1995
This
paper surveys the literature of audience studies in light of the categories of
determination and autonomy and argues the existence of flexible form of textual
determination.
Recent
trends in audience studies have posited the absence of a preferred meaning and
shifted the focus of analysis away from the text to the viewing context. Contrarily, this paper argues that the text
is a structure of multiaccented signs and should be conceptualized as a
structured horizon of meaning, which limits and facilitates different readings
by different audiences.
Based
on a pilot study the paper discusses the limits imposed by the text in the
analysis of viewing contexts.
The
literature on audience studies reminds me of the metaphor of the glass of water
that is either half full or half empty.
From a “half-full” perspective, the field can be seen as an evolutionary
movement from the early crude emphasis on the effects of programs over
audiences, through the one sided view of audiences as autonomous users of
media, to more recent critical analysis of the relationship between texts and
viewers (Jensen and Rosengren, 1990; Lewis, 1991; Moore, 1990; Morley,
1989). Paradoxically, it is in this
last stage that the field starts to appear “half-empty”. Despite the variety and sophistication of
its approaches, the field of audience studies is mired in a number of
unresolved conceptual problems. These problems stem from the lack of an
integrated body of theory and research capable of accounting for the ever
widening complexity of its central object of study: the interface between the
viewer and the text.
The
key difficulty faced by audience studies is but one expression of the central
problematic of critical cultural theory: understanding the relationship between
the determinations and the autonomous dimensions of cultural practice. For audience scholars the problem has been
to conceptualize simultaneously, the determinations, which bear on the act
viewing and the autonomy of the viewer in the creation of meaning. This difficulty is both conceptual and
methodological. For all the studies that have claimed to shed light on this
problem there have been a matching number of critiques of their theory and
methodology. I don’t mean to minimize
the real advances in the field, but only to underscore the idea that the
interface between the text and the viewer remains elusive. As Lewis (1991) points out, “We know now
that the power to produce meanings lies neither within the TV message nor
within the viewer, but in the active engagement between the two” (p. 58). The fact that this definition of the object
of study is articulated through a double negative is symptomatic of the degree
of abstraction still surrounding it. In
my view, the field is still grappling with four recurring questions: What
meanings do viewers make of a text? How are meanings produced? What factors
influence the creation of particular meanings? What methods can be used to study the processes of viewing
television?
In
their efforts to understand the encounter between the audience and the text,
audience scholars have used a number of theoretical and methodological
categories of analysis. Despite some
attempts at integration (Jensen, 1987; Jensen and Rosengren, 1990) these
categories still appear disconnected in the literature and need to be
integrated in a comprehensive framework.
The categories that have been considered include: the socio-demographic
location of the audience and their communities of meaning as determinants of
the process of reading (Morley, 1980; 1986; Katz and Liebes, 1986; 1989; Lewis,
1992; Radway, 1986), the codes used by the audience and the media makers
(Condit, 1989; Hall, 1980; Lewis 1986; 1991), the reading histories of
audiences, their everyday routines and interpretative frameworks (Hermes, 1993;
Rogge, 1989), the pleasures the audience extract from the act of reading as a
factor of resistance (Condit, 1989;
Fiske, 1987; Hobson, 1989) the
audience’s uses of the text (Jensen, 1990), the cognitive structures employed
in the act of reading (Dahlgren, 1986;
Hoijer, 1992), the mode of address of different genres (Fiske, 1987) the
context of reception (Morley, 1986) the influence of the media environment in
meaning making (Morley and Silverstone, 1990), and the meaning which people
attribute to their engagement with the medium or a certain program (Ang,
1985; Morley, 1991). Recent critiques of audience studies
(Jensen, 1990; Garnham, 1990; Seaman, 1992) have placed a political question on
the agenda of audience studies regarding the relationship between the
audience’s production of meaning and their concrete social action.
The
elaboration of an integrative framework is necessary but beyond the scope of
this paper. I believe the problematic
of audience studies can be productively analyzed through the double categories
of determination and autonomy. In this
paper I will review the approaches of different critical perspectives to the
question of determination and autonomy in the production of meaning. Based on an exploratory study I will propose
that media texts should be seen as cues that prompt the audience to reflect on
topics more or less related with the text.
I will also propose that viewers’ reflections are contextualized and
guided by different sets of moral norms.
The perspective offered here is congruent with recent trends in audience
studies, which have decentered the text, but unlike them recognizes determinations
in the decentered text.
The
political economic study of communication and culture is the critical
perspective most distant from a direct analysis of either the texts or the
audiences. Its primary concern is with
the material conditions of the production of meaning rather than its
consumption in everyday life. The
relevance of political economy to audience studies is based on its insights
into the ways in which the economic structure of mass media organizations determine
or shape the content of mass media texts.
According to Nicolas Garnham (1990) “a newspaper article or TV program
is the way it is and carries one set of meanings and by doing so excludes
another set, because of the way in which production is organized. To put it
crudely, the budget available and the given structure of the division of labor
affects what you can say and how you can say it” (p.15). Herman and Chomsky (1988) also stress the
structuration of media texts by the material conditions of production. These authors argue that the content of mass
media news is shaped by five filters: The patterns of concentrated ownership
and profit seeking motive of media companies; Advertising: Reliance on
government and corporate “experts” as the major sources of news; Organized
negative responses to certain news items by power groups and a pervasive
neoliberal antisocialist of anticommunist ideology. They argue further that these filters result in a pattern of news
content which in effect functions as propaganda for the interests of the state
and major economic groups. In addition,
the majority of the world’s media and news sources is controlled and supplied
by the twenty largest transnational media conglomerates (Bagdkian, 1992; Herman
and Chomsky 1988).
These
facts have led some political economists to claim that the material conditions
of media production also directly determine the audience’s reception of media
texts. In this, they have employed the
support, not of the research on the audience, but of some of its tools and
theoretical concepts. Garnham (1990),
for example, affirms that the “interpretative frames that are used to extract
meanings from media texts are themselves determined by the wider socio-economic
structure” (p.15). Other authors have
employed a semiotic perspective to argue for a determined reception. In their
analysis of the functioning of advertising, Leiss, Kline and Jhally (1990)
explain that:
If
the audience is to “decode” the message adequately—that is to make the transfer
of meaning—advertisers have to tap the reservoirs of cultural and social
knowledge maintained by audiences, and transform this material into the message
(“encode” it), developing an appropriate format and shaping the content in
order that the cycle of communication that run from the audience’s experiences
and back again can be completed (p.203).
The
claims of political economists are not altogether off the mark—in the sense
that material conditions shape the horizons of public discourses and the access
to symbolic resources-but they reduce the encounter of the audience with the
text to the interplay of determined frameworks. In sum, they are neat instrumentalist views of a process, which
is messy, contradictory, multidetermined and affected by the routine and
changing events of everyday life.
Hermes (1993), for example, reports that contrary to the first interview
in which one of a respondents described her enjoyment and sense of usefulness
in the reading of women’s’ magazines, in a second interview she found them
boring and without meaning. According
to Hermes, this change was due her respondent’s new feeling of low self-esteem
provoked by the sudden emergence in her life of the man who had fathered her
child.
Textual
analysts, like political economists, have also employed a structuralist
approach and assumed a determined reception on the part of the audience. Using a combination of semiotics and
psychoanalysis, textual analysts have sought to uncover the hidden structures
of the text and on that basis have developed personal readings, which they
mistook to be universal. As has been
repeatedly noted, these analyses although insightful and informed by theory,
are just individual examples of other possible readings. Or, to put it another way, they are examples
of readings undertaken in an academic context by people motivated by
professional goals and who have access to a particular set of discourses. One could speculate that the same analysts in
a different context, perhaps of domestic leisure, would articulate different
readings of the same texts.
The
psychoanalytic approach to textual analysis has been critiqued exhaustively
before, especially the work published by screen during the late seventies. Here I just want to note briefly that the
main problem of audience researcherswith this approach, is that it conflates
the process of entry and constitution of the subject into language, with the
text’s interpellation of real subjects already positioned in society. The structures of the text are thus given
the power to constitute and indeed immobilize a reading subject, who like the
ultimate dupe swallows without protest the repressive ideologies of the
text. The problem is that this
fictitious subject created by the analyst was for a long time confused with
people in everyday life. The result was
a view of the text as the sole determinant of the meaning.
Textual
analysts have also employed semiotics in their analysis of the text. The strategy in this case has been to
identify different codes present in the text and their function in the creation
of meaning. In addition to Barthes’s (1974) codes (narrative, enigma, semiotic,
semic and cultural), which can be applied to the analysis of any text,
television analysts, (Fiske, 1987;
Schwichtenberg, 1986) have also identified a number of visual codes on
the basis of which they argued for definite readings of the text. Lewis (1991) pointed out that textual
analysts have misused the concept of codes and semiotics in general “to show us
not what the text could mean, but assert what it does mean” (p.34).
According to Lewis, the textual analysts’ claims are unwarranted because
the text is a structure of signifiers and as such does not support the
existence of any essential meaning.
What analysts offer is their individual reading of the text not the
reading of the text. I agree with
Lewis’s critique of the excesses of textual analysis, but for different
reasons.
The
view of the text as a structure of signifiers allows a space of autonomy for
the audience in the process of reading, but it can also lead us to the ultimate
conclusion that the text has no determination of its own. If the signifier is a
material without inherent meaning, then the text as a structure of signifiers
becomes devoid of meaning and open to any discourse the viewer might want to
impose on it. By definition, a
structure of signifiers cannot impose any determinacy on the process of reading
because it has no meaning. It has nothing to impose. This is untenable, theoretically and politically.
The
text can be abstracted as a structure of signifiers, but in practical terms it
is always a structure of signs, because it is in a permanent encounter with a
subject immersed in language. This is true
whether the text is encountered at the moment of production, the moment of
reading or the moment of analysis. In
either case, the text is always intersected by the subjectivity of the
producer, an audience member or an analyst.
Just as the producer of a text works with signifiers intersected by a
variety of codes, so, too, the reader of a text is pulled into the orbit not of
signifiers, but of multiaccented signs.
The moment of the encounter with the text is the moment of meaning. The encounter with a signifier happens in a
second moment, when the analyst consciously detaches him or herself from the
text, armed with the conceptual tools of analysis. As for the text sitting on the shelf not read or seen, it is a
structure of signifiers, but it is also socially and theoretically irrelevant.
The
move to open up the text was grounded on the separation of the text from the
intentions of its producer. This,
however, was taken to the extreme position of extricating any semblance of
inscribed subjectivity from the text.
In my view, there is a need to acknowledge that the text is produced by
subjectivity and that it carries an intention towards meaning in the form of a
structure of multiaccented signs. The advantage of conceiving the text as a
structure of multiaccented signs, rather than as a structure of signifiers, is
that it allows us to retain a degree of textual determination in the process of
reading.
The Semiotic Models of Audience Studies
While
political economists and textual analysts have discussed the structural
determinants of meaning, the study of the process of meaning production as an
encounter between the audience and the text, began with the publishing of
Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model and the subsequent development of
audience studies. The encoding/decoding
model is based on the idea that TV texts are encoded from within the set of
frameworks the encoders use to make meaning of the world, and that the process
of decoding can be done from within similar or different frameworks from those
employed in the encoding process.
Depending on the nature of the frameworks used in the decoding process,
viewers can endorse, negotiate or oppose the meanings which have been encoded
(Lewis, 1991).
Preferred Meaning: Placed and Displaced
The
idea of a preferred meaning encoded in the text has been the pivotal element of
the model, but has also been a constant source of conceptual and methodological
difficulties. Morley (1981) in his
poscript to the “Nationwide Audience” asked:
Is
the preferred reading a property of the text per se? Or is it something that can be generated from the text (by a
“skilled” reading) via certain specifiable procedures? Or is the preferred reading that reading
which the analyst is predicting that most members of the audience will produce
from the text? In short, is the
preferred reading a property of the text, the analyst or the audience? (p.6).
These
questions are central to audience studies, because the preferred meaning is the
semiotic material that stands at the confluence between the audience and the
text. According to Lewis (1991) “What
the question [posed by Morley] requires us to address is how and when the
preferred meaning is constituted” (p. 63).
The
questions posed by Morley have been answered in different ways. The research seems to show that the
characteristics of the preferred meaning vary with the particular audience and
text being researched and need to be determined empirically in each specific
research case. Condit (1989), for
example, found that the preferred meaning of a Cagney and Lacey show about
abortion could be clearly identified in the text. According to her, even though her two respondents—a pro-life man
and a pro-choice woman—had different responses to the show, they had understood
the plot in a similar way. In this
case, the consistency between the readings of the respondents and of the
analyst enabled the later to identify the preferred reading of the text without
many problems.
Identifying
the preferred meaning is not always so simple, however, and can become quite
complex. Lewis (1991) elaborated a
distinction between the preferred reading/three response model and what he
called the popular/resistive reading model.
According to him, the preferred reading/three response model is only
valid when we have an unambiguous preferred reading that is decoded similarly
by everyone. That is, after reading the
text similarly, viewers then choose to respond to it in an oppositional,
negotiated or endorsing way. Contrary
to the way they have been traditionally conceived, the oppositional, negotiated
or endorsing readings are not really readings but second stage responses to the
preferred meaning first identified in the text. The popular/resistive
reading model is based on the assumption of the inexistence of a preferred
meaning in a particular research situation.
Here I use the expression
“particular research situation” rather than “the text” or “the audience”
to underscore two points. First, a
qualitative audience study is a specific meeting point between a text and an
audience mediated by the researcher as the instrument of inquiry. Second, given these contextual factors and
its small samples, the conclusions of a qualitative audience study cannot be
generalized beyond the research situation at hand. The contextualization of conclusions would endow much audience
research an added degree of reliability and avoid some of the theoretical
confusion which follow from unwarranted general conclusions.
Based
on his analysis of Radways’ “Reading the Romance” (1984) and Fiske’s (1987)
research on the Newlywed Game, Lewis (1991) concluded that these were examples
of research situations which lacked a preferred meaning. Instead, the texts presented a number of
ambiguities, which were exploited with pleasure by the viewers to construct
readings that resisted the dominant social ideology of patriarchy. In this case, the viewers did not oppose the
text, but worked with its polysemic and ambiguous message to oppose a societal
ideology. The popular/resistive reading
doesn’t need to “self-consciously draw upon other discourses [because] the
material for the reading is already in the program” (p. 70). Lewis adds that
the Newlywed Game “both exposes and endorses patriarchy” (p.69).
In
his own research on the English show the News at Ten and the Cosby Show, Lewis
(idem) also found evidence of the absence of a preferred meaning. According to Lewis, the Cosby Show is
structured in a manner such that “most white people see an upper-middle class
family and most black people see a black family, while both see them as a
normal group they can identify with” (p.196).
In
the News at Ten, Lewis also posited the absence of a preferred reading in all
but one of the news items. Not because
of ambiguity or polysemy in the text, but because of the lack of a narrative
structure capable of engaging the viewers and help them make connections
between the different ideas presented.
As the author points out, this didn’t diminish the ideological power of
the show since the bits and pieces that the viewers understood created
resonances and associations with dominant ideological discourses available to
the viewers outside the text.
Based
on the analysis of Condit’s, Fiske’s and his own research, Lewis reaches two
conclusions: first, that the preferred meaning is absent from a research
situation in which the text appears ambiguous and polysemic. Second, that the ideological power of the
text also works through ambiguity and polysemy. Lewis’ conclusions contradict each other. Since ideology works through the
articulation of some sets of meanings and the concealment of others, Lewis’
analysis indicate that the preferred meaning of the text can be present in the
face of ambiguity and polysemy. I disagree
with Lewis’ conclusions, not with his analysis of the research.
Preferred Horizons
Lewis’
analysis demonstrates that the News at Ten was successfully encoded with an
ideological meaning that was read both by the analyst and the respondents. In the absence of a coherent narrative
structure, the preferred meaning was located in those fragments of the text
that were more salient to the viewers.
As an example, Lewis (1991) reports that the scenes of violence between
Arabs and Jews was the fragment of the West Bank story that caught the attention
of the viewers, and that the whole story was then interpreted with a
“residually racist” discourse, as one of the “world’s troubled spots”.
Lewis’
analysis of his research on the Cosby Show also supports the idea that the
preferred meaning can be present through the ambiguities of the text. While, as Lewis notes, the Cosby Show
created spaces of identification for both black and white viewers, it also
concealed the existence of racism to white audiences and class differences to
black audiences. The result is a
message that supports the attainability of the “American dream”. Similarly, the show also appears ambiguous
on the issue of gender relations.
Although most male and female viewers thought the show had an
anti-sexist message, two men pointed to the show’s contradictions and noted
that Claire was the one checking the roast.
A working class gay man, on the other hand, focused on the differences
between the behaviors of men and women while a teenage boy thought the show was
about being one self.
While
the research situation of the News at Ten presented a preferred meaning through
absences of contextual information and resonances with elements outside of the
text, the research situation of the Cosby Show demonstrates not the absence of
a preferred meaning but the presence of several preferred meanings. The Cosby Show is an example of a
sophisticated text that harbors different preferred meanings and spaces of
identification for different audiences.
The survey of the research shows that whether the preferred meaning
appears as a shared reading of the text (Condit, 1989), or as a field of
multiple readings (Fiske, 1987; Lewis, 1991), it is still structured as an
horizon of meaning which imposes a set of limits on the audience’s readings. The corollary view is that the preferred
meaning is a structure of signs, which facilitates certain readings of the text
by different audiences.
Resistive Readings/Preferred Readings
Lewis
(1991) posited that the resistive reading, was an ideologically progressive
reading, which was fed by the texts’ ambiguities in the absence of a preferred
meaning. Unlike the oppositional
reading situation in which the viewer mobilizes codes outside of the text to
critique the preferred meaning he or she first read in the text, the resistive
reading uses the codes of the text to construct an anti-hegemonic view of the
world. According to Lewis, the
resistive reading was incompatible with the existence of a preferred meaning. The conceptualization of the preferred
meaning, as a structured horizon of meanings however, allows us to accommodate
the notion of resistive reading. The
resistive reading becomes one of the meanings preferred by the text.
In
Fiske’s (1989) research of the Newlywed game, the exposure of patriarchy is limited
to the denial of an extreme and obvious form of machismo. While on one hand the denial of machismo
never reaches the level of a feminist discourse against male domination, on the
other hand the women who resist the machist environment of the show are
penalized by loosing points in the game.
The resistive reading of patriarchy was at the same time facilitated
(preferred) and hegemonized by the text.
Similarly in the Cosby Show the resistive identification of black
viewers with the Huxtables allowed by the text is contextualized by the
illusion of the attainability of the American Dream.
The
conceptualization of the preferred meaning as a structured horizon implies the
idea that the preferred meaning is encoded as a structure of signs, which are
read differently by different audiences in specific research situations. It also implies that the preferred meaning
takes ranges from an unproblematic reading shared by the audiences and the
analyst involved in the research, to multiple readings contained and
hegemonized by the horizon of the text.
This conceptual flexibility allows us to avoid the two equally
undesirable traps of thinking of the text as either fully open or fully
determinant of the process of reading. The preferred meaning thus remains a
privileged area to study the intersection between the determination of the text
and the autonomy of the viewer.
FROM MEANING TO CONTEXT
Perhaps
due to the difficulties of research design and the elusiveness of the encounter
between texts and viewers, in recent years audience researchers have shifted
from the study of meaning production to the study of the contexts of
viewing. This new turn has employed an
ethnographic approach to the study of the audience. Here the research presents
two foci: the first is the study of the meaning that viewers make out the act
of watching television, the second is the study of the influence of the
different elements of the viewing environment in the act of viewing. Although there have been various calls to
study the relationships between the text, the viewer and the context of viewing
and to integrate textual analysis with ethnographic studies (Moores, 1990) the
reality is that the text has receded into the background of analysis. In his introduction of Family Television, Morley (1986) revealed that his focus of
interest had shifted from:
The
analysis of the pattern of differential “readings” of particular program
materials, to the analysis of the domestic viewing context itself—as the
framework within which “readings of programs are (ordinarily) made. (p.14)
Following
the trend inaugurated by Radway (1984) and Morley (1986) ethnographic audience
researchers have focused on such elements as the influence of changing patterns
of everyday life (Rogge, 1989; Hermes, 1993), the daily rituals of the viewers
(Rogge, 1989; Seiter et. al, 1989)), and gender relations in the domestic
environment (Morley, 1986) in the act of viewing. Researchers have also studied and the integration of soap operas
in the work environment (Hobson, 1989) and an interest in the influence of the
technological environment of home in the process of viewing is also emerging
(Morley & Silverstone, 1990; Morley, 1991). While before, the production of meaning was an absolute given,
independent of any contextual factors, now the meaning of television is seen to
be dependent on the changing circumstances taking place not only during the
course of one’s life, but also during the course of one’s day. According to Morley and Silverstone (1990):
The
question may not be so much whether the “reading” model applies to television
(as such) rather a question of when, for which categories of viewing, in which
settings and in relation to which types of programming this model can be
usefully applied (p.44).
In
practice, however the research has focused more on the analysis of the contexts
of viewing then the readings of the texts.
The ethnographic turn of audience studies brings an added degree of
precision and specificity to the study of television viewing, but it also seems
to be leading to a total decentering of the text in favor of the context of
reading. Fiske’s call for an object
audience studies in which “there is no text, there is no audience, there are
only the processes of viewing—that variety of cultural activities that take
place in front of the screen”, is symptomatic.
More than the preferred meaning or some form of textual determination,
it is the text itself that runs the risk of becoming irrelevant to audience
studies.
TEXTUAL DETERMINATION AND READING CONTEXTS
The
research situations of ethnographic audience studies have made visible a new
link between texts and viewers. Given
the different sets of questions and concerns of the analyst, the text now
becomes the leit-motif for the viewer’s discussion of issues in everyday life
rather than the material used for the construction of meaning of the
world. It is as if the text provides
the viewer with a set cues for the reflection of issues, some of which are only
remotely related to the text. The
interview transcripts of various researchers (Gross, 1989; Hobson’s, 1989;
Morley, 1986; Rogge, 1989; Tulloch, 1989) show that the discussion about
television often wonders into accounts of personal stories, experiences and
opinions about the world. One of
Gross’s excerpts from his research on mass media and sexual minorities is a
telling example:
I
used to watch Hill Street Blues regularly, but I mostly don’t bother
anymore...it used to try to demonstrate the ambiguity that people felt towards
each other and towards their work. Now
it’s just the traditional good guys against the bad guys. I think it’s a reflection of the Reagan Era.
(p.140)
The
cueing role of the text was especially evident in a small-scale pilot study on
the NBC news I conducted during the period of one week during the summer of
1994.
The NBC News Study
For
this study I interviewed an American man in his mid-fifties who was a
television technician and a German woman in her early thirties who was a
special education teacher. At the time
of the interview I had a formal but cordial relationship with both of the
respondents. Each respondent was
separately shown four stories from an NBC prime time news-show and then
interviewed. The man was interviewed at
his work place and the woman at home, the settings deemed more convenient by
the respondents. The news items shown were: A story about a fire in a social
club, a story about Lithuania’s independence from Russia, a story about dieting
and a story about Panama in the aftermath of the American invasion.
Summary of the Stories
1. The Happy Land Social Club. The story starts
with Jane Pauley, telling the viewers that a Latino social club in New York
City had been set on fire and 87 people had died. The story proceeds with the field reporter explaining, over a
montage of shots of the fire and the suspect being arraign, that the suspect
was a Cuban man who had a fight with his girlfriend and was out of a job. Next the reporter establishes that the
social club lacked required safety conditions and that been ordered to close
down. However, since city officials
failed to reinspect it the club had remained open. The story moves to a press conference with Mayor Dinkins in which
he announces a crack down on other social clubs in similar conditions. Pauley makes a segway and the story proceeds
with images of praying and grieving in the neighborhood. The story proceeds with an interview with
the Bronx bishop defending the need for the existence of social clubs in areas
where people have scarce means of recreation.
The story closes with a report of the efforts of the Red Cross in the
neighborhood.
2. Lithuania.
The story starts with Pauley’s introduction and moves to images the
Russian army occupying a building that had been taken over by Lithuania’s government. While the reporter explains Lithuania’s move
for independence, we are shown images of talks between Lithuanian and Russian
leaders. This is followed by a quick
interview excerpt of Lithuania’s president stating that he doesn’t trust the
intentions of Russian authorities. The
story proceeds with images of a demonstration by of a group of Russians and the
comments of a Lithuanian man telling the Russians that they shouldn’t create
obstacles to Lithuania’s independence.
Images of pamphlets falling from a Russian helicopter are followed by a
general comment of the reporter closing the story.
3. Dieting.
Pauley opens the story by telling us that there are 65 million people in
the US on a diet and many of those are in weight loss programs. The story proceeds with visuals of public
figures accompanied by a commentary about their weight loss programs. The story proceeds with images of a
congressional hearing featuring people that had been hurt while on weight loss
programs. These images are accompanied
by a commentary about the potential danger of weight loss clinics. Comments of critics and advocates of weight
loss programs follow. Pauley closes by
stating that the Bush administration is considering to regulate weight loss
programs.
4. Panama.
Pauley opens with the information that in the wake of the US invasion of
Panama, the Latin-American country had been deeply scarred. She added that the Bush administration was
asking Congress for 500 million dollars in aid for Panama. The story moves to images of American
soldiers in Panama, followed by images of wreckage and homeless people. The reporter comments that none of the
planned programs of reconstruction have yet been funded. Images of homeless Panamanians being moved
away from their makeshift shacks is interspersed with interviews of Panamanian
leaders.
Design and Methodology
The
stories were first analyzed by the group of researchers involved in the
project. From these analysis we assumed a range of potential readings of the
stories. Based on these assumed
readings we elaborated a set of questions for each news story. Each questionnaire started with the same
two general questions: What was the story about? and What do you remember
happening? These questions were meant
at the outset to release the viewer’s own understandings of each news item. The
aim of the remaining questions was to probe the viewers’ understanding of the
saliences we had previously identified in the text. The questions also aimed to reveal the codes the viewers deployed
in their interpretation. The interviews
followed a semi-structured format that on one hand covered the concerns of the
researchers and on the other, followed the interests and free associations of
the viewers.
Analysis
The
analysis of the transcripts revealed two significant categories recurring
throughout the interviews. The first
was that the text functioned as a cue for the viewers’ discussion of different
topics. The second, was that the
viewers evaluated different stories from within the same set of ethical
concerns. In the course of explaining
what he thought about the social club story Jeff said:
So
Dinkins, Mayor Dinkins put the police on to close down the social clubs, but I
don’t think they can do that realistically.
I think that people have to learn to protect their lives. Like myself, if I go to the movies, if I go
to a large crowd I always sit on the outside seat...You don’t just go to some
place to just have a good time and drink.
You think, if I have to get out of here how do I get out?
Later,
when asked about possible solutions to problems like the fire in the Happy Land
social club, Jeff answered:
Try
to get to the people. Put out the word,
if you’re going to do this try to do it safely. Every once in while you see on the news some of these drug
places, say NY or Chicago, any large city where citizens get mad. Say there’s a park or any large place for
kids to play, but kids can’t do it anymore because the drug dealers have taken
over. There was a story recently about
a woman who got mad, who got the decent—or the so-called—decent people together
and they went over there and they spent all night. They got a fire going and they took the park back. Now to me that’s the way things should be
done...you can’t rely on the police...but you take your parks back your land
back. That’s the way to do it.
Asked
to describe the Diet story Jeff said first that he had obese relatives and
then:
They
talked about diet pieces and the detrimental effects that it has on
everybody. The problem with this
country is that thin is beautiful. If
you’re overweight 2 pounds you’re ugly.
Very little tolerance...I think that we’ve learned that for humanity
that we remain sensitive to the fact that not everybody’s perfect, not
everybody beautiful, but yet they do have feelings, if you don’t like the way
they are just don’t go near them.
These
answers are surprising because they don’t directly address the issues and
events of the story. The first excerpt
reveals that the viewing of the social club story didn’t elicit Jeff’s
reflection on the events of the story per se, but functioned like a cue for
Jeff’s discussion of the measures he takes to ensure his own safety. The second and third excerpts illustrate the
same point. Unlike what the researchers
had expected, Jeff’s solution to the problem was not related to the
apprehension of Latino criminals or better inspection by the city, but was
about individual responsibility and voluntarism. The story of the diet prompted Jeff to discuss his philosophy of
human acceptance and individual responsibility. In fact this ethic of individualism and of doing the right thing
pervaded Jeff’s discussion of the stories.
In reference to the Lithuania story Jeff said:
I
admire people who go into the unknown and that’s what they are doing. They are expressing the fact that they want
independence, want to go their own way, want to lead their own lives.
Ann’s
discussion of the stories was filtered by her main concern of whether the “two
sides” of the stories had been presented.
Asked what she remembered happening in the social club story, Ann starts
by saying:
They
described the guy who was accused of doing it.
I was very aware of the fact that they let the police speak. Not that the media accused him of doing
something, but that they reported the police statement about him...If they
accuse someone of doing something they should have him talk about it himself.
On
the Lithuania story:
The
main story was that they showed people from this part of the Soviet Republic in
opposition to the Russian army. And by
the way, they showed mainly the Lithuanian point of view, they didn’t show the
Russian’s point of view.
After
confessing that she had dieted at a younger age, Ann said:
When
I watched this I though of one commercial they have where one of these, I think
it’s a baseball coach or whatever—and he shows that he has lost forty pounds
within a couple of months...you have the impression that he still eats
reasonably, he has proper meals and doesn’t just eat chemicals, and that looks like
a real healthy way of loosing weight.
But that isn’t it at all. There
are dangerous issues to be checked out first.
And they showed the two sides.
CONCLUSION
The
analysis of the transcripts reveals that the respondents and the analyst shared
a basic interpretation of the Panama story, but that a preferred meaning could
not be established in the other stories.
The research shows that in the absence of a preferred meaning the text
prompted the viewers to discuss different topics. The degree to which the viewers’ discussions relate with the
topics of the text seems to be dependent on the extent to which those topics
resonated with the viewer’s life experiences.
The research also shows that the respondents employed the same ethical
perspective in the discussion of all the stories.
The
findings in this pilot study suggest that some viewers bring a set of
sedimented ideas and beliefs to their encounter with the text. Unlike other codes the viewer might employ
these ideas and beliefs are consistently used regardless of the specificity of
the stories. These findings also
support the idea that the text constitutes a horizon of meaning with different
forms and degrees of influence upon the viewer. While the text cannot guarantee the nature of the discussion it
can prompt the viewer to reflect on particular topics. The multifarious preferences of the text are
at work in the living room.
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