Module 7 Media Ethnography
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; 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).