As we move into the 21st century, it is believed that audiences are much more active in their interpretation of text. They will think about the message relayed by a particular medium and will decode the message in an individual way.
As we move into the 21st century, it is believed that audiences are much more active in their interpretation of text. They will think about the message relayed by a particular medium and will decode the message in an individual way. Different members of an audience will read a media text differently depending on their background, experience other media text they have encountered, age, mood and all the other factors which make us individuals rather than a part of a homogenous mass. It is impossible these days to go through a day without encountering the media in some form. We are all therefore audiences for different kinds of Media products.
Fiske presents a more modern view of audiences. John Fiske is professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. An expert on popular culture and semiotics. According to his theory, meaning is generated from text and not from its reception. In order to understand popular culture it is important to know the meaning of culture. In his view culture is the constant process of producing meanings of and from our social experience, and such meaning produce a social identity for the people. The condition of producing meaning from our social experiences is that this is only possible when it is done from within and not be imposed from above. It is not possible to inflict a culture on society. People make popular culture at the interface between everyday life and consumption of products of cultural industries. The reason for this is people are free to choose what they consume from the variety of demand. Since culture cannot be inflicted on people it is obvious that the people make popular culture. The aim of producing popular culture is to produce meanings. People only produce meaning from text, which they can understand. The fact that people produce meaning from text does not mean there are no similar meanings. In fact people constantly form allegiances on different subjects. Fiske writes, “ In a consumer society, all commodities have cultural as well as functional values. So, of course our popular culture is an industrialised culture”. The complementary focus is upon how people cope with the system, how they read text, how they make popular culture out of its resources. It requires us to analyse text in order to expose their contradictions, their meaning that escape control, their producerly invitation, to ask what it is within them that attract popular approval. Some commentators imply that the financial economy and cultural economy work in the same way. Fiske is keen on emphasizing that they do not work in the same way. Fiske writes, “It is capital that provides the access to the means of production and distribution in the two financial economies. But it is the meaning and pleasure of cultural economy that determines the extent of the economic return on that capital”. He firmly rejects the following assumptions: that capitalist industries produce a variety of products whose variety is finally illusory because they all promote the same capitalist ideology; that any text conveys the same message to all people; that people are ‘cultural dopes’, a passive, helpless mass at the mercy of the capitalist ‘culture industry’ and that the only thing different people and different social groups have in common is the baseness, so that art which appeals to a wide audience can only do so by appealing to the base instincts. He insists that consumer of cultural commodities are not mere passive dopes, but creators of their own right. Creating meaning for those artefacts which suit their social and emotional needs and not those of capitalist producers. Text cannot speak for itself; it needs a reader and a writer. The extent to which the reader is involved in constructing meaning partly depends upon the kind of text involved. Some texts are more open than others. Fiske believes “ a homogenous, externally produced culture cannot be sold ready-made to the masses: culture simply does not work that way. Nor do the people behave or live like masses; an aggregation of alienated one-dimensional persons whose only consciousness is false, whose only relationship to the system that enslaves them is one of unwitting dopes. Popular culture is made by them, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industry can do is produce a repertoire of text and cultural resources for various formations of the people to use or reject in process of producing their popular culture”.
