Passive Receiver or Active Audience?

media-spoonfeeding-cartoon

In the article called ‘Desperately Seeking the Audience’: Models of Audience Reception, Kristyn Gorton presents diverse approaches to audience researches and the viewpoints of different theoreticians who investigate the effect of the mass media on the audience. The main issue which Gorton is addressing is to provide a general comprehension about how we can approach to notion of audience. One of the central claims which Gorton brings into the forefront is that emotional engagement with television is at the centre of the audience research. Because, television has a pervasive character which can create a cultural environment in people’s everyday life. We can observe the long-term effects of television any time anywhere in our lives like culture, economy, religion, education, family, sports etc. As George Gerbner indicated in the article called Methods of Cultivation: Assumptions and Rationale, television has become an integral and stable part of the society and culture since its inception (Shanahan, Gerbner, and Morgan, 1999). Since we were born into a symbolic environment of television, television has been transforming our perceptions of reality, belief structures, our point of views, moral, values, conscience, voting behaviours, shopping preferences, romantic relationships, family interaction and so forth. In brief, television transforms societies and cultures. Therefore, individuals are very important in terms of understanding whether there is a direct relationship between long-term effects of television and people’s perceptions. As a result, in order to clarify the discussion between the concepts of powerful media and powerful audiences, Gorton argues if we can consider the media as capable of influencing and affecting audiences or vice versa.

According to powerful effect theory, the media are very powerful and have a massive impact on audiences and thus, can change their politic decisions or lead them to moral corruption. This is the situation in which Hypodermic Needle Model positions people as passive, vulnerable, open to manipulation, who can be easily influenced by the media messages homogeneously, never react to messages and act in a gregarious way. In brief, this model sees the media as a hypodermic needle and people as miserable creatures whose brain can be injected by media messages (Livingstone, 2000). This model could be meaningful in 1920s and 1930s when the Frankfurt School was founded. If we consider the power of Hitler propaganda and the ability of persuasion of radio, we can understand the most important names of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer who argue that “the media industry creates “dupes” of the masses and they mindlessly consume the latest version of the same thing without questioning and any mental effort” (Gorton, 2009: 14). Moreover, they accuse the culture industry because of influencing people, detracting them from the high culture and creating a corrupted society.

However, this paradigm, which assumes the media as a powerful agent and the audience as a passive receiver, has lost validity in our day. Because, we cannot approach individuals as “passive dupes”; we have to take into account individuals’ identity. As John Fiske and Lawrence Grossberg argue too, people give popular culture their own meaning and they actively engage with it (15). Thus, it would be inadequate if we considered individuals as a homogeneous mass. In the 1950s, a paradigm shift occurred with the “two step flow” model which was advanced by Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz. With this model, communication world passed from the powerful effect paradigm to limited effect paradigm. Because, this model challenged the dominant role of the media over audiences and for the first time the role of interpersonal relations gained a significant position in the debate between powerful media and powerful audience. Two step flow model suggests that messages flow from mass media to opinion leaders and from those to the individuals in social contact with an opinion leader (16). In my opinion, we can observe that this model preserves its validity today if we look at people’s news consumption behaviours on social media. For instance, a significant number of social media users value the contents shared and recommended by their friends and relatives they follow on their social networks like Facebook as a way to get news, rather than solely relying on the judgement of a news organization or a journalist. Therefore, we can say that the traditional gatekeeping function of the media is weakened as most news consumers turn to their family, friends and acquaintances who decide what they need to know (Hermida, Fletcher, Korell, and Logan, 2012: 816-821). As people’s social circles take the role of opinion leaders, deciding which news story is important or not, we can say that the power of creating public sphere has started to pass from the media to people.

Another today’s example related with Lazarsfeld’s model can be: people’s decision during the United States presidential campaign of 2016. According to Pew Research Center report, 20 percent of social media users have changed their stance on a political or social issue based on the content they saw on social media and 17 percent have changed their opinions about a political candidate because of social media. Moreover, people who said they had changed their minds on these candidates often stated that social media pointed their opinion in a more negative direction. However, 82 percent of social media users said they had never modified their views on a particular candidate and 79 percent said they had never changed their minds on a social or political issue because of social media (Anderson, 2016). As we can see, it is obvious that the media influence people’s decisions but it should not be exaggerated. As Lazarsfeld also indicated in 1944 in his research The People’s Choice about the media’s effect on people’s voting behaviours, the media does not change people’s voting decisions; it reinforces existent votes (Tol: 2).

According to George Gerbner’s cultivation theory, which explored the relationship between audiences’ overall exposure to television over long periods of time and their perceptions, beliefs and behaviours, television creates a symbolic environment. He claims that people, who have been watching television since their childhood, are trapped in this symbolic world of television and their viewpoint to world, to minorities, to foreigners, to races, their perceptions are shaped by television effect. Symbolic representations of reality on television touch people so deeply that some time later, they cannot distinguish between what television says about reality and the physical reality. For example, if viewers (especially heavy viewers who watch television 4 hours a day and more) see more representations of police, crime and violence on television, they think the possibility of becoming a victim of crime is very high in the real world (Shanahan et al., 1999: 26-34). However, at this point we should raise the question: Is there really a that much linear and simplistic cause and effect relation i.e.; the more you watch violence on television, the more you become fearful? To be able to say that television “cultivates” fear, we should consider other social influences and messages that a person has been exposed over a long time (32-33).

Moreover, it is very easy to blame the media (television, films, graphic novels, video games etc.) whenever a tragic incident happens or in times of moral panic. Yet, this accusation neglects individuals’ identity, logic and will. Of course, it is expectable that television reflects a representation of social reality as it is a commercial medium which promotes consumption. But it depends on viewers’ will to realize that representations on television consist of fiction and not to be affected by them. In this regard, I do not agree with the cultivation theory in part as it gives insufficient explanation about how individual viewers perceive and interpret messages from television. Cultivation theory positions audiences as passive viewers who take messages in their connoted meanings, which the program’s producer intended to say, without questioning or reacting to the message presented and also interpret all media messages in the same way (36-37). In contrast to other media theories that disempower audiences, Stuart Hall argues that “messages were no longer understood as ‘some kind of package’ that was thrown at the audiences and caught.” (Gorton, 2009: 22). Therefore, he develops the “encoding/decoding model” which proposes that audiences receive messages that are encoded by television producers and they decode or interpret messages in different ways depending on their cultural background, economic standing, and personal experiences. Hall claims that the meaning is not fixed or determined by the sender and the audience is not a passive receiver of meaning (Hall, 1980). Thus, whether television messages have a destructive effect on society, before these messages can have an effect, they must first be meaningfully decoded by the audience (Gorton, 2009: 19). As a result, Hall’s encoding/decoding model moved audience research into thinking about “what audiences did with the media rather than what media did to audiences, emphasizing agency instead of passivity” (Ross and Nightingale, 2003: 76).

Furthermore, there can be many different ways in which audiences understand and interpret media texts. According to reception theory, no text has one simple meaning. Therefore, receiver is the one who gives meaning to the media texts in the context of individual's identity, ideology, ethnicity and so forth (Livingstone, 2000). For instance, due to the polysemy of the text, H&M advertisements can be interpreted in various ways and can mean something different to different people. On the one hand, people may interpret this advertisement that it is breaking down the stereotypes about women’s physical appearance in public. On the other hand, people may interpret this kind of advertisements are a new capitalist trend and they are exploiting women’s rights for commercial purposes. For this reason, I agree that if we watch television too much, the way we perceive the world may change in the long term. However, there cannot be an oversimplified explanation that every audience is influenced by the media messages in the same way. Here, we should ask: “Does only amount of viewing change our perceptions?” Thus, we should consider other contributing cultural variables such as individual’s lifestyle, income, education, gender, family structure and other social experiments.

Both encoding/decoding model and reception theory are in the same paradigm with uses and gratifications theory which proposes a comprehension on “motivated and selective viewers making their own decisions about what to view and what to think about what they see” (Livingstone, 2000). This theory seeks to describe how and why people consume the media. It assumes that audiences actively and individually consume the media and are gratified by this consumption in different ways (Chesebro and Bertelsen, 1999: 35). One of the underlying motivations why people consume media is the need of integration and social interaction. As we mentioned above, television creates a cultural environment and people are emotionally engaged by television. People feel television keeps them connected to the rest of the world through a shared fictional environment. By this means, they know what is happening in the world and have common topics to talk about with other in their everyday lives (Livingstone, 2000). The most popular reality show Survivor can be given as a current example from Turkey to this social interaction need. Survivor viewers feel very emotionally engaged with the program because they identify their character with Survivor competitors’ character - which is another need of identity acquisition - and they imitate them. As well as this, Survivor’s additional program called Survivor Panorama tries to keep viewers in front of the television by asking them questions about competitors with the side screen application. With this method, they give people a message like “Your opinions are valuable for us”. Thus, people feel their emotional engagement need is satisfied. Or, they give people the initiative to choose who to eliminate or to select the winner. By this means, people think they actively participate in the program and become a part of this symbolic environment. In addition, as Acun, the producer of Survivor, knows very well the public’s needs and what they will like or won’t like, he gives entertainment programs to people that will satisfy their social interaction needs. If we look more broadly, we can understand that “the media is capable of knowing what audiences want and is therefore able to give it to them” (Gorton, 2009: 17). Consequently, we cannot say that audiences make conscious decisions through their own will about what to watch and, they are very self-knowing and self-aware about media messages and take from the media what is useful (Ross and Nightingale, 2003). Because I think, they are still unaware of what is mediated reality and what is social reality. Survivor’da izledikleri karakterleri “reel people” olarak görüyorlar ama kameralar kapandıktan sonra nasıl davrandıklarını bilmiyorlar. Therefore, television audiences are in a position in which they think they actively interact with television yet, they are still in a passive position.

In the light of these theories and arguments, we can understand a larger issue. The theories and models we mentioned above were actually developed specially for television. However, with the digitalization we can adapt these theories to today’s media studies too. With the internet, we can say that a paradigm shift has occurred. Because, passive audiences in traditional media (television, radio and printed newspapers) have become active users of digital media. As we stated above, “traditionally the audience has been viewed as a passive receiver of media messages created, packaged and distributed by professional media organizations”. Audiences had limited ability to affect the construction of media messages or communicate with the producers. But with the internet technologies, especially with Web 2.0 applications which allow creation and exchange of user-generated content, “involvement of audiences in browsing, selecting, filtering, interpreting and sharing media contents have been facilitated” (Hermida et al., 2011: 816). Furthermore, with the digitalization and social media, the distinction between the identities of content producers and media consumers has become complexed and blurred. For the first time, users were able to discuss the information they receive and also to create and publish content on their personal blogs or micro blogs like Twitter and to exchange the content with other users. Hence, this digitalization process transformed passive consumers into active producers called “produsers” or “prosumers” (Fortunati, Deuze, and Luca, 2013: 124).

In conclusion, we can see a paradigm shift from powerful effect theory to limited effect theory in which active audience obtains power. Although people think they actively participate in political discussions on their social networks, people actually often prefer to interact only with contents which confirm their existing beliefs rather than to be exposed to opposing viewpoints, and they like to embed themselves into echo chambers in which like-minded people gather and select information that adhere to their ideologies and refuse to interact with different or contrasting viewpoints on a political issue (Del Vicario et al., 2016). Therefore, while users consume and share only the contents which share the same ideology with them, we cannot say that audiences participate actively in meaning making process. Maybe they are the users who decide independently to interact with ideologically similar information sources but, this attitude does not go beyond of reproducing and reinforcing their existing beliefs and bias. Thus, we have to ask: “Is there really an active audience or actively passive audience?”. As we can see, the debate between “passive consumer” or “active audience” still continues in today's digital world too.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, M. (2016, November 07). Social media causes some users to rethink their views on an issue. Retrieved March 02, 2017, from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/07/social-media-causes-some-users-to-rethink-their-views-on-an-issue/

Chesebro, J. W., & Bertelsen, D. (1999). Analyzing media: Computer technologies as symbolic and cognitive systems.

Del Vicario, M., Vivaldo, G., Bessi, A., Zollo, F., Scala, A., Caldarelli, G., & Quattrociocchi, W. (2016). Echo Chambers: Emotional Contagion and Group Polarization on Facebook. Scientific Reports, 6.

Fortunati, L., Deuze, M., & De Luca, F. (2014). The new about news: How print, online, free, and mobile coconstruct new audiences in Italy, France, Spain, the UK, and Germany. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 19(2), 121-140.

Gorton, K. (2009). Media audiences: television, meaning and emotion. Edinburgh University Press.

Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. Culture, media, language, 128-138. Retrieved from: http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~jdslack/readings/CSReadings/Hall_Encoding-n-Decoding.pdf

Hermida, A., Fletcher, F., Korell, D., & Logan, D. (2012). Share, like, recommend: Decoding the social media news consumer. Journalism Studies, 13(5-6), 815-824.

Livingstone, S. (2000). Television and the active audience (pp. 175-193). Manchester University Press.

Ross, K., & Nightingale, V. (2003). Media And Audiences: New Perspectives: New Perspectives. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).

Shanahan, J., & Morgan, M. (1999). Television and its viewers: Cultivation theory and research. Cambridge University Press.

Tol, M. G. (n.d.). Paul Lazarsfeld ve Ampirik İletişim Araştırmaları Geleneği. İstanbul: Galatasaray Üniversitesi Stratejik İletişim Yönetimi, Yüksek Lisans Programı. Retrieved March 01, 2017, from https://www.academia.edu/1483107/Paul_Lazarsfeld_ve_Ampirik_%C4%B0leti%C5%9Fim_Ara%C5%9Ft%C4%B1rmalar%C4%B1_Gelene%C4%9Fi