THE MEDIA AUDIENCE SOCIETY NEXUS
The trajectory of reception analysis may be summarized with reference to
the concrete empirical materials being examined within different varieties of
audience research. What distinguishes reception studies, perhaps most of all, in
comparison with the majority of the quantitative milestones, is their focus
simultaneously on media discourses and ‘audience discourses,’ i.e., the
statements and actions of audiences which serve as evidence about their
experiences and uses of media. The conceptualization and operationalization of
these various discourses call for specification in further qualitative empirical
research.
In an overview of different varieties of communication theory, Meyrowitz
(1993) distinguished between conceptions of media as either conduits,
languages, or environments. The dual status of media as channels and texts –
within transmission and ritual models of communication – is increasingly
recognized as part of the convergence between social-scientific and humanistic
communication studies. A better understanding of media, in addition, as a cultural
environment is one of the next challenges also for reception studies. In meeting
this challenge, research will have to consider at least three types of analytical
objects:
1. This chapter has referred to the contents of media as discourses –
vehicles of potential meaning which are actualized and enacted by
audiences in various everyday circumstances. The interpretive
actualization of media content has also been approached in reception
studies as discourses, as analyzed through various qualitative
methodologies
2. Media are material artefacts – they have a very concrete presence in the
space, time, and interpersonal relations of everyday life. Chapter 1 noted
that the modern media may be defined as institutions-to-think-with.
However, in their local and distributed settings, they are also objects-to-
think-with (Lévi-Strauss 1991 [1962]). Relatively little attention has been
given so far to this aspect of reception, even though some studies have
examined the place of television sets in the family context in different
cultural settings (Lull 1988b) and the representation of television as a
new element of social space during its introduction (Spigel 1992). The
Walkman (Gay et al. 1997) and mobile computing devices also suggest
themselves as objects of research in this perspective.
3. Media, finally, serve to constitute practices. Not only are media received
and applied within particular social and cultural environments, but they
help to constitute those environments, as also suggested by ‘medium
theory’ (Chapter 2). The media enter into specific forms of interaction,
association, and community – in variable contexts from the local to the
global level. At this point, media research blends into other forms of
social and cultural research.
In conclusion, audiences, broadly speaking, constitute a strategic nexus
between media and their social contexts. It is for this reason, in part, that audience
research has been a central ingredient of media and communication studies, both
its quantitative and, more recently, its qualitative variants. Other types of research
have gone on to address the wider cultural and historical contexts of mediated
communication. These research traditions are the topics of the next two chapters.
