1. Week 5: Considering Audiences
Media Studies:
Week 5: Considering Audiences
Big Short:
Spotlight:
Racism on UK TV:
Bronies:
Dallas Theme Song:
Dallas Cliff Hanger:
3D Cinema Audience

2. C. Wright Mills
The Power Elite

3. One of the leading figures in the discipline of Cultural Studies.
Stuart Hall
One of the leading figures in the discipline of Cultural Studies.
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies founded in Birmingham, UK. Hall is one of its early directors.
Combines a Marxist (interest in the social relations and means of production that form the context for cultural meaning formation) and semiotic (interest in the systems of signification that generate and maintain meaning) approach to the study of culture and communications.
Stuart Hall

4. Stuart Hall
Particularly interested in processes of Hegemony: the way in which the most powerful members of society get “consent” from the subordinate members of a society.
How the dominant culture (those that own capital or the means of production) represents itself as the culture - natural, all-embracing, universal.
Stuart Hall

5. Stuart Hall
Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1975)

6. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
Hall’s influential essay critiques some of the assumptions of traditional mass communication models.
The process of communication has been conceived as a continuous circuit measured by the success or failure of message transmission.
Shannon and Weaver’s Model of Communication

7. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
Hall views communication instead as a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments - 1. production (encoding), 2. circulation, 3. distribution/consumption (decoding), 4. reproduction
Each of these moments or practices is distinct and has its own “forms and conditions of existence”
Shannon and Weaver’s Modelof Communciation

8. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
Hall also critiques the behaviourist tendencies of traditional communication studies - which amount to a kind of stimulus-response model of media effects.
“Though we know the television programme is not a behavioural input, like a tap on the knee cap, it seems to have been almost impossible for traditional researchers to conceptualize the communicative process without lapsing into one or other variant of low-flying behaviourism. We know…that representations of violence on the TV screen ‘are not violence but messages about violence’: but we have continued to research the question of violence…as if we were unable to comprehend this epistemological distinction” (p.131).

9. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
Meanings and messages must be coded into symbols (or signs) in order to be transmitted or circulated.
It is in this coded form that circulation of the ‘product’ takes place.
Meaning takes place for instance within the rules of language (one form of a discursive code, the code governing sensible speech).

10. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
But this discursive production, says Hall, also requires at the production end the material means and an organization of social relations (combinations of practices within specific media apparatuses or institutions) to make this possible.
All of these factors (frameworks of knowledge, media technologies and organizations) constitute the meaning structure through which the encoding of meaning may occur.

11. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
For example in the television communication process: the institutional structures of broadcasting - with their practices, networks of production and technical infrastructures - are required to produce a program (as well as the discursive and ideological assumptions informing the production process).
Think for example of the meaning structure in place at the BBC.

12. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
The audience is in some ways both the ‘source’ and the ‘receiver’ of the message:
They are targeted or identified during the encoding process…
and feedback from reception is reincorporated into the production process.

13. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
The process of communication is sustained through the articulation of connected practices, but each one retains a degree of independence and autonomy.
No one moment can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is articulated.
The moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ though only ‘relatively autonomous’ in relation to the communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments.

14. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
Before the message can have an ‘effect’ it must be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded.
These ‘effects’ are framed by structures of understanding, social and economic relations, belief and value systems, etc.
The codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical.

15. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
There are varied degrees of symmetry of understanding or ‘relations of equivalence’ between encoder-producer and decoder-receiver.
What are called ‘distortions’ or ‘misunderstandings’ arise precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange.

16. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
Any society/culture tends to impose its classifications of the social, cultural and political world (its maps of meaning), so a dominant cultural order does exist.
There exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings’ or institutionalized readings.

17. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
“The domains of ‘preferred meanings’ have the whole social order embedded in them as a set of meanings, practices and beliefs: the everyday knowledge of social structures, of ‘how things work for all practical purposes in this culture,’ the rank order of power and interest and the structure of legitimations, limits and sanctions.” (p.98)
But there is no necessary correspondence between encoding and decoding, the former can attempt to ‘pre-fer’ but cannot prescribe or guarantee the latter, which has its own conditions of existence.

18. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
Hall suggests there are three possible positions of reception/decoding:
The dominant-hegemonic position: the viewer is operating inside the dominant code
The negotiated position: contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements - it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations, while at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground rules
The oppositional position: receiver detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference

19. Bronies

20. (Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
Ien Ang
(Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
Dallas was the beginning of an influential TV genre - the prime-time soap opera.
At its peak in Holland in 1982 more than half the country’s population watched the show!
Ang is interested in the ideological context of reception for a commercial American TV program viewed in Western Europe.
J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman)

21. (Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
Ien Ang
(Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
Dallas did not arrive within a neutral context - there was already a ‘moral panic’ surrounding the show.
“Dallas signified danger, a threat to the national community, especially because critics expected (and feared) that the show would ‘overwhelm’ and ‘conquer’ large sections of the audience” (p.70).
J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman)

22. (Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
Ien Ang
(Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
The conventional model of European television, organized according to state-controlled, national public service policy, was in crisis.
“…the commercialization of European television - and by extension, American media empirialism - is frequently cited as a metaphor for the ever-intensifying decline of classical European culture” (p.71).
Dallas comes to symbolize cultural erosion.
J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman)

23. (Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
Ien Ang
(Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
So, Ang claims, people’s personal enjoyment in watching Dallas is accompanied by the social significance of what it means to watch Dallas.
People who reject the show (and even those that enjoy it) speak about their viewing experience in reference to the aesthetic and cultural norms established by an official discourse.
“I find it a typical American program, simple and commercial, role-affirming, deceitful.”
J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman)

24. (Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
Ien Ang
(Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
Ang suggests there is a discursive silence around the pleasure of viewing - the language does not exist to express the meaningfulness of this pleasure.
“The privileging of ‘good’ television produces a sort of ideological closure; its authority makes it difficult if not impossible for Dallas fans to construct an autonomous positive discourse about what the show means to them” (p.75).
J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman)

25. (Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
Ien Ang
(Not) Coming to Terms With Dallas
The audience of Dallas in Holland is not simply being ‘overwhelmed’ by the intended (or encoded) meaning of the show.
There are many “different ways in which people can view a single television show” (p.76).
Many viewers take up a negotiated position in relation to the show - they maintain a critical distance.
There is often an “ironic” appreciation of the show as “bad” television.
J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman)