Unanswered Questions in Audience Research

Abstract

As its title implies, this article explores a number of unanswered questions and outstanding issues in contemporary audience research. These include: models of the “active audience”; questions of cultural power; global media and transnational audiences; methodologies in audience research; problems of essentialism in the conceptualization of categories of audience members; the strengths and limitations of the encoding/decoding model; models of intellectual progress in the field; the new media and technologies of “newness.”

My title is derived from Bertolt Brecht’s “Anecdotes of Mr Keuner” in which he extols the virtue of thinking up questions to which we do not have answers (Brecht, 1966). Working from this principle, rather than trying to formulate solutions to the problems of our field, my contribution here is based on questions in media audience research to which I, at least, do not have the answers, as a way of taking stock of what exactly it is that we think we now know about the field.

Notes

1. The fact that in the published version of his commentary on these matters, which was occasioned by a conference paper of mine to which he was responding, Dayan takes me to have assented to his formulation which, is a matter of some puzzlement to me. His misinterpretation of the significance of the Nationwide Audience research in this respect seems to be founded on the erroneous assumption that in that study, it was only members of trade unions (who equate more closely to his restricted defintion of a “public”) who proved capable of producing oppositional readings of the program.

2. The Nationwide Audience work itself was premised on a detailed analysis of the program shown to audience groups which was published as Everyday TV:Nationwide (Brunsdon and Morley 1979). See also Brunsdon (1989) on the continuing importance of textual analysis. A good instance of the value of combining textual analysis with audience work in this way was provided at the ARSRP Conference by Darren Waldron (2003).

3. In this respect, I regard the plans of the new Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, edited by Martin Barker, to reprint older work from now neglected perspectives in our field to be exemplary of the best intellectual practice.

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