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audiences were differentiated along significant axes such as gender, age, eth-
nicity and level of formal education. It also attended to the differences
between short- and long-term media effects and tried to distinguish between
audience 'attitudes', 'preferences', 'beliefs', etc. so as to unpack the blackbox
of 'reception'. This kind of mass media research arguably conformed to
America's self-conception as a liberal democracy in which no one actor - be
it a government or a private company - should seek to homogenise socio-
cultural values or beliefs. By the 1970s, it bled into 'gratifications research',
in which 'mass audiences' were seen to be fractionated (
de
-massified) accord-
ing to which media content and forms they decided to pay attention to and
how they tailored their reactions to them to satisfy their own personal needs.
Coincident with this (very American) body of inquiry into the effects
of the mass media was the rise to prominence of a more critical tradition
originating in Europe. The Frankfurt School of critical theory (in)famously
emphasised the mass media's role in telling people what
not
to think,
believe or consider. Unlike the state-led propaganda of the 1930s and
1940s, they suggested that the post-1945 'culture industry' in the West
operated to bind ordinary people to capitalist social democracy by mak-
ing it their 'common sense'. With the communist bloc depicted as enemy
and threat, the mass media, according to the Frankfurt School, worked to
instil non-revolutionary sentiments in Western populations via commodity
advertising, televised light entertainment shows, Hollywood films, popu-
lar music, high street fashion and selective news reporting. In tandem with
their rising wages and improved living standards, working people, so argued
the Frankfurt School, were pacified by the mass media at the symbolic and
semantic levels. The political radicalism throughout pre-1939 Europe was
thus neutered, having barely been allowed to develop in the first place in
North America.
Related research of a less resolutely theoretical kind later followed
at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom. Inspired, in part,
by the writings of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (see
Box 6.2
),
Stuart Hall and colleagues explored the complex relationships between
'encoded' (media/producer) and 'decoded' (audience/receiver) meanings.
They showed, through a combination of discourse analysis, ethnography
and interview data, that the mass media tends to naturalise a very particular
set of norms and values at any one moment in time. These norms and values
aren't created by the mass media
sui generis
; rather, they are ether in the slow-
changing cultural atmosphere. The mass media, so argued the Birmingham
School, serves to make them visible by reiterating them day-in, day-out. This
notwithstanding, Hall and others have shown that audiences could subvert,
recontextualise or appropriate encoded meanings in complex acts of decod-
ing (e.g. see Hall, 1973). In part, this is because encoded meanings were
not always simple or internally consistent. Encoding was thus shown not to
guarantee the 'right' interpretations and emotions in recipients, even when
they were 'paying attention' (see
Box 3.2)
.
