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:
