CULTURAL STUDIES

Television, Texts, and Audiences

By
INDAH EFTANASTARINI
NIM. S200130057
 News & Ideology

Television as
Text
Soap Opera

The Active
Audience

Television, Text, Television

Audiences Audiences and
Cultural Identity

The
Globalization of
Television

Global Electronic
Culture
 Presentational
Gulf War Style
news Putting
reality
together
TELEVISION
Agenda
AS TEXT:
setting NEWS AND
IDEOLOGY The
manipulative
model
The The
hegemonic pluralist
model model
 Soap
opera as
a genre

Telenovelas
TELEVISION AS
TEXT: SOAP OPERA
AS POPULAR
TELEVISION Women
and soap
opera
Soap opera
and the
public sphere
 Ideology
and
resistance Encoding-
Decoding

Watching
Dallas
The
Active
Audience

The
Hermeneutic
Nationwide theory
audience
 TELEVISION
AUDIENCES &
CULTURAL
IDENTITY

Audiences,
The Export Localizing
space, and
Meaning the Global
Identity

National
Space

Gendered
Space

Family Space
& Global
Space
 The Globalization
of Television

The political
economy of
global television

Synergy & Convergence &

Deregulation &
Television Television
Reregulation
Ownership Technology
 Media
imperialism

Regionalization

The global and

Global the local
Electronic
Culture Global Hyper reality
postmodern and TV
culture simulation

Consumer
culture

Creative
consumption
TELEVISION AS TEXT:
NEWS AND IDEOLOGY
 Putting reality together
Television news is not a reflection of
reality so much as the putting together
of reality (Schlesinger, 1978).
News is not an unmediated window-on-
the-world but a selected and constructed
representation constitutive of reality.
News selections:
1. News Covers
2. Constitution of the topic
 The manipulative model

In the manipulative model the

media are seen as a reflection of a
class-dominated society and
ideology is consciously introduced
by allocative controllers.
 The pluralist model

Audiences, aware of a range of

political views and presentational
styles within the media, choose to
buy or watch that which they
already agree with.
 The hegemonic model

Ideology in news is held to be not

the result of direct intervention by
owners or even a conscious
attempt at manipulation by
journalist, but an outcome of the
routine attitudes and working
practices of staff.
 Agenda setting

Media define what constitutes

news; that which is important and
that which is outside of the news
paradigm.
Gulf
War
 Presentational styles

Television news is constituted not

only by its choice of topics and
stories but by its verbal and visual
idioms or modems of address.
 TELEVISION AS TEXT:
SOAP OPERA AS POPULAR TELEVISION
 Open-ended
narrative
forms

The pivotal
themes of Soap Core
inter-personal opera Locations
relationships

The tension between

the conventions of
realism and
melodrama
 Telenovelas

Telenovelas is long-running serial

narratives produces for television,
with varying degrees of emphasis,
employ melodramatic narrative
modes.
 Women and soap opera

The central themes of soap opera

interpersonal relationships, marriages,
divorces, children, and so forth chime
with the traditionally domestic concerns
of women so that soap opera is a space
in which womens concern and points
of view are validated and from which
women take pleasure. (Ang, 1985;
Hobson, 1982; Geraghty, 1991)
 Soap opera and the public shpere
The emphasis on the family in soap
opera may lead to the general
exclusion of issues located in the
public sphere.
A potential ideological implication of
which is that personal and family
relations are deemed more important
than wider social and structural
issues.
THE ACTIVE AUDIENCE
 Encoding - decoding

Hall (1981) conceives of the process

of television encoding as an
articulation of the linked but distinct
moments of production, circulation,
distribution and reproduction, each
of which has its specific practices
which are necessary to the circuit
but which do not guarantee the
next moment.
 Hermenutic theory

Understanding is always from the

position and point of view of the
person who understands, involving
not merely reproduction of textual
meaning but the production of new
meaning by the readers.
 Ideology and Resistance

Audience activity is a requirement for

the engagement with and
reproduction of ideology.
The active audience paradigm is now
so well established and the evidence
sufficiently strong that we may
conclude with Silverstone (1994) that
audiences are always active.
 TELEVISION AUDIENCE
AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
 The export of meaning

Audiences use their own sense of

national and ethnic identity as a
position from which to decode
programmes.
 Localizing the global

Television may circulate discourse

on a global scale, its consumption
and use as a resource for the
construction of cultural identities
always take place is a local
context.
 Audiences, space, and identity

The manner in which broadcasting

provides ritual social events
wherein families or groups of
friends watch together and talk
before, during and after
programmes.
 The connection between such
rituals, the spaces in which they
are watched and the production of
cultural identities.
 NATIONAL SPACE

Trying to fix the meaning of space

represents an attempt to anchor it
to specific identities which are
claimed as ones own.
 GENDERED SPACE

Gender identity is a side of

potential conflict within the space
nominated as home and which is
commonly coded as feminine.
Drama and fiction feature more in
the preferences of women than
men, for whom sport and news are
more central.
 FAMILY SPACE AND GLOBAL SPACE

Limited domestic space means that

the introduction of a television set
into a household has considerable
impact. (Lull; 1991, 1997)
 Meyrowitz (1986) argue that
electronic media break the
traditional bonds between
geographic place & social identity
since mass media provide us with
increasing sources of identification
which are situated beyond the
immediacy of specific places.
THE GLOBALIZATION
OF TELEVISION
 The political economy of global television

Political economy is concerned with

power and the distribution of
economic and social resources.
Murdock and Golding (1977) have
argued that the ownership of
communications by private capital
is subject to a general process of
concentration via conglomeration.
 SYNERGY AND TELEVISION OWNERSHIP

Bringing together the various

elements of television and other
media at the levels of production
and distribution so that they
complement each other to produce
lower costs and higher profits.
 CONVERGENCE AND TELEVISION
TECHNOLOGY
Convergence refers to the
breakdown of boundaries between
technologies, which is paralleled
by organizational convergence, so
that synergy is sought through
mergers and take-overs, giving
rise to multi-media corporations.
 DEREGULATION AND REREGULATION

Deregulation and commercial

expansion have promoted
widespread discussion about the
emerging shape of the new tele
landscapes.
GLOBAL ELECTRONIC
CULTURE
 Media imperialism

The media are agent as vehicles

for corporate marketing,
manipulating audiences to deliver
them to advertisers.
 Regionalization

Markets are not necessarily

bounded by geographical space
but involve diaspora populations
distributed across the world.
 The global and the local

Television can be said to be global

in its circulation of similar
narrative forms around the world.
 Global postmodern culture

The postmodern figural is more

visual, draws from everyday life,
contest rationalist views of culture
and immerses the spectator in
his/her desire for the cultural
object.
 HYPERREALITY AND TV SIMULATIONS
For Baudrillard, hyperreality is
produced according to a model. It is not
a given but is artificially reproduced as
real so that hyper signifies more real
than real, a real retouched in a
hallucinatory resemblance with itself.
Television simulates real-life situations,
not so much to represent the world as
to execute its own.
 Consumer culture

The development of global

television as a fundamentally
commercial form has placed that
core activity of consumer culture,
virtual-based advertising, at the
forefront of its activities (Mattelart
and Mattelart, 1992).
 Creative consumption

Chambers (1987) and Hebdidge

(1988) have emphasized the
active and meaning-oriented
activity of consumers, who act as
bricoleurs selecting and arranging
elements of material commodities
and meaningful signs.
THANK YOU