Obtención del hidrolizado proteico de soya

This is the audience in a state of engagement with the text. This conception of audience is about it being engaged in an activity. But audiences as readers are not necessarily understood to be entirely in control of the process of the production of meaning.

Indeed, one approach used by Morley (1989) (drawing from Hall and before that from Parkin’s ideas about three ‘meaning systems’) describes the audience in terms of three different relationships with the text. In each case the audience has more or less autonomy in terms of the sense they make of the material.

G The preferred reading is about that meaning which is preferred by the producer,

inscribed in the text, and likely to be taken from the text by the reader because the use of various conventions and devices close down other ways of understanding it.

G The alternative reading is one that produces meanings which were not intended by

the producer but which do not seriously challenge the dominant meaning.

G The oppositional reading is one which does so challenge that dominance, and

implies a degree of intellectual autonomy in the reader. This kind of analysis also tends to deal in ideology, so that dominant meanings are also about the dominant ideology.

Taking the popular press coverage of the death of Princess Margaret in Britain (2002) as an example, one would say that the preferred reading of this event was in terms of an expected but tragic event of a statusful public figure. Alternatively, it might have been read as the regrettable passing of a life, but of little relevance to the lives of most British citizens. Oppositionally, a reader might have understood it to be a matter of relief that the death of an old-guard member of an anti-democratic institution (the monarchy) made it a little more likely that the abolition of that institution could take place.

The question remains, to what extent is the audience free to resist preferred read- ings? The answer seems to have a lot to do with the cultural background of the audience member, and with their particular beliefs, attitudes and values within that cultural nexus. Liebes and Katz (1993) have demonstrated that a text may be understood in different ways by those coming to it with different sets of values and priorities.

Silverstone (1994) comments on their work: ‘results suggested that cultural and ethnic identity do provide a significant determinant of different relationships to the texts, differences which are an expression of those groups culturally and politically in the wider society’. However, he also disputes that differences of understanding, of moral judgement for example, necessarily mean that the ‘ideological force’ of the text is blocked. ‘Viewers can be critical but still accept the basic, dominant or structural mean- ings offered by the text.’ Yet again the jury stays out on attempts to demonstrate media influence, though the importance of conditioning factors remains pretty clear.

In the initial flush of a structuralist period of media criticism, Hall conceptualized ‘audience as reader’ as decoders of material. We have to recognize the codes and conven- tions within a text in order to make sense of the text. He was interested in the relation- ship between producers and audience in terms of the amount of common ground there was between them (or not). They would share for example knowledge of the codes of news. They would share the ideological background to that news. They would even share

understanding of the technologies which produce that news – the use of camera or of satellite links. What concerned him was the extent to which that sharing might close down the possible meaning of a text, the extent to which there was a closed circle of encoding and decoding. Again, this concern was ideological in basis. If drama or news encodes crime as a problem with an inflection of race, then what chance is there for the audience to decode crime as perhaps a problem of selective representation, or perhaps as a problem of how police deal with crime?

At the same time as attention was turning from the text alone to the audience, and to what was entailed in reading, there was also a recognition of the polysemic nature of visual texts in particular. So again, there was a conceptual struggle between the notion of the text closing down meanings for the reader, and the ambiguities of texts (some more than others) which offer more opportunities for different readers to open up differ- ent meanings. By the same token, whatever influence is proposed becomes less certain, less specific, more problematic.

The notion of the ‘audience as reader’ does at least get rid of early critical notions of audiences as some kind of receptacle into which ideas might be poured by the media. But then, even when one understands that audiences do have some part to play in the production of meaning, still there is the question of how that part is conceptualized. Critical views still tend to fall into the model of audience as either victim or as hero. What we need to remember is that, if texts cannot be neutral – and some may be less neutral than others – so too audiences as readers bring their own experiential and ideological baggage to that process of reading. In saying this, I am not suggesting that there is some kind of absolutely truthful reading out there of the film or magazine. But I am drawing attention to the fact that readers may be ‘influenced’ by factors other than devices in the text, or their experience of the media in general.

The variability of audience experience and attitudes has been used in what Curran (1996) has called ‘New Revisionism’, which argues that the media do not influence the audience in any consistent or meaningful way. He cites research by Meyer (1976) as typifying findings about the variability of response to the media: ‘different types of chil- dren, bringing different beliefs, attitudes and values to the viewing of the show as a result of different socialisation processes, are affected in different ways’. Such evidence has been used to talk down media influence and to talk up the importance of the text and of the ‘audience as reader’ (not as victim). This approach is about reception analysis, not analysis of influence as such. This kind of analysis has been used to emphasize the power of reading, the possibility of making oppositional readings. It argues for ways in which the reader reuses media materials to affirm cultural identity, to resist subordination to that same material.

However, this kind of use and its immediate context (in micro-studies of audience) is also open to the criticism that it fails to take account of a larger industrial and political context to ‘use’. Murdock and Golding (2000) criticize the ‘romantic celebration of subversive consumption’ (see also section 8, Taking pleasure).