Core post 3 — On research methods (mostly) and venn diagrams (belatedly)

The first time I read Star Trek: Rerun, Reread, Rewritten, I basically fell in love with audience studies because I loved the way that it centered the ways that people engage with a text rather than focusing on some ostensibly set meaning that could be uncovered through textual analysis. I still hold pretty firmly to that belief, but now it's deeply tempered by the feeling of selection bias that comes with so much of the field. Which is precisely why I loved Professor Seiter's article so much. Honestly, if my iPad didn't allow me to highlight in multiple colors the thing would be an undecipherable mass because it's so marked up with references to paucities that have bothered me for a lot of my time reading media studies pieces. This part on page 467, however, stood out to me most: "The encoding-decoding model seems to work better for news and nonfiction programmes than it does for entertainment programmes, where it is much more difficult to identify a single message, or even a set of propositions with which audience members could agree or disagree."

First, it stands out because while we've been talking about the model I've been primarily thinking about entertainment and I hadn't applied it to nonfiction programming — where the model feels like it fits much more closely. In particular, I’m thinking about it in relation to the increasing ability for people to pursue news media that fit their current worldview. Time and again that’s felt like it made the model of encoding, decoding, and dominant/negotiated/oppositional reading break down because people encounter less content that is designed for masses* the same way compared to the past. But thinking about this in terms of news media helps make sense in some ways of bits of news that people do encounter from sources that would challenge their views. Regardless, it’s interesting to think about the differences in how people view news media (and advertising) and entertainment.

Second, I think the way it interacts with the skew of quantitative analysis towards (easily) quantifiable questions, regardless of their actual impact, is interesting because it hints that while we would love to understand the ways that people engage with meaning, it’s not something that we can easily understand quantitatively because there are so many variables involved — and yet that doesn’t make the ways people engage with meaning-making any less important. To me, that’s the heart of the article: how do we find ways to get at answers to questions that are important but difficult to answer. I’m not sure at the end of the article that I have a clearer sense of how to do that, but I do appreciate being able to see more ways that it’s difficult to do and more ways that attempts to do it are flawed (albeit sometimes still useful).

~ Charlie

* I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks, as it seems like content is now produced for more targeted audiences on many platforms, and that in some ways blockbuster movies are some of the only pieces of content that are designed “for everyone” in the US right now — and that superhero and science fiction movies are the current apex of that.

Oh! But actually, I'm not quite done yet. The other quote that has stuck with me this week is from Andrejevic's conclusion: "[T]he point of exploring the ways in which the interactivity of viewers doubles as a form of labor is to point out that, in the interactive era, the binary opposition between complicity passivity and subversive participation needs to be revisited an revised." I find this interesting and valuable because it recognizes that in this modern capitalist moment fan labor can be both empowering and simultaneously feed the very structures that disempower fans in the first place. I note this because I think it's important to hold both sides as true rather than argue that one's truth invalidates the other. It recalls for me a project that my friend Rachel runs a project called "vent diagrams," which uses venn diagrams to highlight the multiple, oftentimes contradictory, truths that we hold. The project started following the 2016 election with things like, "We've seen this before / We've never seen this before," "The system is fixed / The system is broken," and "Resist with RAGE / Resist with Love." In this case, the ven(n/t) diagram is something like, "participation empowers us as viewers" and "participation empowers the system that confines us" — it's not that only one is true, it's that both sides are true and rather than arguing their opposition it's probably more useful to argue about the new place that gets us to.