Morely (1993) Active Audience Theory

Abstract

Morely (1993) begins by stating passive audiences are a thing of the past, and that the audience theory pendulum has swung within media studies to show that audiences are commonly in an active state (p. 13).  Additionally, media texts are often polysemic and can be interpreted numerous ways by an active viewer (p. 13).  

Based on this recent pendulum swing, Morely argues that Hall’s (encoding/decoding) notion of a preferred reading, where the encoder of a media text tries to direct the viewer to a certain ideology, has been dropped from view of researchers (p. 13).  Much of active audience theory and the theoretical frameworks guiding this research need to be reread (pp. 13-14).

As a field, we should not discredit the way audiences negotiate media texts, either accepting the dominant hegemonic messages or resisting them entirely (p. 14). Morely fears this area of research is being obscured because researchers seemed settled on accepting the unfounded notion that audiences always resist dominant meanings (p. 14).  He argues that the concept of new revisionism – a concept that has attempted to challenge previously accepted paradigms of critical research - has allowed researchers to now better trace the history of audience studies and focus on parts of the field that have been ignored or under utilized (p. 14; also see Curran, 1990).  Morely believes the encoding aspect of Hall’s model, should not be ignored by the social sciences because not all audiences read texts the same way.  To demonstrate this, he offers Fiske’s (1986) example of semiotic democracy.  This framework centers on audiences decoding texts through the lens of their own cultural understanding (Morely, 1993, p. 15).  The issue here is that the creators of the text are not all equal and differences in the capitalist power relations of production companies afford certain entities more production power (television channel, time slot, actors, etc.), which in turn, can affect semiotic readings by audiences.  Therefore, Morely argues that the encoding process is just as important as the decoding process, given its economic, political, and ideological implications (p. 15).  

Me; This sounds as though he is invoking critical political economy into audience studies and also textual analysis, so researchers known what the preferred reading would be in the encoding process.

Research cannot assume that all active audiences interpret texts against the grain.  Morely draws upon de Certeau’s (1984) work that makes a distinction between audiences having power over a text and power over a text’s agenda (as cited in Morely, 1993, p. 16).  In other words, an active audience does not necessarily equate to a powerful audience with the ability to come away with resistive, polysemous readings of texts.

Finally, Morely brings up the distinction between macro and microanalyses of audience research and fears swinging the pendulum back to macro would be a mistake (pp. 16-17).  This is because microanalyses utilize ethnographies, which collectively produce macro concepts.  He doesn’t want to abandon either of these two types of analyses, but rather use them in tandem to better articulate audience studies.  However, he agrees with Fiske (1990), that ethnography must be used as a means to interpret audience activities in a broader context than simply individuation (p. 18). 

Morely’s (1993) central argument surrounds the notion that audience research is doing itself a disservice by ignoring the encoding process and assuming viewers’ decodings to always be resistant to the dominant cultural ideologies embedded within texts:

"Much recent work in this field is marred by a facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and by an undocumented presumption that forms of interpretive resistance are more widespread than subordination, or the reproduction of dominant meanings." (p. 14)