Hi. HERE are the lecture slides for this week.
We really didn't have time for class discussion this afternoon. I'm still curious to know what you think of the following issues:
1) To what extent do you agree with the arguments of media imperialism and/or audience studies? Is there a way to bridge the two approaches?
2) How does the model of media as environment and the model of global/local relate to one another? How do these two frameworks compare to the effects and uses and gratifications frameworks?
3) "Active audience does not mean powerful audience" (Ien Ang). Critically discuss.
HOMEWORK:
Please read Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson). This is the shortest reading at four pages! (Gasp!) Please be prepared because we have a guest speaker next week. Let's be ready to be active audiences. I think she's planning for a more discussion-heavy meeting than a lecture-based meeting.
I have read through the four case study proposals so far. While the hip-hop proposal presented a very clear and relevant problem (great abstract, actually), and the Harry Potter audiences proposal was well written, I am encouraging everyone to still think of alternative topics, or ways to refocus their current topics. I suggest you go review our previous lectures, and pick one or two concepts then think how you can empirically examine it in a case study. Think how you may be able to extend the concept, argue against it, problematize it, etc. (e.g., problematizing "proper distance" in an audience study)
I am also encouraging others to look at news and news audiences. All the proposals so far are all entertainment-related. Feel free to email and discuss. I am available for face-to-face consultation Thursday and Friday next week.
Please email me if you wish to know your group presentation grades as well.
Happy weekend!
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4 comments:
2. The media as environment model ties up with the global/local model; that is, they contextualize media experience. The former posits that consumers constantly choose to surround themselves with media that they (potentially) domesticate. The global/local model takes a relativist view on the reception and acquisition of media as chosen and imported by way of culture, and as both top-down and counter-imperialist. Although it is tempting to say that this emphasis on media consumers can be directly traced and/or attached to the effects tradition and U&G frameworks, not all media consumer behavior is psychological. While consumers are influenced by media, it is in no way direct and completely quantifiable (haha), and there are numerous contextual factors to consider. In this light, the effects and U&G frameworks are guilty of reductionism. Unlike the first two models, they seem to eliminate the extenuating factors of race, gender, nationality, etc.—identities institutions ascribe to individuals, and individuals ascribe to themselves that affects how they choose and react to media events and institutions.
Media performances aren’t purely hegemonic and homogenous, the media as environment and global/local models say.
3. I was wondering how the concept of Interpellation (Althusser) relates to Ien Ang’s statement. While we can read Interpellation as identifying with a media text, we can also translate this as the text calling, drawing us out as subjects. Say for example, identifying with a character from Friends. Here, audience activity is in selecting a character who you think is most like you. But because there are only six main characters to begin with, audience power decelerates/decreases when you debase your totality to accommodate the character traits of the six presented in the series. How powerful are we in a world where choices are already predetermined?
"Active audience does not mean powerful audience..."
I think what it's trying to say here is that, just because the spectator is interacting with a certain medium, it doesn't necessarily mean that it can make a great impact on it. Take for example the people who write to their editor about the things that they particularly like about the last issue of a certain magazine. Sure, it does indicate a form of participation and show how it is possible for the audience or in this case the receiver of the audience to reach the sender. But then, alhtough there is activity, the responses may not be all that great. I can be a praise or an insult but it the question is, "Will it acutally make a difference?" But I'm not taking this a bad thing and that active audiences are just stupid and irrelevant paticipators but I think it would also be keen to look whether the responses of the audience does make sense. Just take my reply here as an example. I may have written a comment, but I may not be making any sense at all. I think that Ien Ang is trying to point out here is that it's really enough to scrutinize the medium and the message, but to also crtically analyze the audience because they do take an important part in the communication process.
Excellent posts.
Tin's analysis of the two models/frameworks of the media is absolutely spot-on. This is a good example of what you need to do in your theoretical chapters in your case study/thesis/research project. You need to critically review theories/concepts/models and see how they agree/disagree with one another and then say how you wish to apply one (or two or three) concepts in your study.
Myka and Tin also had critical discussions of Ien Ang's very famous statement. A lot of audience studies theorists kind of over-celebrate the freedom of viewers to interpret media messages (e.g., John Fiske's "semiotic democracy"), but if we relate to the study of audiences what we studied about representations, we are reminded that the media do construct "frameworks for understanding", the media do filter and frame meanings and have the authority to give meanings the "status of truth."
Good posts. Keep it up.
On active audiences vs. powerful audiences:
Audiences, though able to engage a text, are nonetheless constrained in doing so. One can only interpret a text insofar as it allows or accomodates your interpretation - they are not completely flexible. Traditional power differentials further limit the activities of audiences because the very fact that those who produced the text have already set the parameters for the discourse (by creating a 'specific' text) implies a privileged position of negotiation for them. Moreover, when critics of the media speak of policy-laden content, it is dubious that the greater part of the public employs such a discernment in its consumption... people rarely engage a supposedly 'objective' news report, for instance, with the intent of assessing its assumptions. In this sense, one might argue for Ang's statement as meaning that audiences' interpretative power over texts is often overshadowed by that of the text itself (and hence, of its makers).
Nonetheless, there may be occasions where the activities of audiences can overwhelm the power dynamic. Reynaldo Ileto gives a lovely example by way of Rizal's chapter in the Noli, where a friar delivers a theatrical sermon with great 'sound and fury' to the fascinated natives... entirely in Spanish. As the crowd's Spanish faculties were limited to a mere smattering of words in the language, they were reduced to picking their way through the sermon in a haphazard and stumbling manner, selecting random phrases to form an interpretation of the text that not only fit what they wanted to hear but also ran completely counter to the original message. In this case - an all too plausible one when there are difficulties of communication between the media and the audience - the audience's power overrides the textual parameters as well, going so far as to spin its intended meaning on its head. A misreading of the message, yes, but a 'reading' (in a sense) of the text, all the same.
There is also the possibility of non-response as an instrument of power for the audience. Baudrillard speaks of this in terms of the 'silence' of the 'majority', referring to a refusal to engage the text beyond the realm of the affect of spectacle. This refusal is equal to a denial of the need to interpret - in which the masses merely accept and redirect "everything en bloc into the spectacular." A curious evasion, certainly, but one cannot deny that it holds interesting implications. Put another way, it is as though an audience's refusal to exercise its power resulted in its actually wielding it, albeit in a negative form.
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