Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Reception studies derives primarily from the application of literary theories of textual interpretation to the everyday activities of mass media audiences. To understand the interpretive work actively undertaken by viewers or users of media, as part of the circuit of culture, reception studies integrate semiotic and sociological theories so as to situate the viewer between text and context. Thus, drawing on ideas from the interpretation of the literary texts of high culture, reception studies argues that popular culture and mass media texts must also be made sense of by their audiences. To do so, two forms of resources, or determinations, shape the meaning that results – first, the codes of the text, along with the conventions of its genre and the affordances of the technology; and second, the norms, values, and practices of the viewers’ domestic, community, and wider sociocultural contexts. Reception studies offered a new approach to audience research from the early 1980s in reaction to the predominant conceptions of audiences as passive and – in tandem – of media texts as moving wallpaper requiring little interpretive effort. For, ever since the advent of mass media over a century ago, the major theories of the audience have been strongly influenced both by sociological theories of ideology and hegemony and by social psychological theories of media effects and attitudinal or behavioral ... log in or subscribe to read full text