Audiences as Decoding Sites

Audiences, as Richard Butsch reminds us (2008), have been around since the first person addressed someone else in a public environment – such as the Acropolis or, in the United States, a church. But as a relatively recent object of study, a product of late capitalism, and the “cultural industry,” American audience studies were precipitated by Hitler’s state propaganda, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s scholarship (1972) about the popular

culture/audience dichotomy and the idea of a powerful media viewed as an agent of audience-appeasement. This critical paradigm did not remain stagnant nor, however, has it faded away.

Parallel with it, other paradigms have developed. Some were influenced by literary scholarship (Mukerji & Schudson,

1991), by French linguists (Barthes), or even anthropology (Geertz, 1973). By the late 20^th century, it had become obvious that the two powerful, even polar, audience

paradigms were the “critical,” abstract, hermeneutic model, and the ethnographic model. The ethnographic model viewed audience members as free agents ready to satisfy their own desires and it might well be replaced by a different

ontological paradigm altogether (Bratich 2005; 2008).

Although Professor Jack Bratich is primarily interested in audiences for their multitudinal potential, my study

benefited from his approach because it forced a

reconsideration of audiences as sites of power, in this case meaning-making decoding sites.

Scholars have identified a variety of factors that define audiences as decoding sites. The foundation was first laid by The Birmingham School, and especially by Stuart Hall’s essay on encoding/decoding, which introduced the idea that all texts have an encoded preferred reading, open to multiple decoded readings (1981). As Hall explained, every text is created in such a manner that it can reach an audience. That audience is able to engage the text and read a meaning into it, because the text incorporates symbols available to it, shared by both creator and audience,

symbols of the dominant cultural and political structure.

Thus, Hall argued that the encoded text only suggested a preferred reading, but the audience’s class and

correspondingly, its (popular) cultural identity, would equally control the meaning-making process, by influencing how audiences read and understand a text.

David Morley tested Hall’s thesis (1980), and believed Hall’s thesis was empirically tenable: the meaning-making process is connected to the audience’s class and cultural background. Though Fiske and others attacked this analysis as simplistic and deterministic (1987a), and insisted on a semiotic democracy, recent academic work suggests that both authors are correct, that sometimes the text may be more open to meanings and other times more strictly and less democratically structured.

Sujeong Kim went back to the roots of cultural studies and refined Morley’s finding of audience readings (2004).

Kim reinterpreted Morley’s findings and illuminated two elements of the reading:

a) the role of the content of the text and

b) the role of the audience’s economic background (2004).

Kim re-analyzed the reading patterns for each type of text:

non-economic (television programming), economic (family budget) and political (a report of an American activist and Presidential candidate, Ralph Nader). Kim’s findings

support the role of the audience’s social class, income, education and occupation (2004, p. 105), in creating reading patterns when reading non-economic texts. The reading uniformity within a socio-economic group was especially obvious among middle class audience members

(there were no upper class members in the audience sample).

Kim also found that racial, gender, and cultural taste produced no differences (Id).

Although Fiske never equated content with meaning nor meaning with reading, he did emphasize the active role of the reader (the audience) in meaning-making, while never denying the power of external factors, such as economic and cultural background. As shown above, these factors may

create communal decoding patterns: affluent or

college-educated people would have similar knowledge and interests, especially within generational limits. Such groupings have been ever more evident with the advent of the internet which can make fandom both visible and influential in

meaning-making (Jenkins, 1992; Gray, Sandvoss & Harrington, 2007).

The interaction between text and its consumer, of course, is easy to simplify but hard to grasp. Here, in an effort to address this potential problem I embrace Morley’s concern about unrepentant valorization of audience pleasure (1992) and romantic scholarly belief in popular resistance to the preferred reading (or meaning). I argue that

Morley’s position remains valid because, especially in

today’s fragmented world of “narrowcasting,” when televised texts are aimed to satisfy fragmented audiences whose

identification with the host or show’s characters is so total, that an oppositional or even a negotiated reading of the next is reasonably impossible. Faced with a myriad of nuanced textual differences, audiences are encouraged to search “a perfect fit” of views rather than come up with a negotiated reading, and switch the channel and make a

different choice at their slightest intellectual or affective discomfort.

In addition to such external social and economic

factors, technology has influenced the process of decoding in multiple ways. In the last few decades, the American public has been confronted with wholly new kinds of images

and sounds. This is an extension of what Todd Gitlin called

“the burgeoning consumption of goods” where consumption of

“fleeting and changeable elements of life” (2001, p. 45) becomes the only permanence we have. But to multiply,

consumption needs to activate new or dormant needs. One of those needs may be the need to become one’s own self, to self-actualize as an individual. In an attempt to profit from this desire for individuality through the consumption of more goods, media organizations have come up with a variety of programs which are meant to treat the masses piecemeal in the form of smaller, even elite, niches.

Technology, through cable TV, made this option a viable trend. For example, Viacom, through CBS, broadcasts evening news to the millions who still watch it. As a complement to that, MTV and Comedy Central “narrowcast” news, using

Sandvoss’ term, to millions whose needs demand

“sophisticated” entertainment (Dagnes, 2010, p. 71).

For over a decade, Henry Jenkins has written about the various aspects of the interplay among technology,

governmental regulations of media (or the lack of it), and how the cultural habits of media consumers give them the perception of becoming something more significant than mere consumers. Jenkins believes that they have become more

powerful, because sometimes, as fandom, audience members engage in some sort of media production (2006).

This type of activity is possible because, as Jenkins noted, consumers’ access and ability to archive media has expanded and, as a result, consumers are in a better

position to overcome at least some effects of corporate concentration of media ownership (2004). However, the interaction with the text has become so complex and so multi-layered, that it is difficult to use those tertiary, derivative, texts in a meaningful way to interpret the primary text.