Walter Jackson Ong, Ph.D. (November 30, 1912 –
August 12, 2003), was an American Jesuit priest, professor
of English literature, cultural and religious historian and
philosopher.
Models of Audience Studies!!
 The hypodermic needle model
 The intended message is directly received and wholly
accepted by the receiver.
 Two-step flow
 The people with most access to media, and highest media
literacy explain and diffuse the content to others. This is a
modern version of the hypodermic needle model.
 Uses and gratifications
 People are not helpless victims of mass media, but use the
media to get specific gratifications.
But There's More!!
 Reception theory
 The meaning of a "text" is not inherent within the text itself,
but the audience must elicit meaning based on their
individual cultural background and life experiences
 Obstinate audience theory
 This theory assumes that there is a transactional
communication between the audience and the media. The
audience actively selects what messages to pay attention
to. The Zimmerman-Bauer study found that the audience
also participates in the communication by influencing the
message.