Active Audiences: An example

Audiences The encounter between media and consumers in earlier media reception studies: “What matters is the effect of the encounter. More important, what matters is a bad effect. I seriously doubt that all the hoopla about media would have occurred if people thought... good effects were coming from an experience with media.” (Janet Staiger, Media Reception Studies, 2005.)

Audiences Media reception studies: categories of relationships of individual + media -education model -reinforcement thesis -mediation model -power...different underlying conceptualizations of the individual and of society (Janet Staiger, Media Reception Studies, 2005.)

Audiences Contradictions? Example: representation of violence “Watching television causes violence and passive behavior (all at once!)” (John Hartley, 1996)

Audiences Example: The ‘active audience’ paradigm in Cultural Studies: Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (1982/1985) Ethnographic method combined with textual analysis

Audiences Example: The ‘active audience’ paradigm in Cultural Studies: 3 samples: - Ien Ang + Dallas - David Morley + TV series - John Fiske and Robert Dawson + film HOW are audiences ‘active’? How does this relate to identity, esp. gender?

Ang: Watching Dallas Letter 3: “I find Dallas super and for this reason: [the characters] reflect the daily life of a family (I find). You sometimes see serials where everything runs smoothly. Never any rows or anything. Not a damn thing wrong. Every family has rows sometimes. … In Dallas there are rows, desperate situations.” Letter 4: “Do you know why I like watching it? I think it’s because those problems and intrigues, the big and little pleasures and troubles occur in our own lives, too.”

Ang: Watching Dallas Letter 6: “You have to see the reality of life, and reality occurs there the way it is in real life, too, the intrigues, especially with people living together in the same house. The wealth is the only difference, I’m not rich (financially, materially speaking.)”

Ang: Watching Dallas e.g. Ien Ang: Watching Dallas. Soap opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (1982/1985). “… realism of Dallas can be called an ‘ emotional realism.’” (i.e. NOT: “empiricist realism”, “classical realism”)

Ang: Watching Dallas e.g. Ien Ang: Watching Dallas. Soap opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (1982/1985). Identity: gender negotiation, contextualized consumption, empowerment vs. disempowerment

TV as ‘culture’: Cultural Studies -- The “Circuit of Culture” Paul Du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, und Keith Negus. Doing Cultural Studies. The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage/The Open University, representation identity production consumption regulation

Audiences The ‘active audience’ paradigm: Audiences = “active producers of meaning from within their own cultural context” (Barker, 2004) e.g. studies of British television series (David Morley) e.g. studies of telenovelas (McAnany, La Pastina) e.g. recent work on reality TV and casting shows in Germany and Austria (e.g. Brigitte Hipfl, Elisabeth Klaus)

Active audiences: Fans e.g. ‘cult’ series: Lothar Mikos, „Fernsehen, Kult und junge Zuschauer“ (2004)... ‘cult’ = actively made by the viewers The medium is not the message: its social use is.