There is a feeling that I had Friday night after the homecoming game that I don’t know if I will ever be able to describe except to say that it is warm. Sam and Patrick drove me to the party that night, and I sat in the middle of Sam’s pickup truck. Sam loves her pickup truck because I think it reminds her of her dad. The feeling I had happened when Sam told Patrick to find a station on the radio. And he kept getting commercials. And commercials. And a really bad song about love that had the word “baby” in it. And then more commercials. And finally he found this really amazing song about this boy, and we all got quiet.

Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something.

“I feel infinite.”

And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest thing they ever heard. Because the song was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way. I have since bought the record, and I would tell you what it was, but truthfully, it’s not the same unless you’re driving to your first real party, and you’re sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain.¹

If you are anything like Charlie, the narrator in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, you can probably think of at least one song that holds a unique significance to you. Perhaps the narrative of the song is somehow related to your life, and maybe the artist who sings it is in some way important to you, but neither of those aspects fully captures what the song means. Perhaps this song is the one that played during the slow dance at your senior prom, or the last time you saw a grandparent, or even (like Charlie) on the way to your first real high‐school party. No matter how many other people you encounter who claim to know and love this song, none of them will have the same meaning for it as you do because none of them were dancing, dealing with loss, or growing up with you.

This chapter asks the question: What is the role of the actual audience in the process of understanding the media? Reception scholars primarily seek to understand the personal meanings that individuals make of mass media texts in relation to their lived social systems and experiences. Often by interviewing audience members or by observing the environments where they read, watch, and listen, Reception scholars provide the field of media studies with a unique perspective on the power of audiences in shaping the media landscape. Instead of looking at how media content or production practices influence helpless media consumers, Reception analysis supports the notion of an “active” audience constantly reformulating the meanings of a media text across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and more.

This chapter will begin with a brief overview of Reception theory (especially as a response to more traditional audience studies), before looking at three contemporary Reception theories that shed light on how audiences make original meaning out of media texts. These theories are conceptually distinct but broadly convergent, and it is important to understand how they build upon one another to create an overarching understanding of the active audience. The chapter ends with a discussion of the primary research method for Reception scholars, ethnography, and considers two of the most famous examples of this approach in media research: David Morley’s Nationwide study and Jackie Stacey’s work on memory and stardom.

Reception Theory: An Overview

Reception theory refers to a diverse body of work that nevertheless commonly stresses audience interpretation as a primary source of meaning in the media. Proponents in this vein argue that the meaning of a text is never inherent; meaning only arises in the interaction between text and audience member. In relation to literature, for example, Wolfgang Iser notes that “as the reader uses the various perspectives offered [to] him [sic] by the text in order to relate the patterns and the ‘schematized views’ to one another, he sets the work in motion, and this very process results ultimately in the awakening of responses within himself.”² Iser suggests that there are always some aspects of fictional narratives that are “unwritten” or left unaddressed by an author. Reading involves imagining or filling in these details, and by doing so the reader influences the meaning he or she makes of the text. Of course, the same process could be said to operate in relation to many other forms of media as well. No newspaper story or Wikipedia entry can relate every detail on a subject. Few films explicitly address what happens to the main characters after the credits roll. As a result, audiences always have some ability to add their own perspectives to a media text. Reception scholars admit that media owners might have the economic power to craft media texts with particular messages, but it is audiences who determine what a text ultimately signifies to them and how it actually functions in their own lives.

The historical advent of Reception theory in media studies was in many ways a response to more traditional, social scientific approaches to the audience that concentrated on measuring the effects of messages on mass consumers. As such, we believe it is important to summarize these approaches briefly in order to provide perspective on the more critical (and, we believe, more important) tradition of Reception analysis. The earliest model of media effects research conceived of the audience as mindless vessels ready to receive media messages. Sometimes dubbed the “hypodermic needle” approach, this research tradition predominantly sought to discover how the mass media “injected” particular understandings into consumers. Researchers assumed here that media messages meant only exactly what producers intended them to mean, and audiences were unable to ignore or negotiate these meanings. The weaknesses of this approach should be obvious: messages do not mean the same thing to every person, and the audience does not just passively absorb any and all media messages. As a result, media scholar Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues proposed the “two‐step flow” model as a more nuanced version of the hypodermic needle approach.³ This model proposed the existence of opinion leaders, or certain individuals in the audience who attended more carefully to media than others. Mass media messages would influence these individuals, who would in turn disseminate the information to secondary audiences. While the two‐step model recognized a bit more activity on the part of the audience, it was still problematic because it supported the notion that the meanings of media messages were clear and definite.

Other empirical media effects research looks at the ways in which media messages could have broad, collective effects on the larger population. One of the most significant examples that still continues today is cultivation analysis, first proposed by George Gerbner.⁴ Gerbner argues that individuals who watch heavy amounts of television are hyperconscious to issues of danger and violence in their everyday lives. His theory suggests that heavy‐viewing audiences develop a distorted view of reality and believe that violence is more prevalent in society than actual statistics support. This kind of widespread effect is mirrored in the work of Donald Shaw and Maxwell McCombs, and their theory of media agenda‐setting.⁵ Shaw and McCombs claim that popular media outlets like news stations tell the American public what to think about and how to think about it: they set the national agenda and fuel public concern. Cultivation analysis and agenda‐setting are both more complex and developed approaches than the hypodermic needle or two‐step models, but they continue the tradition of positioning the audience as mindless consumers who believe and follow most of what they see in the media.

One early approach to studying the audience that significantly departs from the others mentioned here is uses and gratifications theory.⁶ This perspective was the first to begin “thinking of audiences as empowered to select their access to specific media and to use that media within the ranges of possibility.”⁷ Uses and gratifications theory assumes that individuals consciously consume media texts for their own ends, purposefully reworking textual meaning in order to integrate the text into their daily lives. Instead of passively absorbing given meanings, audiences are selective in which media they consume and how they choose to use it. Audiences may engage media as a means of escapism, as a source of information, or even as a form of interpersonal relationship. In essence, this perspective reverses the classic understanding of audiences by revealing how they use the media (instead of how the media may use them).

Though uses and gratifications theory is often critiqued for being overly optimistic about the audience, it is important to recognize it as an historical development in Reception analysis. Some of the analytical methods utilized by these researchers helped pave the way for contemporary ethnographic research on audiences. Moreover, the theoretical underpinnings of Reception theory were born out of the criticisms leveled against uses and gratifications theory for assuming conscious activity on the part of the audience. Much Reception theory claims that while consciousness may be a factor for some individual consumers, audience members as a whole can refashion dominant media meanings without being completely cognizant of the process. A fully formulated understanding of this reasoning first crystallized in the encoding/decoding model.

Encoding/Decoding: Stuart Hall

Perhaps the most significant early conceptual paradigm within Reception theory is Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model (see Figure 10.1), which he originally published as a polemic against the classic models of audience effects research. Hall is best known for his ideological critiques within the field of British Cultural studies (see Chapter 6), and the model’s emphasis on the production, negotiation, and reception of ideological messages between classes reflects this background. The model recognizes the role of media institutions and owners in engineering media texts with particular messages, but it also accounts for the various ways in which active audiences of different classes can consume and rework these hegemonic or dominant meanings. In a general sense, it outlines all of the possible ways in which the intended meaning of a text can be potentially reworked in the hands of an active audience.

Hall begins with the basic premise that “there is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code.”⁸ A code is a set of rules that govern the use of visual and linguistic signs within a culture. Popular codes, like Morse code or so‐called Pig Latin, are systems where users can disguise a message by translating it according to particular rules. Hall’s notion of code is much broader, but relies on the same principle. When you want to communicate something meaningful to a friend, you have to “translate” the thought in your head into a verbal sentence. Language is the code that you use in this instance. You could also use sign language or even paint a picture that expresses the same thought. Both of these are alternative codes to language. Any image or word we can comprehend, for Hall, is the result of a code.

Codes are never neutral, in the sense that that they are always representations of meaning, not meaning itself, and they reflect the partiality inherent to any representation. Feminist theory is a code that encourages its users to generate and interpret ideas according to issues of gender and power. Christian theology is a code that prompts its followers to disseminate and understand messages according to ideas of love and redemption. The codes we use lead to certain ways of seeing the world, and they compel us to interpret the world according to their rules. This interpretation occurs in two related moments. Encoding is the process of creating a meaningful message according to a particular code, while decoding is the process of using a code to decipher a message and formulate meaning. The key insight of Hall’s model is the recognition that “the codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical.”⁹

The left‐hand “encoding side” of the model is primarily concerned with how dominant ideologies come to exist in mass‐mediated texts. The codes that media industries use to create media texts are typically marked by dominant ideologies. Some industry codes, for example, reflect stereotypical understandings of race and gender (addressed in Chapters 6 and 8). When media producers use these codes to generate media texts (encoding), the ideologies implicit in the code also shape the representations of race and gender in a hegemonic way. The resulting meaning is called the “preferred reading” or desired interpretation of the text. It is “preferred” in the sense that this understanding of race and gender reinforces systems of unequal social power, which in turn support media industries. The encoding of preferred meaning in Adele’s 2015 break‐up anthem “Send My Love (To Your New Lover),” for instance, would be the encoding of meanings about lessons learned from the end of a heterosexual relationship. Other implicit preferred meanings might be that “true” love is worthy of pursuit or that being tough after a break‐up is an admirable quality. These are all preferred meanings because they are the result of the dominant codes that constitute the song, which draw from and reinforce hegemonic ideologies (heteronormativity, individualism, etc.), whose popularity in turn benefits the mainstream music industry. A good way to consider the preferred meaning of a media text is to think of what the text apparently “means” on a thematic or cultural level. It is the aspect of the text that draws from and validates dominant cultural ideologies.

Media industries want consumers to interpret texts according to the preferred meaning by employing codes similar to those used in production, but Hall points out that this does not always occur in practice. The right‐hand “decoding side” of the model shows how audiences can actually interpret or “read” media texts according to three possible codes or positions: dominant, oppositional, and negotiated. Media audiences operating from a dominant reading position employ a code identical to the industry code and understand the text according to its preferred meaning. These audiences decode the meaning of the text intended by media producers and consciously or unconsciously accept it as the totality of the meaning present. Communication is “perfectly transparent” here because both parties are using the same code. If the first time you heard “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” you thought, “What a catchy break‐up song!” and jammed out to it in your car, you probably performed a dominant reading of the song. In other words, you probably accepted the song as meaningful to the extent that it features messages about the necessary trials of heterosexual love and the importance of self‐reliance.

If, upon hearing the song, however, you quickly switched radio stations and criticized the rise of the pop music love ballad, you probably performed an oppositional reading instead. Oppositional reading is not the same as misunderstanding. For Hall, a media consumer who decodes meaning from the oppositional position “detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference.”¹⁰ These audiences recognize the preferred reading and dominant code in a text but reject them in favor of a completely different code (and, therefore, a different meaning). For instance, listeners who view the pop music industry as a vapid profit machine might employ a (Marxist) perceptual code that rejects Adele’s messages of self‐sufficiency and empowerment. The meaning that they decode from the song might then recognize “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” as the latest in a long line of moneymaking schemes by the music industry.

Dominant and oppositional reading strategies represent two of the three possible decoding positions, but in reality they are relatively rare. It is better to view them as two ends on a complex continuum that predominantly features the diverse practices of the third category: negotiated reading. The majority of media consumers interpret media texts from a negotiated position, meaning that they decode part of the text in accordance with the industry code and part of it with an alternative one. These audiences mesh the preferred reading of the text with their personal perspectives and interpretations, and produce meaning that is only partially reminiscent of the preferred. Typically, a negotiated reading “acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules.”¹¹ It accepts the large‐scale meanings while simultaneously assigning personal meanings.

This “hybrid meaning” of negotiated reading can take many forms. For example, some consumers who listen to “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” might accept its ideologies of heteronormativity and self‐reliance, but they might also interpret it as an example of uniquely female empowerment. Queer individuals who listen to “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” might reject the implied heterosexual love in the song, but still accept the messages of self‐reliance in times of emotional crisis. The notion of negotiated readings also helps us understand the various ways that people “use” media texts in their daily lives. When we watch individuals performing “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” in talent shows, or in their living rooms via YouTube, we are watching a negotiated reading. There is a dimension of meaning for the performer we cannot access by simply looking at the ideologies of the song’s lyrics.

Hall views the encoding/decoding process as cyclical. Each exchange of messages between media producers and consumers (every encoding and subsequent decoding) alters the codes and frameworks of knowledge from which both sides operate. The public reception of “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” necessarily influenced which song would become Adele’s follow‐up hit. Though the encoding/decoding model was the first of its kind to recognize the roles of media producers and audiences in determining the meaning and influence of media texts, it also has a number of conceptual problems: If the encoding and decoding sides always affect one another, where does a text really “begin” in the model? How is it possible to determine the preferred encoded meaning of a text without first engaging in a process of decoding? These questions and others have led some scholars to look at textual negotiation in a less structured way through the notion of polysemy.

Polysemy: John Fiske, Celeste Condit, and Leah Ceccarelli

The word “polysemy” literally translates to “many meanings.” As proposed by television scholar John Fiske, polysemy refers to the relative openness of media texts to multiple interpretations. A polysemic text is one that can signify a number of different meanings to many different members of its audience. Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a fairly polysemic text because it blends the generic conventions of a sitcom, parodies of popular narratives, and diverse intertextual references into a complex piece of television programming. Different audiences will make different meanings of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt based on their background and knowledge of American popular culture. Emergency broadcast announcements, on the other hand, have limited polysemic potential. There is only so much a color bar and a loud screeching sound can mean to an audience. These examples suggest that a text must be polysemic in order to be popular, and the most popular texts are often those most open to audience interpretation (just think of the moral ambiguity at the heart of popular programs like How to Get Away with Murder and House of Cards).

The notion of popularity becomes an overriding construct that Fiske uses to understand the role of power and the negotiation of meanings in a text. He concedes that all popular texts must have a foundation of dominant social conventions shared by audiences. Quite simply, “a text can appeal to this variety of audiences only if there is a common ideological frame that all recognize and can use, even if many are opposed to it.”¹² This foundation of dominant understandings, however, cannot fully contain all of the meaning in a media text, a fact that always results in the recognition of what Fiske labels “semiotic excess.” This excess is the surplus of symbols in a text that do not reference clear meanings, and the degree of polysemy in a text is relative to its level of semiotic excess. Polysemy is, therefore, not a quality a text either possesses or lacks, but an ever‐present aspect of a text that can be measured in terms of more or less. The greater the semiotic excess and polysemy of a text, the more audiences can negotiate and manage personal meanings. This understanding leads Fiske to view most television programs as “producerly,” a term he uses to denote an open, writerly text (see Chapter 11) that is also popular. A producerly text “relies on discursive competencies that the viewer already possesses, but requires that they are used in a self‐interested, productive way.”¹³

A clear example of a producerly text that exemplifies the tenets of polysemy is the CW network’s Supernatural. The long‐running program is a complex narrative that follows the Winchester brothers (Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki) in their attempts to rid the world of demons, ghosts, and other mythical creatures. On the one hand, Supernatural relies on a number of American ideological assumptions (the struggle between good and evil, the importance of family, the reinvention of the self) and televisual conventions (seasonal story arcs, cliffhangers, flashbacks). These are the aspects of the show that make it popular among American audiences because they are culturally familiar. On the other, Supernatural is also predicated on the gradual unwinding of secrets that represent free‐floating symbols and semiotic excess. Viewers encounter narrative moments (hints regarding the brothers’ destinies, allusions to plots hatched in heaven and hell, roguish characters with dubious intentions, etc.) that do not possess immediate or clear meanings within the context of the story. The joy of Supernatural for many of its fans is the speculation that it generates around these elements, and there are scores of online forums where people can share their thoughts and interpretations. In this way, Supernatural’s polysemic ambiguity makes it ripe for multiple readings from different individuals.

Fiske’s theory of polysemy reimagines Hall’s encoding/decoding model by aligning Hall’s notion of preferred meaning with communal audience decoding practices and his concepts of negotiated or oppositional reading with semiotic excess. Thus, the management of meaning from a polysemic perspective is neither linear nor cyclical, and is best viewed as a ratio between convention and excess on the part of the reading audience. Polysemy is an important contribution to Reception analysis because it recognizes two levels of potential meaning in any given media text, and it allows scholars to understand the “place” in the text where audiences engage their personal experiences and attitudes. Fiske is one of the strongest proponents of audience agency in contemporary media studies, and his theory of polysemy (where meaning can never be fully controlled by producers) reflects that scholarly commitment.

Naturally, such a singular perspective on the audience has its critics. In her essay, “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy,” Celeste Condit outlines a number of issues that Fiske overlooks.¹⁴ The first is a lack of oppositional codes on the part of most audience members. Oppositional codes, such as Marxism and Feminism, are ways of understanding the world that contradict dominant American ideologies. Because most audience members simply do not have access to these codes, it would be difficult to interpret a media text in the truly novel way that the theory of polysemy implies. Condit also critiques Fiske for ignoring the disproportionate amount of internal work required in generating personal meaning against the dominant meanings in a text. Socially privileged groups whose views resonate most with the conventional level of textual meaning experience pleasure more easily than marginalized groups who must work to pull meaning from the semiotic excess. This leads Condit to question Fiske’s assumption that television is a democratic medium, instead asserting that media texts are “compromises that give the relatively well‐to‐do more of what they want, bringing along as many economically marginal viewers as they comfortably can.”¹⁵

Condit goes on to point out that even the diversity of programming on television tends to reinforce particular messages about cultural issues, and the historical moment that contextualizes a media program also importantly influences its reception. Both of these factors position television as a more determined medium than Fiske’s notion of polysemy allows. In light of the shortcomings of polysemy, Condit proposes “polyvalence” as a more applicable term. Polyvalence “occurs when audience members share understandings of the denotations of a text but disagree about the valuation of those denotations to such a degree that they produce notably different interpretations.”¹⁶ In other words, audiences understand the actual content of media texts in a similar way, but they disagree on the merit or value of that information. Film critics provide an excellent illustration of this point. Though most reviewers share common perceptions about how a film’s plot develops or what role its characters play, their overall assessments of the work can be strikingly diverse. Polyvalence differs from polysemy in that the difference between audience members is one of connotation, not of meaning as a whole.

Whether viewed as polysemy or polyvalence, the recognition of multiple dimensions of meaning in a text opens up new understanding in media studies and Reception analysis. These approaches shake off the problematic structuring of the encoding/decoding model while still retaining a focus on the interplay between media producers and audiences. Both Fiske and Condit, however, ironically operate within a textual paradigm even as they concern themselves with methods of reception. They both (unreflectively) consider how polysemic texts enable audiences to negotiate meaning. This is understandable if one remembers that prior to the notion of an “active audience,” many media scholars focused on the industry and textual issues outlined in the first two sections of this textbook. The work of many early Reception theorists (like Fiske and Condit) reflects this tendency to consider the text as central, and it was not until Reception theory developed into a more distinct body of work that scholars began interrogating its internal assumptions.

One of the most significant contributions to the refinement of Reception theory and polysemy is Leah Ceccarelli’s article “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism.”¹⁷ Prior to its publication, Reception theorists had used the concept of polysemy to explain audience interpretive practices without clearly identifying whether polysemy existed as a quality of the audience or a quality of the text, or neither or both. In essence, “the term ‘polysemy’ is itself polysemous.”¹⁸ Ceccarelli is not concerned with pinning down an essential meaning for the term, but she does attempt to understand how it can function through different bodies in different ways toward different ends. Though she is primarily interested in how polysemy functions rhetorically across disciplines, her outline of the three primary “types” of polysemy helps us better understand the process of audience reception in media studies. These three types are resistive reading, strategic ambiguity, and hermeneutic depth.

When scholars view polysemy as a quality of the audience, they are conceptualizing it as a tool of resistive reading. Resistive reading is the active, audience‐based creation of textual meaning that is contrary to the meaning intended by the text’s author, creator, or producer. Here, marginalized audiences use the concept of polysemy to distort or transform the messages that reflect the needs and interests of dominant groups. Resistive reading is very close to Hall’s notion of oppositional reading, in the sense that both rely on audience access to oppositional codes to interpret a message. A Feminist reading of magazine advertisements, for example, is an act of resistive reading. Rather than interpreting the message as an advertisement for a useful product at a good price (which one needs to purchase right now), a Feminist resistive reading would understand the advertisement as a text that primarily reinforces the subjugated role of women in society. Polysemy is crucial here because it explains how feminist audiences open up oppositional fields of meaning in a given text.

When scholars view polysemy as a quality of the text and its creator, conversely, they are conceptualizing it as an instance of strategic ambiguity. Strategic ambiguity is the intentional decision to craft a vague, semantically rich text that is purposefully open to multiple interpretations. When textual producers are faced with conflicting demands from different audiences, they may navigate through these expectations by attempting to satisfy all of them with the same text. The use of strategic ambiguity is rhetorical in the sense that it is often tied to a specific situation: particular conflicting audiences at a particular historical moment. The State of the Union address by the US President is a good example of a strategically ambiguous media text. In the address the President must attempt to satisfy a number of conflicting audiences across areas like political affiliation, income level, and geographic location. Clear directives are less common in the address than general commitments, which allows these different audiences to interpret plans for the coming year as they see fit. Polysemy allows for attractive ambiguity in this instance.

Finally, when scholars view polysemy as a quality of the critic or analyst, they are conceptualizing it as a dedication to hermeneutic depth. Hermeneutic depth refers to the critical recognition of multiple meanings in a text as the source of its overall meaning. When scholars imbue a text with hermeneutic depth, they engage it as a site of academic play and problematize any apparently singular meaning. This process reveals the multiple meanings of the text and encourages the understanding of many, sometimes conflicting interpretations. The textbook you are currently reading is in many ways an extended project in service of hermeneutic depth. We began with the text of “American media” (understandably large and complex) and have now run it through eight different perspectives. None of these perspectives is wholly correct or incorrect, and true understanding only comes in recognizing the (in)applicability of each at different times. This lack of clear meaning is the meaning. Here, polysemy becomes a way of achieving hermeneutic depth, a bridge toward a deeper, more complex understandings of texts.

Ceccarelli’s essay sheds critical light on how different types of polysemy function in different ways toward different ends. Her categorization also helps distinguish between text and audience in the process of audience meaning‐making, which is both its major strength and its major weakness in terms of Reception theory. On one hand, by clearly distinguishing between resistive reading, strategic ambiguity, and hermeneutic depth, she reminds Reception theorists to be more conscious in their use of the term and their scholarly worldview. On the other hand, she implicitly recognizes audience‐based and text‐based polysemy as equally prevalent and valid. While this may be true, it is not helpful for Reception theorists attempting to understand all of meaning from the audience perspective. Instead, this type of holistic viewpoint forms the central component in the final theoretical section we will consider.

Interpretive Communities: Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish is an important literary critic in the tradition known as reader‐centered or reader‐response criticism, but his work on textual interpretation is just as applicable to media studies as it is to the analysis of literature. Unlike Hall and Fiske, who recognize some degree of ideological or authorial power in texts as a result of their production, Fish claims that all meaning resides in the reader or audience. Meaning simply cannot exist outside of audience interpretation. The interpretive strategies we already possess as audience members, he writes,

are not put into execution after reading (the pure act of perception in which I do not believe); they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as it is usually assumed, arising from them.¹⁹ [emphasis added]

In other words, until audience members engage a media text and begin to read or interpret it, that text literally means nothing. The strategies we use to interpret the text direct us to understand its words and images in a particular way. Only then does the text actually mean anything. Though we tend to think that our varied perspectives allow us to access the different kinds of meaning implicit in a text, it is actually the other way around: our ways of understanding create meaning in the text, the only meaning a text can have. Any meaning we generate, anything we notice, “has been made noticeable … by an interpretive strategy.”²⁰

This thinking quickly leads to problems. After all, if every individual makes unique and personal meaning out of a text through the process of reading it, how is it possible that some people tend to read some texts in roughly the same way? If an individual interprets texts according to particular strategies, how can that individual read two similar texts in very different ways? And where do these strategies come from in the first place? Fish’s answers to these questions can be found in his notion of interpretive communities, or groups who interpret texts similarly because they share similar social positions and experiences. New Yorkers might interpret a film about New York society differently from Arizonans because they share different codes based on geographic location. Naturally, the total meanings that individual audience members generate in each group will vary, but one might expect to see more resemblance between any two New Yorkers than between a New Yorker and an Arizonan. At the same time, an Arizonan who had adored the previous work of the director of the film might hate it because it disparages Americans. If this were the case, we might reason that the interpretive strategies based on this person’s nationality supersede those based on state residency in this instance. Thus, the fact that people can and do belong to many interpretive communities at once explains the similarity and variation in their interpretive strategies.

In Fish’s paradigm, meaning ultimately resides in interpretive communities. This collapses the distinction between producers and audiences that so many other theorists struggle over. Rather than concentrate on whether power over meaning lies in the producer or the audience, Fish claims that interpretive communities give rise to all producers, texts, and audiences in the first place. The communities that an individual belongs to shape how he or she interprets texts, but the communities that an author/producer/creator belongs to also influence how he or she constructs a text initially. Fish points out that all texts carry with them “a projection on the part of a speaker or author of the moves he [sic] would make if confronted by the sounds or marks he is uttering or setting down.”²¹ Readers and audiences who belong to the same communities as the author/producer will pick up on these projections as directions for understanding the text; those outside of his or her communities will not. Meaning is not inherent in producers, texts, or audiences, but only in the interpretive communities that constitute them.

One of the most notable historical studies dealing with interpretive communities is Janice Radway’s analysis of women and meaning in romance novels.²² In her study, Radway surveyed and interviewed a sizable group of women in the midwestern town of Smithton in order to better understand the meanings they attributed to romance novels. All of the women in the study were connected to a central respondent named Dot, who worked at a local bookstore and helped women select novels to read. During the course of her study, Radway found that the women did not passively absorb the conventional meanings of romance novels and instead actively used the romances in order to supplement their needs and desires. Many of Radway’s respondents, for example, claimed that they consciously used the novels to escape the emotional demands of their daily life and construct a world of personal meaning and satisfaction. These responses point to the fact that romances do not carry a singular or stable meaning imbued by their author. Meaning comes from interpretation on the part of the audience.

One could speculate that these women belonged to a number of intermingling interpretive communities. Though they differed in their educational levels, family incomes, and religious convictions, all were women, and all lived in the town of Smithton. As a result, Radway discovered that many mimicked one another when discussing the meanings of romance novels. Beyond the common theme of escapism, the respondents also tended to agree on what constitutes a good romance novel:

A romance is, first and foremost, a story about a woman. That woman, however, may not figure in a larger plot simply as a hero’s prize … To qualify as a romance, the story must chronicle not merely the events of a courtship but what it feels like to be the object of one.²³

This similarity in interpretation speaks to the shared communities of the women in question. Though they disagreed over some aspects of good romances (first‐person versus third‐person narratives, for example), they shared enough reading strategies as women and as romance readers located in Smithton to articulate a common interpretation of quality. The ratio of agreement and disagreement between the women is directly related to the overlapping of their interpretive communities.

Overall, Fish’s theory of interpretive communities locates meaning completely in the audience, while also accounting for similarity and variation among individual audience members. Even textual producers are “audiences” in the sense that they draw from their own experiences and interpretations in creating a text. This is not to say that Fish’s approach is the supreme or correct one in relation to media Reception theory, but it is certainly one of the closest to the spirit of ethnographic Reception studies. The best approaches to Reception analysis will consider the work of all of the theorists we have discussed thus far and understand how their various perspectives fit together. Even though Radway’s study focused on meaning‐making within a particular community, other aspects (such as her discussion of the romance publishing industry) nod to the power relationships found in concepts like encoding/decoding and polysemy. It also provides our first glimpse into the process of ethnographic audience studies discussed in this chapter. The careful designing of surveys, extensive interviewing, and attention to detail that we see in Radway’s analysis are the hallmarks of the ethnographic process. The remaining sections will further consider the major tenets of this research method.

Ethnographic Research and Memory

Ethnography is a qualitative research method that focuses on understanding a cultural phenomenon from the perspective of the members of that culture. Ethnographers attempt to immerse themselves in a culture as much as possible through observation, interviews, and participation, in order to gain an insider’s knowledge of a cultural phenomenon. In theory, this immersion accomplishes two goals: (1) it minimizes the researcher’s cultural biases by displacing his or her own culture as the basis for judgment and (2) it yields additional understanding about how the phenomenon in question functions within the larger, complex practices of a particular cultural group. Because ethnography has developed predominantly in the fields of anthropology and sociology, many people tend to think of ethnic or national cultures when they think of ethnographic research. In reality, almost any “culture” can be analyzed with this method: workplace culture, videogame culture, fan culture, and so on (see Chapter 6 for an extended discussion of different types of cultures).

Though it is central to the application of Reception theory within media studies, ethnography actually began in the larger field of communication as a tool to better understand the link between language and culture. This early approach, which continues to thrive today, is often called the “ethnography of speaking” or the “ethnography of communication.” Here, ethnographers approach a culture with two basic questions in mind: What does a speaker need to know to communicate appropriately within a particular speech community, and how does he or she learn to do so?²⁴ In order to answer these questions, ethnographers of communication look at the interaction patterns, power differentials, and identity performances of a given culture/speech community. Understanding the way members of a culture communicate with one another helps explain particular behaviors and beliefs within it.

Perhaps the most famous example of an ethnography of communication is Gerry Philipsen’s extended analysis in the 1970s of a blue‐collar Chicago neighborhood he dubbed Teamsterville.²⁵ Philipsen observed and talked to residents of Teamsterville for nearly two and a half years in order to gain a nuanced understanding of the neighborhood’s communication patterns. He learned that speaking in Teamsterville was intrinsically tied to concepts of gender, ethnicity, and even physical location. Teamsterville men could talk to other men of similar background and social standing, but for men to talk at length to a person with less social power (a child, for example) was not appropriate. “To speak ‘like a man’ in Teamsterville,” Philipsen elaborates, “required knowing when and under what circumstances to speak at all.”²⁶ Similarly, Philipsen discovered that the front porch of Teamsterville homes functioned as an important place for community socialization. One resident even confessed that a man who had recently moved to the neighborhood could never fully acclimatize because he lacked a porch.²⁷ By observing and interviewing Teamsterville residents in their own environment, Philipsen was able to assess the subtle communication patterns of the neighborhood culture in a way that would be impossible using other methods.

As we noted in Chapter 6, ethnographic research on media audiences grew out of the ideological work of British Cultural studies in the 1970s. Ethnographers interested in media Reception research utilize methods similar to Philipsen’s to understand how audiences engage media texts. These scholars attempt to immerse themselves in the actual environments of audience media consumption as a way of capturing the intricacies of meaning‐making and negotiation. Media ethnographers might, for instance, attend a film society’s weekly screenings to discuss what the films mean to the members of the group. By interviewing members of the society and closely monitoring their viewing practices, a media ethnographer would be able to discover the codes, meanings, and complex negotiations that inform how they make sense of the cinema. This method might reveal how the society’s conception of film as art (and not merely entertainment) colors their interpretation of the weekly narratives, a conclusion that would be difficult to realize fully without “knowing” the group first. Other media ethnographers could potentially study the regular patrons of a local music store, the fans of an author, or even the participants in an online role‐playing game. In short, these scholars use ethnographic methods of participation, observation, and interviewing to understand how an actual group of people makes sense of specific media texts.

The most significant example of ethnographic analysis in media Reception research is David Morley’s Nationwide audience study of the 1970s.²⁸ Morley is a British Cultural studies scholar and was one of the first to break away from traditional conceptions of the “duped” audience. Informed by issues of ideology and Hall’s model of dominant, negotiated, and oppositional reading, Morley was interested in investigating the degree to which a person’s access to cultural codes influences his or her reception of dominant ideologies in media texts. He disagreed with uses and gratifications theories because they often ignored ideology, and he rejected Hall’s focus on class as a determinant for decoding positions. As a result, his Nationwide study was an attempt to look at how audiences with different qualities interpreted ideological messages in the British media.

Nationwide was a popular weekday evening news program broadcast by BBC One between 1969 and 1983, which at the time placed special emphasis on representing the various parts of Britain in its reporting. Morley (along with colleague Charlotte Brunsdon) had already catalogued the types of dominant ideologies present in the program.²⁹ With “The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding,” Morley shifted attention to understanding how different members of British society made sense of these ideological messages through the use of dominant, negotiated, and oppositional codes. The study consisted of two phases. In the first, Morley screened a specific episode of the program that “covered a fairly representative sample of Nationwide’s characteristic topics” to 18 small groups.³⁰ These groups included apprentice engineers, apprentice electricians, black college students, school students, teachers in training, and more, all selected on the basis of factors he assumed were related to decoding practices (sex, race, class, union membership, educational level, political affiliation, etc.). In the second phase, Morley screened an episode focused specifically on the economy to 11 different groups, including bank managers, sociology students, apprentice printers, and shop stewards. In each case, Morley gained access to the social groups through courses they were taking together at technical/trade schools and universities. In this way, he attempted to use pre‐existing groups that were somewhat cohesive in their shared educational pursuits. After each group viewed the program in the context of their classes, Morley led a focused discussion and recorded the answers on tape.

Morley discovered that the particular combination of social factors in each group led to unique understandings of Nationwide. This may not seem like a revolutionary conclusion now, but at the time it represented the first real evidence of an active audience that negotiated or resisted meaning in the media. Certain groups, like the apprentices and bank managers, mostly interpreted the program within the dominant code. Others, like the black college students, felt that “the concerns of Nationwide are not the concerns of their world,” as they rejected the very process of interpretation.³¹ Most of the groups exhibited different degrees of negotiated reading, closer to the preferred (e.g. teachers) or oppositional (e.g. university students) side of the reading spectrum. Additionally, the study revealed that class was not the determinant factor of reading style as Hall had proposed. The apprentices, shop stewards, and black students all shared a similar class in the study, but they performed widely divergent readings as a result of other social factors like union involvement and racial subculture.

Morley’s landmark study was one of the first to open up room within media scholarship for ethnographic analyses of the actual audience. It reinforced Hall’s model by acknowledging the place of both industry ideologies and audience interpretation, but it also dispelled his reliance on class by revealing the multifaceted basis of audience reading strategies. This concentration on audience diversity and variation has become a hallmark of ethnographic analysis ever since.

The Nationwide study also provides valuable insight into how media ethnographies can differ significantly from ethnographies of communication. For example, while Morley did attempt to use intact groups in their own educational settings, parts of the study resemble more traditional experimental methods. These groups would probably never watch an episode of Nationwide in any of their regular classes, much less discuss their personal interpretations of its content. He also spent far less time “in the field” gathering information about audience members than his more anthropologically‐minded counterparts. Morley’s half‐hour interviews with 29 groups hardly compare to Philipsen’s two and a half years in Teamsterville. The fact that Morley “set up” the environment and then recorded his findings via interviews seems to downplay the natural qualities of the audience that ethnography seeks to represent. Coupled with a comparatively brief data‐collection period, this quasi‐experimentation casts doubt on how much the Nationwide study could actually be called “ethnography.”

More recent scholarship in the field of audience studies has argued for a looser definition of ethnography to accommodate the complex process of media reception. Morley’s work certainly falls within what we might call the “contemporary” standards of media ethnography. Media texts and audiences have become increasingly diverse since Nationwide, and some scholars have now recognized that “classic ethnographic fieldwork may not be an appropriate method for studying dispersed media audiences.”³² As a loose methodological movement within audience studies, then, media ethnography emphasizes certain ethnographic methods over others as a function of today’s media landscape. Media ethnographers today can certainly attempt to capture the interpretations of a widespread audience, but it has also become permissible to consider smaller groups or cultures (even the reading strategies of a single family). Many ethnographic studies of media still focus on the importance of the actual environment in which audiences consume texts, but the amount of time spent observing audiences in this environment is usually far shorter than traditional ethnographic methods require. In this way, media ethnography takes useful aspects of traditional ethnography (a focus on context, allowing people to represent themselves in the research) while discarding parts that often do not fit with the media object of study (lengthy data‐gathering periods, extensive immersion in the field). Media ethnography is ethnography in spirit, and “if the means of investigation are not always identical, then the aims of the inquiry can be.”³³

One important method for media research that has developed within these flexible ethnographic standards involves the use of memory, or audience members’ recollection of their reception histories. Rather than observe audience members in an actual context of media reception, some Reception scholars instead ask them about their memories of consuming media at a particular historical moment or in relation to specific objects. This approach is somewhat “ethnographic” in the sense that the audience is often conceived of as a cultural group (held together according to history or around a common object), and the researcher’s primary interest is understanding the management of meaning among members of this group, but the individuals included in the study often never interact with one another. The goal of memory‐based “ethnographies” is to recreate as much as possible an otherwise inaccessible or lost media reception context. While traditional ethnography might be able to capture the nuances of reception practices in the public or the present, memory studies allow scholars to “observe” reception practices that occur in private or in the past.

One of the most famous reception studies grounded in memory forms the basis of Jackie Stacey’s book, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship.³⁴ Troubled by the overwhelmingly textual approach to studying the role of gender in the structure and reception of classic Hollywood cinema (see discussion of the male gaze in Chapter 7), Stacey set out in the late 1980s to discover how actual audiences, and specifically women, related to images of female stars in mid‐century Hollywood films. The most significant portion of Stacey’s study involved soliciting letters from “keen cinema‐goers” about their memories of film stars of the 1940s and ‘50s through four popular women’s magazines in Britain. She received more than 350 responses to this request. Twenty of these respondents also agreed to fill out an open‐ended questionnaire, which allowed them to discuss their memories further and with minimal direction. Though the individual respondents did not know one another, they were a fairly homogenous cultural group: mostly British white women who were 50 to 60 years old.

On the basis of these letters and questionnaire responses, Stacey constructs a detailed account of this audience’s reception practices nearly half a century prior. The responses challenge narrow, Psychoanalytic theories of female sexual objectification in film, positioning female stars instead as focal points within rich tapestries of leisure and escapism for the actual women who watched them. Stacey notes that the opulent movie palace was a haven for these viewers from wartime and postwar life in Britain, and many used the cinema to escape the house and its attendant (and often dreary) domestic chores. Viewers remembered stars as archetypes and innovators of femininity, as sources of inspiration, and as signifiers of national culture. By accessing actual viewers’ memories, then, Stacey was able to uncover significant information about film spectatorship and challenge standing interpretations about film during the time period.

In the third chapter of her book, Stacey refers to the women in her study (and those like them) as “the lost audience,” largely ignored within film studies in favor of formal or textual approaches. Without the ascent of memory as a tool for ethnographic media studies, they might still be overlooked today. Memory is not perfect recall in the sense that it is often distorted by time and other factors, but sometimes memories are the only way to learn about reception practices that are inaccessible to more traditional methods of ethnographic observation. The use of memory is in many ways a product of the ethnographic flexibility that has marked media Reception studies from its inception.

Conclusion

This chapter has looked at the role of Reception theory, ethnography, and memory in understanding media from the perspective of the actual audience. Theories of encoding/decoding, polysemy, and interpretive communities allow us to conceive of the audience not as a passive mass ready to absorb singular ideological messages from media texts, but as an active group of diverse people who “read” texts according to their social positions and lived experiences. This departure from classic conceptions of the audience shifts the discussion for scholars from media effects to media meanings: Where does meaning in a text come from? How do audiences negotiate meaning? What continues to structure the process of audience meaning‐making? Ethnographic research methods are key to answering these questions, because they allow scholars to investigate the subtle and otherwise invisible meanings that audiences attribute to the media texts they consume. In many ways, these methods are complements to the types of industry and textual analyses outlined in the first two sections of this book. By analyzing actual audience media consumption along with the production of media texts, scholars gain a more complete picture of mainstream media today.

SUGGESTED READING

1. Acosta‐Alzuru, C. Tackling the Issues: Meaning‐Making in a Telenovela. Popular Communication 2003, 1, 193–215.
2. Allor, M. Relocating the Site of the Audience. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1998, 5, 217–33.
3. Ang, I. Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. New York: Routledge, 1996.
4. Athique, A. Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale. Malden, MA: Polity, 2016.
5. Bird, S.E. The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. New York: Routledge, 2003.
6. Cavalcante, A. Affect, Emotion, and Media Audiences: The Case of Resilient Reception. Media, Culture & Society 2018, 40, 1186–201.
7. Cavicchi, D. Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
8. D’Acci, J. Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
9. Fish, S. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
10. Fiske, J. Understanding Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989.
11. Fiske, J. and Dawson, R. Audiencing Violence: Watching Homeless Men Watch Die Hard. In The Audience and its Landscape, J. Hay, L. Grossberg, and E. Wartella (eds.), pp. 297–316. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
12. Gamson, J. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.
13. Goldstein, P. and Machor, J.L. New Directions in American Reception Study. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
14. Gray, J. Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge, 2005.
15. Morley, D. Television, Audiences & Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.
16. Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., et al. Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2016.
17. Press, A. Toward a Qualitative Methodology of Audience Study: Using Ethnography to Study the Popular Culture Audience. In The Audience and its Landscape, J. Hay, L. Grossberg, and E. Wartella (eds.), pp. 113–30. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
18. Schutten, J.K. Invoking Practical Magic: New Social Movements, Hidden Populations, and the Public Screen. Western Journal of Communication 2006, 70, 331–54.
19. Shaw, A. Rethinking Game Studies: A Case‐Study Approach to Video Game Play and Identification. Critical Studies in Media Communication 2013, 30, 347–61.
20. Simons, N. Audience Reception of Cross‐ and Transmedia TV Drama in the Age of Convergence. International Journal of Communication 2014, 8, 2220–39.
21. Staiger, J. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
22. Staiger, J. Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
23. Winocur, R. Radio and Everyday Life: Uses and Meanings in the Domestic Sphere. Television & New Media 2005, 6, 319–32.
24. Yoon, S. Forbidden Audience: Media Reception and Social Change in North Korea. Global Media & Communication 2015, 11, 167–184.