You are here

Interpreting Audiences
Share

Interpreting Audiences
The Ethnography of Media Consumption


January 1994 | 208 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Reviewing a wide range of work done by qualitative audience researchers over recent years, Interpreting Audiences charts the emergence of a critical ethnographic perspective on everyday consumer practice. This outstanding volume is separated into four parts: the debates about media literature's power to determine the meanings made by their readers, an examination of the relationships between media genres and social patterns of taste, day-to-day settings and dynamic social situations of reception, and cultural uses and interpretations of communication technologies in the home. Identifying the issues at stake in each of these areas, Shaun Moores then relates advances in audience research to a broader set of questions about the practices and politics of cultural consumption. Assessing the theories of Bourdieu, de Certeau, and others--and drawing on his own investigations--he advances a model of creativity and constraint in everyday life. This accessible text will be an invaluable introduction to the recent work on audiences for students in media, communication, and cultural studies, and a helpful analytical overview for media scholars and researchers.

 
Approaching Audiences
 
Ideology, Subjectivity and Decoding
 
Taste, Context and Ethnographic Practice
 
Media, Technology and Domestic Life
 
On Cultural Consumption

`Moores has provided a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to the analyses of media reception which have some independence from the strategies of the industry' - Screen

`A timely literature review which will interest students and researchers within media and cultural studies. It is encouraging that, unlike many other cultural theorists, Moores does believe that the ideological power, textual production and audience interpretations of media texts should remain on the agenda, not to be neglected entirely in favour of power dynamics in the domestic setting, preferences of genre or gendered frictions over "who controls the remote control"' - Sociology

`This is an extremely helpful overview of research in the last 15 years into mass media audiences...The concluding chapter looks at cultural consumption more generally and assesses the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This is a short text but it brings together a range of diverse studies and issues which are of wider interest than in media studies alone' - Network

`It is to be welcomed for its excellent review of the now considerable body of research within cultural studies, feminist and ethnographic perspectives. It is clear, precise and eminently usable as an undergraduate or postgraduate text' - Irish Communications Review