Unanswered Questions in Audience Research

As its title implies, this article explores a number of unanswered questions and outstanding issues in contemporary audience research. These include: models of the “active audience”; questions of cultural power; global media and transnational audiences; methodologies in audience research; problems of essentialism in the conceptualization of categories of audience members; the strengths and limitations of the encoding/decoding model; models of intellectual progress in the field; the new media and technologies of “newness.” My title is derived from Bertolt Brecht’s “Anecdotes of Mr Keuner” in which he extols the virtue of thinking up questions to which we do not have answers (Brecht, 1966). Working from this principle, rather than trying to formulate solutions to the problems of our field, my contribution here is based on questions in media audience research to which I, at least, do not have the answers, as a way of taking stock of what exactly it is that we think we now know about the field.


Active audiences, cultural consumption and media power
My point of departure is with an anecdote told by the Latin American media scholar, Jesus Martin-Barbero, concerning an occasion twenty years ago now, in 1984, involving a disconcerting experience, when he took a group of his students to see a popular melodrama in a cinema in Cali, in Columbia: 'After 20 minutes of the screening we were so bored, because the film was so sentimental and corny that we started to laugh about it. People surrounding us -the cinema was full mostly of men, it was a very successful film, that's why we went -got angry and offended, so they yelled at us and tried to force us out of the venue. During the film I observed these men, moved to tears, watching the drama with a fantastic pleasure…As we came out from there, I was puzzled, wondering what the relationship was between the film I had watched and the [very different] one these men [seemed to have] watched . I had to ask myself -what was it then that I was not seeing? And what use could these men make of my ideological reading of the film, if that was not the film they saw?' (Martin-Barbero, quoted in Mattelart and Mattelart 1984) When I hear again today the repeated patrician complaint (from the Left every bit as much as from the Right) that the media are 'dumbing (us) down'because the audience is supposedly so 'hooked' on Reality TV shows that they have lost interest in serious documentary -I do wonder if we have really advanced so very far beyond Martin-Barbero's expression of honest puzzlement. In which case the question with which Martin-Barbero concludes his story remains every bit as pertinent today as it was in 1984, when he says that 'these kind of questions lead me today to face the unavoidable need to read mass culture from another place; from www.compos.com.br/e-compos Agosto de 2006 -3/25 Revista da Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação where another questions arises -what, in mass culture responds not to the logic of capital, but to other logics?' (Martin-Barbero op cit).
The taken-for-granted wisdom of our field has certainly gone through significant changes in the last twenty years. If the 1980s and 1990s saw a veritable boom in the production of audience ethnographies which attempted to explore the various 'other logics' of cultural consumption to which Martin-Barbero refers, today we face a new backlash, in which this work is denounced as 'pointless populism' (Seaman 1992) . In this 'new' story (which seems to me to be in fact, more of a return to a very old story about media effects and largely readable as the return of a narrowly fundamentalist political economy) it is now sometimes argued that this work on the varieties and complexities of media consumption has simply led us up a blind alley -with John Fiske usually cast as the evil 'Pied Piper' who led us astray. I have outlined my own considerable disagreements of emphasis with Fiske elsewhere (Morley 1992), but to dismiss this work out of hand, as some seem now to want to do, and to reject all the insights gained by subsequent ethnographic work on the contradictions involved in media consumption, would be to return to the presumptious idiocies of the political fundamentalism which Martin-Barbero rightly recognised as itself bankrupt in 1984. It is one thing to argue (as I have myself done) that some recent audience work has exaggerated, and wrongly romanticised the supposed power and freedoms of media consumers, imagining that all audiences everywhere are engaged in a continuous form of 'semiological guerrilla warfare` (Eco 1972) with the media, in which they constantly produce oppositional readings of its products. However, it is quite another thing to imagine that there is anything to be gained by returning to simple -minded models of media power which fail to grasp Fiske's entirely correct argument that, in crossing over into the popular, any ideology pays a price for its hegemonic reach -in so far as, in the very process of becoming popular, it is inevitably 'made over' into something other than its propagators intended. To eschew this insight is to fall back into the politics of 'false consciousness', where the realm of the popular media is simply conceived as a world of 'bread and circuses' got up by the powerful to dupe the vulnerable masses -though of course, it is presumed to only affect those Others (children, women, the poor, the www.compos.com.br/e-compos Agosto de 2006 -4/25 Revista da Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação working class, the uneducated) outside the realms of adult maturity and transcendent consciousness happily inhabited by the critic Himself.
The backlash against cultural studies' supposed populism which is now emerging, in the UK at least, also has a significantly gendered dimension. This critique, articulated by people like my colleague at Goldsmiths, James Curran (1990 and, but also by John Corner (1991), Greg Philo and David Miller (1997) holds cultural studies to blame for the abandonment of `real` political questions, about power. In their place, according to these commentators, cultural studies now focuses on `inconsequential` questions about the niceties of domestic media consumptiona process in which, according to Philo and Miller, we end up treating `TV as if it were no more significant than a kitchen Toaster` (Philo and Miller op cit : 13). The problem here, as Ann Gray (1998) has put it, is that this critique depends on a thoroughly masculinist equation of the realms of `serious` television -such as news and current affairs -with what she wittily calls the `gender of the real` -an equation which can only be allowed to stand if we are to abandon the 30 years of feminist theory -such as the work of Nancy Fraser and others on the gendering of the public sphere -of which these authors seem to be quite unaware (cf. Fraser 1989;Butler and Scott 1992).
Some of this may perhaps be specific to debates in the UK, but there do seem to be some parallels between this work and Daniel Dayan`s recent critique (2001) of whether the television audience is `really` a `public`. Dayan's presumption seems to be that, if it is not, then it is inconsequential. The problem here is that the whole argument is premised on a very restricted sense of what `politics` is -which quite ignores the crucial role of the media in the construction of what we might call `cultural citizenship`2. The further question raised by the critics of cultural studies audience work is whether it matters if people make oppositional or subversive decodings of media material, unless they then go out and `do something` (go on a 2 The fact that in the published version of his commentary on these matters (2001), which was in part occasioned by a conference paper of mine, to which he was responding, Dayan takes me to have assented to his formulation, is a matter of some puzzlement to me. His misinterpretation of the significance of the Nationwide Audience research in this respect seems to be founded on the erroneous assumption that, in that study, it was only members of trade unions (who equate more closely to his restricted definition of a 'public') who proved capable of producing oppositional readings of the programme.
www.compos.com.br/e-compos Agosto de 2006 -5/25 Revista da Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação demonstration; start a petition) about it. However, the reverse question would be to ask where such critics imagine that the impetus for political change comes from, if not from many micro instances of `pre-political` attitude change in the cultural sphere -moments in which 'negotiated' or subversive forms of media consumption may often have a vital role to play. This, I take it, is precisely the issue which Peter Dahlgren's work is intended to address, in his analysis of the discursive construction of the political, the non-political and the pre/para-political (Dahlgren 2003 -this work was presented at the 'Actualites des recherches en sociologie de la reception et les publics' conference held at the University of Versailles/ Saint Quentin in October 2003 -hereafter referred to as the ARSRP conference).
As for the question of treating TV `like a kitchen toaster` -far from being prepared to regard that as an `inconsequential` issue, I would argue that the work of

Global media power and transnational audiences
Certainly, in the bleak geo-political landscape in which we now find ourselves, there is plenty of cause for despair. In a world where there is little to choose between the neo-conservative fundamentalism of the Bush regime in the USA, What is needed here is not to swing, in our despair, from a romanticised vision of audience 'empowerment' back to an unreconstructed politics of media manipulation, but rather, as Clifford Geertz once put it, to vex each other with ever greater precision in attempting to clarify the issues at stake.
Let us take the question of globalisation, and its relation to previous discourses of media or cultural imperialism as one key site on which to explore these issues.
Of course, we all know that simple minded theories of North American cultural imperialism, as articulated originally by Herbert Schiller (1969) and others are inadequate -not least because they were premised on an inadequate hypodermic model of media effects on their international audiences. Years of now canonical research in our field (Ang 1984;Liebes and Katz 1991;Michaels 1994;Gripsrud 1995) has shown that things do not work so simply as that and it is not just a question of an unopposed `one-way` cultural flow form Hollywood outwards to the various 'peripheries' of the world. Nowadays, as my colleagues at Goldsmiths Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy (2001) claim, it is transnational culture which is, in Raymond Williams` phrase, `ordinary`. In line with my argument above, derived from Fiske, about the 'price' that powerful ideologies pay for their hegemonic reach, that 'ordinariness' is a very complex phenomenon, not easily reducible to any simple arithmetic of metropolitan power. Nonetheless, we must take very seriously the evidence emerging in the Middle East about the important role of media PR in the current `Project for the New American Century` now installed at the centre of American foreign policy by the 'neo-conservatives' in the White House -including the importance of American government-funded propaganda channels such as al-Hurra , even if, again, its viewers do not always consume and interpret it in the ways that the US government would wish. To put it simply, the fact that Schiller may have been wrong about how audiences consume media does not mean that he was wrong about everything else as well (cf Morley 1994 and.
We might also consider here the question of `glocalisation' which is again not really addressed by fundamentalist theories of media imperialism. It is many years now since Coca Cola declared that it was `not a multinational but a multilocal`.
Any simple story of the world-wide distribution of standardised cultural goods clearly www.compos.com.br/e-compos Agosto de 2006 -7/25 Revista da Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação is not going to be all that much help to us -as we also see by considering the speed with which MTV Europe realised that it had to `regionalise` its services, in order to succeed in attracting audiences in different parts of Europe, rather than just pumping out one standardised cultural product .However, against this argument, it can perfectly well still be asserted that, in the end, all the different versions of programmes such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire which now exist in different parts of the globe are just that -versions which ultimately, are all still derived from an Anglo-American template. This is the continuing pertinence of Jeremy Tunstall's (1977) argument that it is often the export of formats, rather than programmes, which is the key issue in matters of cultural imperialism Where does all this leave us in relation to models of the `active audience`?
We are certainly now all aware of the many examples which the research referred to earlier has unearthed about how world-wide audiences often re-interpret `foreign` media materials according to local cultural grids, and that remains a crucial insight.
However, there is no good reason why this should lead us to neglect the fact that, on the whole, it is still mainly North American programmes that people are busily `reinterpreting`. We should remember that these models of audience activity were not initially designed (however they may have sometimes been subsequently deployed) to make us forget the question of media power, but rather to be able to conceptualise it in more complex and adequate ways.

Questions of methodology
A further problem here derives from the fact that most of the influential audience work of recent years has been qualitative and ethnographic in its approach. This work has certainly been the source of a whole range of insights into the complexities of how audiences 'indigenise' the media materials which they consume. In the long wake of the `crisis of representation` imported into cultural studies from anthropology, after the impact of Clifford and Marcus` (1986) work, many scholars in the field seem now to assume that self-reflexive forms of ethnographic work are the only ethically acceptable and intellectually justifiable forms of research . But, while for some purposes, ethnography is an excellent thingfor others, it is simply not suitable. I would want to argue here for a greater pragmatism in our methodological choices -which requires an awareness of the `opportunity costs` of any method, ethnography included. For some purposes only statistics will help -and to my mind it is a real puzzle as to why so few people ever use numbers in contemporary audience research -despite the cogent arguments in favour of doing so advanced in recent years by Justin Lewis (1997) Darnell Hunt (1997 and Sujeong Kim (2004). There is also a particular irony, and one that will perhaps be particularly resonant in France, that Anglo-American cultural studies scholars, who themselves would never resort to the use of numbers in their own research, nonetheless often quote work by Bourdieu (1984) which was, of course, founded on the use of sophisticated statistical methods. Conversely, I remain puzzled as to why so many cultural studies scholars, in designing their research, assume that more contextual information is always a Good Thing. As one who has had the unhappy experience of being involved in at least one research project which simply `died` under the weight of the quantity of unanalysed contextual data that had been collected, I am very aware that too much context can sometimes be a highly dangerous thing. None of this is intended to undermine the value of ethnographic research, but simply to register that now that the intellectual argument about its legitimacy as an approach has been won, it may be time to recognise, as Andy www.compos.com.br/e-compos Agosto de 2006 -9/25 Revista da Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação Ruddock does in his recent survey of the field, that other, more traditional methods may still serve us better on some occasions (Ruddock 2001).

The problem of 'Essentialism' in audience studies
Nowadays it is widely taken for granted that any form of 'essentialism', which reduces individuals to the status of mere members of a social category (of class or gender or race) is a great danger in audience studies. Regretfully, my own early study of the Nationwide Audience (Morley 1980;Morley and Brunsdon 1999) which is largely known at second hand, through the many summaries of it which exist in textbooks in the field, seems to have played an unwitting part in installing this particular orthodoxy. The taken-for-granted wisdom here, retailed in most of these summaries, and faithfully reproduced in student essays, is that the Nationwide research showed us all that it was hopeless to imagine that audience decodings of the media were structured by class -and that to do so was to engage in `class essentialism`-because it is, in fact, all so much more complicated than that.
The best-known statement of this position is probably that offered by Graeme Turner in his widely read history of British cultural studies (1990). In his account of the Nationwide research, Turner concludes that the attempt there to 'tie differentiated readings to gross social and class determinants was a failure' and indeed that, as matter of principle, the very attempt to make empirical connections between social position and modalities of media consumption is 'a waste of time' (Turner op cit 132-3).
The first problem here, as I have argued before (Morley 1992) is that the thesis that decodings are straightforwardly determined by class was simply not the proposition which the Nationwide project set out to explore . Harold Rosen's (1972) critique of Basil Bernstein's (1971)  Revista da Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação which were unavailable to me in 1979, shows that, in fact, the decodings of the groups in that project were, once one allows for the combined influence of these various factors, actually more structured by social position than I originally claimed.
Kim's reanalysis of my data, in which she carefully distinguishes (in ways I was unable to do) between readings of individual programme items and responses to the programme as a whole, and further distinguishes between the separate determining effects of class, ethnic, racial, gendered and generational identities, opens up, in my view a valuable way forward for further research in this field. The recent swing away from theories of social determination, towards the now widely held presumption of the 'undecidability' of these influences, has thus given rise to what may be among the most pernicious of the myths which have come to dominate our field. Certainly, as the work of Andrea Press (2003) and Lynn Thomas (2003) shows us, despite the claims of much post-structuralist theory, class is still very much with us, if in new and always changing forms.
Curiously, at the same time that the invocation of class forms of determination of decoding has increasingly been dismissed, in much of the recent work which explores the decoding of media materials in relation to `race` and ethnicity, the explanatory framework has sometimes tended towards a rather essentialist position.  (Hall 1994 gives them their meanings. However, we now know, from many studies of viewing practices, that people, on the whole do not actually consume whole texts on television (even if they still do in the cinema). Rather, in the age of the remote control device, they watch cannibalised schedules of their own construction, as they jump from one bit of programming to another -in which case, the structural relations within any one programme will be irrelevant, except in that particular sub-category of viewing in which people do sit down and watch the whole of their favourite programmes. In that case, we may need to abandon the presumption that in their work on cultivation theory, George Gerbner and his colleagues were misguided in focussing on overall patterns of programme `flow` and recurring imagery, rather than on individual programme texts. To that extent it may now prove useful to go back to forms of analysis that concern themselves with the accumulative meaning of a variety of `bits` of programming, rather than with the analysis of single texts (see Gerbner 1970; see also Ruddock op cit for a sympathetic recent reconsideration of this field of work) A further, fundamental problem about matters of interpretation is raised by Condit (1989) and Caragee (1990) who both argue that many audience scholars have exaggerated the extent of the polysemy of meanings of media texts and ignored the limits placed by texts themselves on the process of interpretation. Their argumentthat most texts have meanings which are perfectly clear to the majority of their 3 The Nationwide Audience work itself was premised on a detailed analysis of the programme shown to audience groups which was published as Everyday TV:Nationwide (Brunsdon and Morley 1979). See also Brunsdon (1989) on the continuing importance of textual analysis. A good instance of the value of combining textual analysis with audience work in this way was provided at the ARSRP conference by Darren Waldron, 2003 readers -who only differ in their evaluation of them, takes us back to another unresolved issue raised long ago by John Corner (1981). This concerns the need to disentangle the elements of comprehension and evaluation -which are intertwined in the Encoding/Decoding model. This takes into deep water, as Hall`s original (1973) argument was that, in any society characterised by significant cultural divisions, and thus a `systematically distorted` system of communication (Habermas 1970) the elements of comprehension and evaluation will inevitably be intertwined -with some kinds of interpretations dismissed by more powerful others as merely `misunderstandings`. The unresolved difficulty here is that the price of analytical clarity, if we attempt to too neatly divide matters of interpretation and evaluation, may be to disassemble the empirical conjunction of these issues and thus to evacuate from the model the very questions of cultural power which it was designed to address (cf Hall 1973).
Yet further important questions remain about the status of another of the model's central categories -that of the `oppositional reading`. It may well be that the original model, in its search for overtly political forms of opposition to the culturally dominant order, overvalues 'oppositional' rather than 'negotiated' decodings.
Moreover, it is by no means clear that an audience's refusal to even engage with a text sufficiently to make any decoding of it -on the grounds of its irrelevance to their concerns (which is the position of many people in the UK, in relation to much of contemporary news and current affairs programming) is less of an oppositional reading than one which is at least sufficiently engaged by a text to bother to `disagree` with it. As Dominique Pasquier (2003)  All of this is to suggest that there are serious problems still to be resolved in developing the original insights generated by the Encoding/Decoding modeI -but it is also to recognise that the model, despite its limitations, still has much to offer.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, as one much involved in the development of that model I am unpersuaded by the accounts of its demise offered by David Buckingham (1999) and Martin Barker (2003). Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst (1998)  importance in the maintenance of social order -and thus that media studies as a whole (and audience research in particular) was a rather inconsequential field, by comparison to serious matters of sociological enquiry (Abercrombie et al 1984). To denounce a field of research is one thing, but it is a rather curious intellectual manouvre to then move into it and announce the triumph of one's own version of it.
Moreover, Abercrombie and Longhurst's intellectual schema, in which one model of media-audience relations is seen to displace another, in a steady form of intellectual progress, displays a worrying form of 'stagism' in its argument. It may well be that, rather than look to a schema of this kind, in which we pass ever onwards, from one singular truth to another, we should see that each of these models captures -or highlights -a different dimension of media-audience relations. What we perhaps need here is a multi-dimensional model which incorporates insights along all of these dimensions. The Encoding/Decoding model may well have over-valued the explicitly political dimension of the media's relation to their audience -but to now announce that these relations should now be understood without effective relation to the political seems an odd conclusion to draw.

Models of Intellectual Progress
Intellectual progress is, of course, a fine and marvellous thing, for which we must all strive, but I sometimes wonder whether in these respects our field is in obviously, `know better' than that now. That way lies hubris 4 . I also worry when I read claims such as that made, implicitly at least, by Pertti Alasuutari, that we now see a `New Generation` of audience work, which will boldly go where none have been before (Alasuutari 1998). This simply seems to me to be a bad model of how intellectual progress operates -by the discarding of the old in favour of the new.
Alasuutari argues that what should distinguish the new approach to audiences is its focus on practices of viewing, rather than on individual moments of decoding or interpretation of texts. It is not that I think that attention to viewing practices is a bad idea in itself -indeed, here I would agree with Eric Maigret (2003) when he argues that we need to attend to more than the immediate 'R' moment in reception studies and consider the role of the media in everyday life (here Maigret's comments parallel the suggestions made in Janice Radway's (1988) argument). However, what is involved here, surely, is the addition of that broader perspective, which nonetheless maintains attention to specific moments of decoding, rather than the wholesale abandonment of the one approach in favour of the other. One can certainly argue that we need to add the analysis of the `horizontal` analysis of modes of participation in media consumption to the more familiar analysis of the `vertical` dimension of the transmission of ideologies and power, but this is surely not a case where the one truth replaces the other. It is rather a question of developing a bi-focal mode of vision, in so far as we need both close up/micro perspectives and long-sighted/ macro ones, for different purposes, and at different moments -but neither perspective reveals the whole truth.
It perhaps also remains for me to comment on Martin Barker's (2003) commentary on the problems with the Encoding/Decoding model. Hall's own comments on this, on pp 245-6 of Hall 1994). In this context, Gurevitch and Scannell rightly argue that the value of the model is to be judged not simply in its own terms, but with reference to the subsequent body of work which it has spawned and enabled, as a seminal rather than canonic text. Here, in effect, their argument echoes the terms of Harold Bloom's analysis of the great texts of the literary tradition, which are to be judged, for Bloom (1994), in terms of his theory of the 'anxiety of influence'. If Bloom seems an odd figure to whom to turn in this context, given his It may well be that losing your TV remote control down the back of the sofa, and then having to actually get up and walk across the room to change channels on your TV is an excellent practical demonstration of how that piece of technology has changed the experience of viewing in significant ways. However, we still need to disentangle that issue from the question of whether these technologies are `empowering` in the ways that liberal market ideologies present them as being. We should not mistake activity for power and we should recognise that the consumer's ability to choose options from within a pre-set menu is a very limited form of power, compared with that of the institutions that construct those menus.
We are endlessly being told that we need to `go beyond` old models of the media -and even that we should now abandon the very idea of an audience as a separable entity -as we are all, now, audiences almost all of the time, to one medium or another, in our increasingly `media saturated` environment, as Todd Gitlin (2001) puts it. Of course, this argument itself is perhaps not so new as is sometimes proposed. Some time back now, Armand Mattelart (1993)  The problem is that so much of the binary division on which this contrast of old and new media rests is badly overdrawn. There is, as yet, little sign of the media convergence (in either the realms of production or consumption) which has been so widely trumpeted. The division between analogue and digital media remains rather blurred -and the `Great Expectations` of consumer demand for enhanced interactive media services remain, as yet largely unfulfilled. In the UK at least, not only is there little evidence of effective demand for most of these services, but in one of the paradoxes of `technical rationality`, manufacturers are increasingly worried by the evidence that many people are not only unable to use many of the ever more complex functions on the technologies in their homes, but are, indeed, put off buying new machines for precisely this reason. Moreover, even the newest technologies can be recruited to the most traditional of purposes. There are websites for the conduct of arranged marriages, mobile phone systems designed to ring the `faithful` to let them know when it is time for prayer -or when their football team has scored -and the most popular website in the UK is one called `Friends Reunited`, offering the thoroughly nostalgic and old-fashioned pleasures of putting old school friends back in touch with each other.
The current claims for the specificity of the realm of the interactive media can thus be seen to be woefully exaggerated. I was talking, not long ago, to a young interactive media professional, who referred, in passing, to the contrast between her world and that of the old `slouchback` media .That very phrase clearly connotes a thoroughly negative image of the passive, morally bankrupt, corrupted audiences of 'couch potatoes' who are then presumed to have characterised that era -an assumption that we know to be false, from many years of audience research. The `netizens` of the world of the new media then automatically accrue a positive value, by contrast -as they are all presumed to be sitting forward (or, at least, upright) interacting significantly with the new media of their choice. Apart from anything else, the problem here is that, as we know, a lot of their activity is of a relatively trivial nature. But there is also a further irony here -notwithstanding all the hype about the interactive dimensions of these new media, at a conceptual level, most new media theory also returns us, ironically enough, to a place we started out from, long ago -to a technologically determinist version of hypodermic media effects. In this vision, www.compos.com.br/e-compos Agosto de 2006 -21/25 Revista da Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação these technologies are seen as inevitably transforming the both the world around us and our very subjectivities. It is as if the technologies themselves had the magical capacity to make us all active -or in some visions, even to make us all democratic -a strange form of media effects, indeed.
In conclusion, I can only say that it seems to me that, just like Brecht's Mr Keuner, we should be pleased that we have many important questions still left unanswered, which will provide meat for future debate in the field of media audience research Bibliography: