Objectives

From working on this module, you should learn to:

• understand the nature and importance of media ethnographies in terms of the meaning of media texts as constituted through audience response and participation

• understand the different ways in which audiences participants in constructing responses to media texts as fans or participants in fan communities

• understand and apply different ethnography research methods:

  • defining topics/questions

  • finding a site for analysis (chat rooms, e-zine production, TV/video viewing, music clubs, theme parks, etc.)

  • observing audience practices using field notes, observations, photography, interviews

  • analyzing results in terms of norms, codes, discourses constituting the meaning of audience response and participation

  • aspects of texts that invite or evoke audience response

What are Media Ethnographies?

Media ethnographies are studies of how audiences assume the active role of constructing the meaning of media texts. The meaning of media texts is not “in” these texts; nor is the meaning simply “in” audiences. Rather, the meaning of evolves out of the activity of audiences’ activity of social participation with media texts. As Grossberg, Wartella, and Whitney (1998) argue in defense of their model of “mediamaking”:

. . . the media are themselves being made while they are simultaneously making something else . . . we must see the media and all of the relationships that the media are involved in as active relationships, producing the world at the same time that the world is producing the media. This means that the media cannot be studied apart from the active relationships in which they are always involved: We cannot study the media apart from the context of their economic, political, historical, and cultural relationships (p. 7).

For Virginia Nightingale (1996), the experiences of the private everyday life has become controlled by a media culture in which the private experience are replaced by public performances and consumption in a range of different worlds. As a result, the ideal, unified self of the “individual personality” is now dispersed across a range of loosely defined, transitory alliances. As she notes:

media engagement increasingly transposes everyday life to a public ‘out there.’ Everyday life has become synonymous with what’s on television or radio, what’s in the newspapers or magazines, what’s on at the cinema or what’s in the shops. All that is left is the person finding a way ‘to be,’ operating electronically and commercially programmed pathways . . . (p. 141).

Through observation and interviewing audience participation in responding to the media, media ethnographers (Ang, 1985; Bird, 1991; Booker & Jermyn, 2003; Brown, 1990; 1996; Buckingham, 1993; 1996; Davis, 1997; Harrington & Bielby, 1995; Jenkins, 1992; Lull, 1990; McGinley, 1997; McRobbie, 1990; Mills, 1994; Palmer, 1986; Provenzo, 1991; Radway, 1984; 1988; Riggs, 1998; Seiter, Borchers, Kreutzner, & Warth, 1989; Spigel & Mann, 1992; Schwartz, 1998; Turkle, 1995) attempt to understand an audience's responses as a social activity (for summary analyses of media ethnographies, see Ang, 1991; Crawford & Hafsteinsson, 1997; Moores, 1993; Nightingale, 1996; Stevenson, 1995).

Purpose of this Module

This module describes strategies for integrating media ethnographies into a media studies class to provide students with an understanding of how the meaning of media texts is constructed through participation in viewing or reading activities. By learning about the various techniques involved in conducting media ethnographies, you can then have your students conduct their own small-scale media ethnographies of how meaning is constructed through viewer or reader participation in response activity. Students may study television viewing, Internet chat rooms, fan club activities (soap opera/Star Trek), responses to magazine, or participation in media events (Super Bowl, rock concerts). Through conducting these studies, students move beyond simply analyzing media texts to understand how audiences construct their own meanings of these texts based on shared needs, purposes, attitudes, values, or enjoyment.

Module 8: Word document

Active Audience Response in a Media Culture

Methods for Conducting Media Ethnographies

Methods for Conducting Media Ethnography Studies

References