CMNS1234 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Janice Radway
28 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Audience Studies: Moving From Passive to Active Conceptions
The Encoding Decoding Model
• Negotiating meanings with the text ‘allows the socially situated viewer an active,
semi-controlling role in’ (Fiske 1987, p. 82) the process of creative interpretation that
is the making of meaning.
Nationwide Audience Study
• The Nationwide study by David Morley, with Charlotte Brunsdon, was an effort to test
the encoding/decoding model.
• Morley in fact found that the act of reception, reading or interpretation in the
communication process is far more complex than researchers at first realised. This
conclusion gave rise to the notion of the active audience. Prior to this
audiences were largely seen as passive receivers of information.
Janice Radway and the Reading the Romance study
• Like David Morley in England, Janice Radway’s study also reinforced the notion of
audience activity.
• The study was focused on ‘the differential interpretation of texts’
• In her ethnographic study Radway discovered two distinct sets of interpretations of
romance novels.
• Many of the feminist critics saw romances as being about “helpless, passive, weak
women who relinquish their sense of self in the arms of the more important man”
(Radway 1991, p. 473).
• romance readers believed they were reading “a story about an extraordinary woman
who is overcome by unforeseen circumstances…”
• these readers found a temporary release from the demands of the social role that
defined them
• they received “psychological gratification for the needs they experience because they
had adopted that role” (Radway,1991:473).
Uses and Gratification Theory
• In 1944 Hilda Herzog found that soap opera audiences used them for emotional
release, it gave them an opportunity for fantasy fulfillment through wishful thinking,
and they sought information and advice from them (Singhal & Rogers 1999, p. 59). In
other words audiences actively used message to gratify their own needs not those of
the producers.
• there are broadly similar ways that an audience could ‘use’ texts. These they listed
as:
- diversion
- personal relationships
- personal identity
- surveillance
Underlying assumptions of uses and gratification approach
• The audience is active. It is not passive in its reception of media content, but actively
selects and uses that content.
• One can suspend cultural value judgements about the cultural significance of these
texts. It is irrelevant, according to this view, to dismiss some texts as trash and
elevate others on the opinion of highbrow aesthetes. If some television shows, for
example, meet the needs of a large proportion of the population then they are useful,
and thus valuable.
Reception Analysis
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
