Is Audience Research a Useful Methodology to Study Contemporary Media Cultures in All Their Complexity?

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Table of Contents

Background/introduction
Literature review
Aims and objections
Data analysis
Methods – textual analysis
Ethical issues
Conclusion
References

Background/introduction

Media culture corresponds to the understanding of the different media and the roles that they play in forming and expressing the identity and meaning of the daily life of common people. Media culture mainly focuses on the power, pleasure and significance that are enjoyed by the media. A study of the modern media cultures helps us to produce the materials of our daily life so that people can build their identities based on them. The materials provided by the study of the media cultures help people to understand what it means to be successful or a failure, male or female and powerful or feeble and construct their ideas about class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and nationality. The resources, symbols and images provided by the study of media culture build up a common culture for some individuals all over the world. Media cultures help to create definite identities of the individuals producing a fresh new structure of global culture for them. In addition, since media cultures are concerned with normal people we need to include researches based on the audiences in its study. Since media cultures aim at a large audience, thus, it should resonate with the existing concerns and themes and it is also extremely contemporary such that it helps to provide hieroglyphics of up to date social life of the people (Zepetnek, 2005).

Literature review

The term audience research is a very broad one, which in principle signifies a systematic study of an audience for a cause or purpose. However, in terms of practice, it implies the efforts made to analyze and describe the various patterns of media cultures generally for some administrative or commercial purpose. Audience research had become like a routine at the beginning of the 20th century when various new forms of mass media cultures came into the eye of the public. Various types of media, like the radio and film, became more and more entwined with the widespread business of marketing and advertisement. An extensive range of various methods and theories are being used in modern audience research and they can be recognized by the well-known labels, like qualitative vs. quantitative audience research, applied vs. theoretical audience research and the unconventional custom vs. syndicated audience research (Webster, 2006).

Applied vs. Theoretical audience research

Theoretical audience research has only two levels, namely macro and micro. Macro level audience research views the audiences from the outer side to identify their natural behaviors and characteristics collectively. This perception views the audiences as the public and/or the market and is frequently embedded in the areas of marketing and economics. Working in this stage of analysis enables the various researchers to build new laws and models on the behavior of audiences. On the other hand, micro-level audience research views the audiences from the inner side by adopting the viewpoint of an individual member of the audience. Certain important questions like what motivates selection of a media culture, how is media culture used in daily life, what exactly stimulated and commands attention, whether people are the consumer or fans of media culture, and/or what are the pleasures derived by us from media cultures, are of theoretical interest (Allen, 2004).

Applied audience research is much more prevalent than theoretical audience research mainly due to the commercial nature of the media cultures. They provide important information giving rise to the audience rating research, which is important throughout the world. Organizations carry out applied researches to determine the manners in which media cultures are being used and whether they can meet the different social objectives (Simonson, 2000).

Qualitative vs. Quantitative audience research

The most common quantitative audience research method is survey research that is based on a type of probability sampling. Survey researches are predominant in the study of contemporary media cultures and their complexities but qualitative audience research methods are also becoming increasingly popular in both theoretical audience research and applied audience research. However, generalization is often taken as the weak point of qualitative audience research (Eaman, 2004).

Custom vs. Syndicate audience research

Syndicate audience research is the audience research that is done with large and multiple numbers of audience members. Its most evident form is audience rating. On the other hand, custom audience research mainly aims at the needs of a particular branch in the study of media cultures and their complexities.

Audience research emphasizes the difference of responses of a given style of the media cultural object by investigating directly how a group of given audiences would use and understand fashionable modern media cultures. Three types of research form most audience researches. They are:

Opinion polls and broad surveys – They are mainly done by academic researchers.
Small and representative groups, which mainly discuss and react to a media culture text.
Participant of in-depth ethnographic observation in a known audience in which sometimes a researcher observes over a considerable phase of time (Rosengren, 2003).

Each method has its pros and cons and sometimes we can use more than one method to check out the other methods. Actual audience research also tries to separate certain variables like gender, age, ethnicity, region, income and race to understand how the various social groups can create different meanings of the same media cultures. Audience research also includes exploring the various special categories of the audiences and their sub-cultures, which, surround the different media cultures. Audience research can also be carried out among online fans, as they are extremely accessible and appropriate to understand the media cultures that are very important in its study (Webster, 2006).

Aims and objections

The fundamental Aim of the research is to evaluate whether Audience research is a useful methodology to study contemporary media cultures and its complexity or not.

Data analysis

The perspective of the meta-theories in the study of contemporary media cultures and its various complexities not only combines a huge range of different techniques of textual analysis, political economy, significant social theory and philosophy but also audience research that is necessary to understand the actual wealth of the effects and forms of contemporary media cultures, covering high cultures, modernism and oppositional sub-cultures. Audience research is believed to be a useful method for studying contemporary media cultures and its complexities since it has led to the belief that only members of the audience can generate meaning. This means that the diversity present in the audience members and the cultural texts can produce a number of useful effects and meanings to textual readings. However, the meanings sometimes remain vague due to the analysis of the effects that are sometimes more than provisional (Allen, 2004).

Audience research is compiled from a huge range of groups and not from a homogenous mass. The audience members live in their social environments and can be barely conceptualized as individuals. Thus, the meanings produced by the groups that include their social experiences are important in the empirical study of the contemporary media cultures and its various complexities. Many people believe that the important characteristics of the audience members need to be taken in to consideration in different analyses required in the study of contemporary media cultures, like their place of residence, ethnicity, age, gender and social class. Most of these characteristics corresponded with the various audience member groups and similarly with alternative meaning systems and cultural codes. In order to understand which subgroup, class and subdivision of class prefers which type of media culture; we need to develop a media cultural map of the audience members to help us in the study of the contemporary media cultures and its complexities (Simonson, 2000).

In recent times, we have seen a definitive and clear shift in the direction of audience research that covers the viewpoints of the active audience members in the study of the contemporary media cultures and its complexities. The skills that the audience members use to assess what they have heard or seen and the significance of the manners in which processing of the programs are carried out in our daily communications with others about the output made by media cultures are extremely important in the study of the contemporary media cultures. Another important concern is to properly identify the different manners by which technologies of the media cultures are actively integrated or embedded into the every day routines of our domestic life and also the geography of the family circle that include relations of the gender within it (Click, 2000).

Active and dynamic audience research has frequently been alleged to be an opposition to certain textual analysis and it often doubts the actual capacity of individualistic interpretations of the social texts in the study of the contemporary media cultures and its various complexities. It has also been pointed out that this conflict has at times created a break up among those who, on one hand, assert that different media cultures serve to publicize the philosophy of the inevitable and powerful beliefs of the audience members and, alternatively, those who support the approach of the active audience members. They insist that the audience members are completely capable of resisting all forms of ideology by yielding meanings completely on their own. With regard to the various research preoccupations, an elementary split had been created among those who focused upon the practice of audience analysis or reception and those who focused mainly upon the practice of media culture production and relied on the principles of political economy (Rosengren, 2003).

As we already stated, media cultures have provided us with numerous materials that have helped to forge our individual identities and mainly due to this reason, the involvement of audience research is important in the study of these media cultures. From studying the media cultures, we understand how to think, behave, believe, and feel and what to desire or fear and what not to do. Thus, acquiring knowledge about the all important and critical media cultures is a very important resource for both the citizens and an individual to cope up with the modern, tempting cultural environment. We need to be able to follow, assess and if necessary even refuse to give in to the social and cultural manipulations to help make ourselves powerful with respect to the various dominant forms of media cultures. The various audience researches focus on how the different audience members not only interpret but also make use of the various media cultures that are completely distinct from each other. It analyses the various factors, which makes the various audience members respond in distinct manners to different media cultures (Novak, 2001).

For studying the contemporary media cultures and its complexities, audience research plays a vital part as it helps to provide different materials required for fabricating views about the world, its behaviors and, as said earlier, identities. Some people who in an uncritical manner follow the various dictates of modern media cultures sometimes tend toward becoming conventional and normal by mainstreaming themselves. Audience researches, thus, also include how the individuals and sub-cultural groups are properly able to resist the dominating forms of culture and keep their own identity and style above all (Dennis, 2001).

Methods – textual analysis

Literature in the realm of research performed on the issue and their use would be quite numerous and diverse in their content and methodology. In the different separate studies located, only few would have spanned a time beyond a decade. The majority of research pieces, which focus on the inclusion of theoretical and technological advances in the context of the issue and marking process, would actually focus on the overall segments through fundamental theoretical levels. The fact that there is not very many-advanced research items specifically directed toward the theoretical strategy in the context of the ascertaining whether audience research is a useful methodology to study contemporary media cultures and its complexity or not would be the focus of this paper. All the studied material is made use of and subjected to analysis. The results of various researchers are checked and tallied. Furthermore, Identify appropriate key performance indexes that will help in monitoring the performance of the businesses. Lastly, conclusions pertaining to the objectives of the current research are thus arrived at, from the theoretical point of view (Ketrow, 2006).

Ethical issues

Various audience members of different political ideologies genders, sexual preferences, regions, nations, races and classes are bound to read media cultural texts in different manners and thus, audience research can shed light on the reason why dissimilar audience members deduce media cultural texts in a variety of, and at times conflicting, manners. Audience research also makes it possible for us to understand that multiple readings, the subject’s positions and views of the reader determine the meaning of the media cultural texts. It is most definitely one of the virtues of the study of contemporary media cultures to have included audience research in recent times. Although this focus on audience research had some major advantages, it has at times caused some problems and limitations with the standards specified for media cultural study based approaches to the audience (Mytton, 1999).

To understand the ways by which media cultures can affect the audience members, shaping their behavior and beliefs, a standard approach would be to engage them in the area of ethnographic research. Ethnographic media cultural studies have in recent times indicated a number of different ways used by the audience members, most of the times to endow themselves. The emphasis on audience research helps media cultural studies to triumph over the previously held biased textual orientation towards media culture. As audience, research can actually reveal to us how different people use the media cultures and their affects on the people’s everyday life, a combination of qualitative and quantitative research and recent reception studies have provided us with important contributions telling us how audience members interact with actual media cultures (Zepetnek, 2005).

There are several factors, which we should be cautious about. We should see to it that the classes are not downplayed as it is of significance in structuring the audience decoding of the media cultural texts. We should not also exaggerate on the constitutional force of a class and ignore or downplay a few other variables like ethnicity or gender. These factors need to be considered while studying contemporary media cultures and its complexities as audience members use and decode media cultural texts based on the particular constituents of their gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preferences and other elements (Novak, 2001).

However, some people do not agree that audience research is necessary for the study of contemporary media cultures. They believe that audience research has moved too far in the direction of blockage of media power, romanticism of the audience, indefiniteness of meaning and relativism and it should immediately return to epistemological realism, methodological pragmatism and sociological philistinism. According to them philosophical perception is needed to observe and study the different assumptions of definite versions of the study of contemporary media cultures and to present a point of view for the critiques of lucid perspectives, extreme relativism and / or textual idealism that simply celebrates textual delights and diversifies audience researches such that elimination of concern takes place with value, truth, meaning, and further epistemological concerns (Allen, 2004).

There have been some eminent theories by certain philosophers on whether audience research is needed in the study of contemporary media cultures. P. Bourdieu has made one of the major contributions in this field. In his work The Weight of the World, he has outlined a number of relevant methodological and ethical views while performing interview studies of audiences. To bring about familiarity and social proximity he also provides us with his concept of non-violent communications (Mytton, 1999).

Conclusion

Some critics have the opinion that active audience approach in the study of the contemporary media cultures raises a number of questions. Some people argue that texts are much more prone to restrain audiences rather than activate them. They find that this approach including the audience members tend to exaggerate the independence of the audience members in the process of reception. It has been repeatedly remarked that researching active audience members for studying contemporary media cultures frequently tends to minimize the unavoidable restrictions, which it places upon both alternative readings and audience autonomy and the dominant and fundamental impact of the favored reading, which is customarily inscribed in to the media text (Eaman, 2004).

A second problem arises when occasionally noticeable confusion arises between resistant viewers and active viewers in which the latter is not essentially resistant, although it is often implied so. However, this confusion is unnecessary. The audience members can themselves actively obtain their individual interpretations of the texts exclusive of any essential implication which the chosen reading has undermined. In addition, even if the chosen reading is undermined by a section of the active audience during a research to the text, other people in the same audience is probable to discover their own perspectives reinforced or confirmed by the favored reading. Active audience research must not be seen as a contrast to the political economy approach in the study of the contemporary media cultures that points to the restraints fundamental to media texts. It seems to be more sensible in allowing those audience members who are not only active but in several cases resistant too, although being within the elementary restraints of the preferred text. Thus, it can be safely stated that Audience research is not a useful methodology to study contemporary media cultures and its complexity (Ketrow, 2006)

References

Allen, Sue; 2004; Designs for learning: Studying science museum exhibits that do more than entertain; Science Education; 88, S1, S17-S33; Exploratorium, San Francisco
Click, Benjamin A. L.; 2000; Educating students to write effectively; New Directions for Higher Education; 96, 31-44; Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company
Dennis, Paul M; 2001; Chills and thrills: Does radio harm our children? The controversy over program violence during the age of radio; Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences; 34, 1, 33-50; Department of Psychology, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown
Eaman, Ross A; 2004; Channels of Influence: CBC Audience Research and the Canadian Public; University of Toronto Press
Ketrow, S. M.; 2006; Attributes of a telemarketer’s voice and persuasiveness: A review and synthesis of the literature; Journal of Direct Marketing; 4, 3, 7-21; Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company
Mytton, Graham, Unesco, UNICEF, BBC World Service Training Trust; 1999; Handbook on Radio and Television Audience Research; BBC World Service Training Trust, 1999
Novak, Joseph D, Donald G. Ring, Pinchas Tamir; 2001; Interpretation of research findings in terms of ausubel’s theory and implications for science education; Science Education; 55, 4, 483-526; Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Rosengren, Karl Erik; 2003; Audience research; Elsevier
Simonson, Michael R; 2000; Designing instructional media for attitudinal outcomes; New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education; 17, 29-35; Secondary education at Iowa State University
Webster, James G, Patricia F. Phalen, Lawrence W. Lichty; 2006; Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research; Routledge
Zepetnek, Steven Tötösy de; 2005; Comparative literature and systemic/ institutional approaches to literature: New developments; Systems Research; 11, 2, 43-57; John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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