McQuail: chapter 1, 8, and 9

This week’s readings on chapter 1, 8, and 9 from Denis McQuail’s book called “Audience Analysis” provides fundamental yet interesting insights of audience in both old and new media culture: From what audience used to mean in old media as a set of spectators to newer meanings as active, interactive, and borderless people.

When he talks about the privatization of media experience (p. 6), I thought of it as true indeed especially when it comes to the practice of television viewing. For instance, the location of a television at home is almost always at the center of a living room. Television viewing has been a family ritual in some way; it’s been customary, not only in American household but in many other countries, to watch TV together after dinner. However, with the invention of mobile communications (e.g. smartphones), people now watch TV in a more privatized environment, such as on their way to school or work. Although there might be a less of physical accompaniment of television viewing, there seems to be an increasing sense of virtual accompaniment of viewing (e.g. watching online streaming content where instant messages from other online users pop up on the screen, such as AfreecaTV).

When explaining the characteristics of “mass,” he refers to the mass as lacking “any organization, stable structure, rules, or leadership (p. 7).” However, I find this highly arguable nowadays. For instance, the 2008 US beef protest in South Korea was first elicited by the fans of K-pop idol boy band TVXQ (Shirky, 2010).

McQuail argues that audiences form according to factors that cut across residential patterns and have more to do with tastes and lifestyles (p. 133). However, he seems to have ignored a crucial factor when analyzing audience: Social capital. Only those with rich social capital in high socio-economic status are able to move flexibly between exclusionist highbrowed culture and lowbrowed culture, becoming inclusionist omnivore (Peterson & Kern, 1996). When talking about internationalization (by the way, I think internationalization is not the same as globalization), he said “the nation-state is in relative decline as transnational cooperation on many things becomes more important than sovereignty for its own sake (p. 130).” However, this is not always the case if you look at the ways in which Chinese government strictly regulates and censors the immense influx and popularity of Korean pop cultural content to protect their own sovereignty. On page 140, he said that “audiences do not find it hard to distinguish between imported and domestic products and read them differently.” This can be indeed true, but if you think about imported television formats (e.g. American Idols, MTV, etc.), it’s not that crystal clear. When TV producers/writers are importing and exporting TV formats, broad yet so subtle to recognize social, cultural, economic, and political ideologies are inevitably embedded in the format itself, such as westernized notion of capitalism. Some scholars have opposed the view of McQuail on national definitions of cultural content as no longer exclusive or uniquely important (p. 141) in the world of globalization. Some of the theories supporting those scholars’ arguments are cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991) and hybridity (Kraidy, 2002). It would be interesting to read some of their work in light of audience studies.

Studies on audience can be done with dichotomized approach: Looking at it from the perspective of either technological determinism or social determinism. But as we may agree upon reading this book, the realm of audience is much more dynamic and complex. However people define or make use of the term audience, as a socialist Shiach (1989) once said, I hope it gets liberated from the dominant status groups (e.g. multinational conglomerates)’ way of sustaining their power.

 

References:

Kraidy, M. (2002). Hybridity in cultural globalization. Communication Theory, 12(3), 316-339.

Peterson, R., & Kern, R. (1996). Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore. American Sociological Review, 61(5), 900-907.

Shiach, M. (1989). Discourse on popular culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus. New York: Penguin Group.

Straubhaar, J. (1991). Beyond media imperialism: Asymmetrical interdependence and cultural proximity. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 8(1), 39-59.