The Communication Review, 9: 93–100, 2006 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN 1071-4421 print / 1547-7487 online DOI: 10.1080/10714420600663278
1547-7487 1071-4421 GCRV The Communication Review Review, Vol. 09, No. 02, March 2006: pp. 0–0
AUDIENCE RESEARCH IN THE POST-AUDIENCE AGE: AN INTRODUCTION TO BARKER AND MORLEY
AnL. A. Intro Press to Barker and Morley
Andrea L. Press Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois
This article considers the contributions that Martin Barker and David Morley have made to the ongoing debate about the future of audience research in communications. Considering their positions on theory and method in the field, the article concludes that audience research in the future must incorporate a variety of different methodological perspectives. The article also notes the increasingly political nature of questions posed in the field of audience research and our necessity as researchers to acknowledge the political dimension of our field.
In the following articles, David Morley and Martin Barker offer two different contrasting perspectives on the current state of audience research. Both are dissatisfied with the state of the field but emphasize a slightly different reason for this dissatisfaction. These critiques are rooted in opposite methodological and epistemological positions on the overall purpose of research in our field. Barker is dissatisfied with the lack of systematization, which he equates with a lack of progress, in the field. He accuses us of forgetting what we’ve learned in the past, as each new qualitative audience project fails to build on the knowledge gleaned from the last one. He mentions a series of propositions that audience research has generated thus far, and bemoans the fact that more students now seem to write about audiences— e.g., pursuing strictly theoretical work—than actually researching audiences. This is an issue to which I will return as I feel it reflects the tendency of our field to draw sharp distinctions between theory and research. In fact, most of Barker’s objections to our history seem tied to this tendency to bifurcate theory and research. Much writing about audiences is The author would like to thank Tamar Liebes for her discussion of these papers. Address correspondence to Andrea L. Press, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, 810 S. Wright Street, 240 Greg Hall, Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail:
[email protected]
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often quite theoretical as it engages many of the central methodological quandaries in the social sciences, including the debate between qualitative and quantitative research, and perhaps more centrally the divide between politically motivated research and research that attempts to generate objective scientific propositions. While Barker feels that our goal must be to generate objective scientific propositions, Morley’s piece takes a decidedly different emphasis in addressing “unanswered questions in audience research.” For Morley, one central problem with audience research in the current era is that we define the notion of its “political” aspect much too narrowly. Often, Morley argues, audience researchers ignore the media’s role in the construction of “cultural citizenship,” a notion which conceptualizes the political impact of mass media quite broadly. Also feminist research, which has questioned the narrowness of the definition of politics as confined to the “public” rather than the “private” sphere, has not penetrated and transformed our definitions as it should have. Otherwise, Morley is more sanguine about our ability in audience research to build on past knowledge. According to his argument, there is much research that is almost canonical in the field of audience study—Hall’s “encoding/decoding” model, for example, or Williams’ notion of “flow”—that is still relevant today, and foundational in the work of many audience scholars. In a related vein, Morley criticizes our field’s tendency to unfairly and misguidedly politicize the various methods that have been used to research audiences. As one of the progenitors of ethnographic audience research, he makes the perhaps surprising (given that he is known as a media ethnographer) comment that ethnography is not useful for investigating all questions pertaining to audiences, and that survey research and other less interpretive methodologies are sometimes useful as well. In this he agrees with Barker and initiates a move toward a field less bifurcated in terms of methodological choices and theoretical perspectives. He points to many scholars—Justin Lewis (1997), Darnell Hunt (1997), Sujeong Kim (2004), and Pierre Bourdieu (1984), whom Barker also mentions—who have used quantitative research to good effect in questions relating to the reception of media and culture. I experienced this sort of methodological “typecasting” firsthand, and ironically from both directions, in my own career, in a set of experiences which indicates how spurious such stereotyping almost always is. Trained as a qualitative sociologist and an ethnographer, I entered the communications field with a position at the University of Michigan in the communications department, and a social science environment, which was dominated by quantitative research due to the to the highly quantitative Institute for Social Research (ISR) located there. After a time, I became the only representative in the communications department with a feminist
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perspective, a critical communications approach, and qualitative empirical research of any kind (interviews, ethnography, focus groups, etc.). Students came to me for advice on theoretical approaches to the mass media (I taught communications theory at the graduate and undergraduate levels), on critical perspectives, and for methodological guidance on qualitative research. From the perspective of the quantitative researchers that generally governed the department and the social sciences there, I was, in short, “soft,” nonscientific. Moving from the University of Michigan to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I entered a department (the Institute of Communications Research) in which a critical, cultural studies perspective predominated. Overnight, my role in communications changed. Students and colleagues stressed the empirical dimensions of my research and I became known as one of the only representatives of a “scientific” perspective in the department. Students came to me for whatever guidance they needed about social science research in either a quantitative or qualitative mien. The same interviewing and ethnographic methods I was using to study the media audience while at the University of Michigan, and that there identified me as a representative of “soft” critical social science, now identified me, when viewed by a group of primarily textual analysts and historical researchers, as a slightly naïve, scientific researcher, someone who perhaps misguidedly believed one could learn from the empirical study of humans and their communities. This experience I believe epitomizes the schizophrenic attitude the communications field exhibits toward ethnographic audience research, a confusion both Morley and Barker attempt to address, and comment critically upon, with their excellent integrative essays.1 While the solutions they propose and the perspectives they bring to bear differ, I believe they are in effect addressing the same dilemma: a frustrating lack of cohesion—at times, even a sense of chaos—in the field at the levels of theory, method, and political motivation. In the remainder of this essay, I address each of these areas, in turn contrasting Barker and Morely’s comments on each and offering my own attempt at forging a common language for them and the field as a whole. THEORETICAL DILEMMAS Both Morley and Barker defend audience research and talk about its tradition as valuable. In addition, both want the contribution of audience research to extend beyond what they term mere “stories.” Yet at this point, their recommendations diverge markedly. Morley and Barker ask quite different things of theory in audience studies. Their debate highlights a dialogue already inherent within our field which addresses our
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overall goals as academic researchers. The active audience tradition—and both invoke it—depends, as Morley recognizes, on the conviction that one will find an active audience. This is a prior political conviction, rather than some kind of “grounded theory” emerging from all sets of audience data. Some might—and have—criticized these assumptions as “mindless populism.” Yet Morley is not so willing to dismiss active audience theory on these grounds, instead appreciating the tradition for its recognition of the inescapably political dimension of audience research. At the same time, Morley is cautious in his approbation, criticizing accepted notions of “politics” and the “public,” citing many who offer a gendered critique of conventional notions of the political, and chastising others who write about politics and audiences for not being cognizant of the importance of such research. Cautioning as well against falling back into the politics of “false consciousness” which dominated our field in the early media effects days, Morley urges an interrogation of the function of the concept of the “political” in our field, an appreciation of its complexity and nuances. Morley concludes that the notion of media’s role in the global construction of cultural citizenship are the set of interests that ought to guide our efforts and research in the current cultural and technological moment. While Morley acknowledges the political essence of active audience theory, Barker seems less willing to go this route, instead making the search for empirical and testable “scientific propositions” the very first characteristic of the audience research of his dreams. He chastises those of us who rule out survey methodologies and other less than entirely interpretive methods simply because of our outdated prejudices against particular types of methodologies. Barker seems more sanguine about the possibility of generating some generalizable, objective truths as a result of audience research than does Morley. Yet the questions Barker identifies: how to make the concept of “interpretive community” empirically measurable and testable? how to explain the relations between the “reading positions” of different interpretive communities? and finally, what are the conditions that have to be met for an audience member to attain an “unconditionally positive experience” from a cultural encounter? are framed without reference to the political nature of much previous audience research. Instead of the answers to politically informed cultural questions, Barker yearns for testable propositions, and points us in the direction of a search for “viewing strategies” which he hopes will yield this type of general, testable knowledge. Yet this concept is described in a curiously abstract fashion and I am not as convinced of its universal usefulness as Barker seems. Indeed he proposes the “viewing strategy” as a more current substitute for Hall’s encoding/decoding model, which Barker feels has outlived its usefulness. The strength of Hall’s model,
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however, was its ability to take into account the context of each end of the media reception process. The model thereby allowed us to theorize the importance of power and hierarchy in the reception process. In my view, this has contributed to its longevity, and is a noticeable lack in Barker’s proposed model. In the end, Morley adopts a much more positive tone in his survey of the last 30 years of audience research than does Barker. He agrees with Barker that in some ways the current task as we face the new media environment, both technologically and in terms of the increasingly global nature of media, is to try to remember what theorists of the media throughout the last several decades have taught us. And in fact, there is quite a lot of media theory, and theory of media reception, that is useful for us at this juncture. Invoking Katz et al.’s thesis that certain texts in the field are canonical (2003), Morley relies on Hall’s “encoding/decoding” thesis, as a set of ideas that remains useful as we attempt to understand new forms of media reception, particularly as we try to avoid falling into a technological determinism in certain too-zealous theorizations of the totalizing world of “new media.” Perhaps, Morley notes, citing White (2003), Raymond Williams’ now classic notion of “flow” could be rethought in this context as well. And so, Morley reminds us that audience research has had its shining and useful moments, many of which (including much of his own now-classic work) are, though widely criticized, still cited and read. In this, he directly disagrees with Barker who offers the notion of “viewing strategies” as a new and superior substitution for the encoding/decoding scheme. What draws these articles together is a common wish for more theoretical progress in the audience field, and a frustration with our lack of ability to speak both in a cohesive manner to one another, so that we might build theory, and also to those in different fields apart from audience study, who might not share either our political or methodological predispositions. In addition, Morley and Barker are united by their call for a more integrative relationship between qualitative and quantitative methodologies in our field. METHODOLOGICAL DILEMMAS Those of us investigating the basic category of “meaning making,” which characterized the “active audience” tradition that both Barker and Morley mention, typically run into a classic dilemma of interpretive social science, one which has been much written of since Clifford and Marcus published their now-canonical critique of ethnography (1986). The very notion of the active audience is based on the idea that we can learn from those we are studying, even though our increasingly sophisticated appreciation of the role of writing in ethnographic work shows us how complicated this
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process is. The new dilemmas of global research complicate the situation and lead us into localism, as Morley warns, ever further from Barker’s goal of generalizable propositions. In audience research (again, as Barker acknowledges), we remain very ambivalent about the desire to generalize. In addition, at the current moment what we have taken to calling the “new media environment” has further complicated our research questions and procedures. In the case of internet studies, the range of discussion about the internet vacillates between a heavy cognizance and attention to its dangers, and enormous potential for influence, and serious interest in its democratic, resistant, radical possibilities, and to the commercial and policy-related war over possession and use of the internet given its potential benefits and dangers. Concomitant with the wide-ranging nature of our theories and questions, those investigating the internet have used a variety of methodological approaches, ranging from large-scale survey work to in-depth ethnographic observations (Press and Livingstone 2006). Debates about the superiority or political correctness of qualitative vs. quantitative methodological approaches seem dated and irrelevant when applied to research in the new media environment. Both Morley and Barker address this current move toward methodological integration in their critiques. Each cite Bourdieu’s appropriation of quantitative survey methodologies to study culture and its audience as an example of some of the best new work in our field. Methodologically, Bourdieu symbolizes the theoretically sophisticated use of quantitative methodologies. Theoretically, his presence in each of their discussions indicates that both Morley and Barker urge a much broader and more cultural and contextual conceptualization of what constitutes audience research than has heretofore characterized our field. While each may pose radically different questions of the field, call for different courses of action, and conclude by calling for different research programs, what draws these articles together is their agreement that our methodological rifts have outlived their usefulness, and a narrow, noncultural and nonglobal image of the nature of audiences is similarly no longer appropriate to the current situation. CONCLUSION Morley concludes his essay by noting the importance of the changing media environment to any rethinking of the future of audience research. The proliferation of digital media has thrust into a new light the very problematic of audience study. While once the field was preoccupied with the dichotomy of the active/passive audience, the notion of “interactivity” has taken on a whole new meaning in the age of digital media. As Livingstone argues (2003), no one term can capture the complexity of media
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relationships in today’s complex multi-media environment. Gitlin long ago (1978) warned media researchers not to overlook the forest for the trees by being reluctant to pose questions about media influence that, because of the ubiquitous nature of that influence, were difficult to research. Living in a household containing a 7-year-old and an 11-yearold, I find it increasingly impossible to overlook the forest, as the totally absorbing nature of the new media environment becomes obvious even to the casual observer of today’s children. As Gitlin himself notes (2001, cited in Morley), we are now all audiences of some sort of media, almost all the time. Yet Morley cautions against the totalizing nature of this type of thinking, and the technological essentialism to where it might lead. Once again, invoking the distinguished history of our field—in particular, historical and feminist theory about the importance of the domestic setting for media technologies and their relationship to political questions— Morley notes the way “new” media are often used in the service of many very traditional ends, and urges an intelligent remixing of new and old theorizations, methodologies, and ideas. In the end, both Barker but especially Morley recognize the pessimism of the political moment in which we now live, and the way our recognition of this reality must impact the questions our field will address. And this, in my view, is the real legacy of audience research in the age of the new conservatism. It’s not enough to ask how do we theorize a fully “positive” cultural encounter, but I would supplement Barker’s question by asking, how do we problematize this notion of “positive” politically? And in connection with this, how do we formulate a notion of “politics” that is meaningful and constructive in the current political climate? Finally, how—if at all—can we mobilize the study of media in the interests of progressive change? While none of us have the answer to these questions at the moment, these reflections we hope will help move our scholarship in this direction. NOTES 1. There have been a number of recent attempts at integrative understanding of the field of audience research. See, for example, Livingstone (2003) and Liebes (forthcoming).
REFERENCES Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. London: Routledge. Clifford, J. & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gitlin, T. (1978). The dominant paradigm. Theory and Society, 6(2), 205–253, September.
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Gitlin T. (2001). Media unlimited. New York: Metropolitan Books. Hunt, D. (1997). Screening the Los Angeles riots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katz, E., Peters, J. D., Liebes, T. & Orloff, A. (Eds.). (2003). Canonic texts in media research: Are there any? Should there be? How about these? Cambridge: Blackwell. Kim, S. (2004). Re-reading David Morley’s The Nationwide Audience. Cultural Studies, 18(1), 84–108, January. Lewis, J. (1997). What counts in cultural studies. Media, Culture and Society, 19(1), 83–97. Liebes, T. (forthcoming). Viewing and reviewing the audience: Fashions in communication research. In J. Curran & M. Gurevitch (Eds.), Mass media and society, fourth ed. Livingstone, S. (2002). Young people and new media: Childhood and the changing media environment. London: Sage. Livingstone, S. (2003). The changing nature of audiences: From the mass audience to the interactive media user. In A. Valdivia (Ed.), Blackwell companion to media studies, (pp. 337–359). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Press, A., & Livingstone, S. (2006). Taking audience “Taking audience research into the age of new Media: Old problems and new challenges. In M. White, J. Schwoch, & D. Goankar (Eds.), Cultural studies and methodological issues. London: Basil Blackwell. White, M. (2003). Flows and other encounters with TV. In L. Parks & S. Kumar (Eds.), Planet TV. New York: New York University Press.
