The Discovery of the 'Decoder' of Mass Media Messages (<Special Symposium>Discussins on the New Theory of Audience)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to review 'audience' theories of the critical schools in mass communication research. They have criticized the orthodox conception of the 'audience' held by empirical schools which regard the audience as a passive and negative 'receiver' of mass media messages. They have urged a paradigm change from the passive audience to the active and positive decoder-reader conception in their theoretical endeavor. The critical schools intend to overcome the passive audience paradigm by introducing the semiological terms, "encode-code-decode" to mass communication theory. Their epistemological viewpoint has been generated by the articulation of two theoretical streams: (1) Althusserian structualistic Marxism, characterized by its break with economic reductionism, rediscovery of ideology as a relatively autonomous instance, and definition of media as "ideological state apparatus", (2) Saussurian linguistics, which has revolutionarily changed the perspective of languages and subjects, and his successor - Lacanian psychoanalysis and Barthes text theory. Altusser maintains that social formations can not survive without ideologically. reproducing the product forces = labors Mass media contribute to this process through representation of the status quo as self evident. And its messages create`subjects' by their interpellation mechanism. Although 'subjects' behave as if they are autonomous existence, they are, in fact, created by mass media. Roland Barthes argues that literary critique must pay attention to 'the reading' and 'the reader' which is the place where the plural meanings are generated. According to Cultural Studies, the media contribute to reproduce the dominant ideology through "signification". The media make people recognize that they are certainly members of some social formation by its naturalization mechanism. Stuart Hall defines this mass media's textual strategy of naturalization as the preferred meaning and or the preferred reading. This preferred meaning is not always read as it is. Hall points out that the restoration of the alternative meaning is possible if media texts are decoded in terms of the antidominant code. David Morley interviewed the audience of "Nationwide", a TV program in the U. K. ,in order to confirm this oppositional reading process. Although his research was an ambitious attempt, Screen schools criticized it for neglecting the power of text which makes people 'subjects'.