The Effects of Race, Gender, and Fandom on Audience Interpretations of Madonna's Music Videos

Autor: Jane D. Brown, Laurie Schulze
Rok vydání: 1990
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Communication. 40:88-102
ISSN: 1460-2466
0021-9916
DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.1990.tb02264.x
Popis: In the past decade, scholars have refocused attention on the mass media audience and how it constructs ideological meaning. Both social scientific and critical analyses often assume that “expert” coding or interpretation of media content leads to the same meanings as those constructed by typical viewers. But even the most informed semiotic, narrative, or psychoanalytic “readings” of a text cannot predict the meanings that will be made by audiences in social situations different from those of the academic critic. Similarly, systematic content analyses count the incidence of certain categories of overt acts, but say little about how viewers interpret the depictions. Meanings and pleasures are not “in” texts; they are produced in the act of viewing or reading. Hall (20) argues that “reading” (viewing) a media text is an active, social process and also a site of cultural struggle. Morley’s (33, 34) seminal work on the active audience of the British news program “Nationwide” and Radway’s (37) ethnographic study of romance readers have provided empirical support for these ideas. Radway, for example, showed that although quantitative or qualitative content analysis might see romance novels as presenting very uaditional sex-role scripts, some readers use the books to subvert their own traditional sex-role positions.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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