Core Post #3

I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s readings. Some of these ideas and concepts are familiar to me and others were new, or at least clarified concepts I had not thoroughly understood in previous seminars. My research explores, as Seiter explains, “how specific audiences make meanings in their engagement with media in the context of the everyday life, an emphasis on audience activity rather than passivity, and an interest in why the media are pleasurable” (Seiter, p. 462). And therefore I find it extremely important to incorporate qualitative research methods in television studies. Qualitative methods allow for subtext, interpretation, and agency in a way the quantitative research does not. This is why Hall’s encoding/ decoding is a pivotal text for television research and audience studies. I have always felt the need to push back against Horkhiemer and Adorno because they do not account for audience agency.  Steiter situates this historically explaining how, “mass communications audience researchers were wedded to methodologies that restricted them to questions answerable through quantitative methods. In particular, there had been too much emphasis on observable behaviors, rather than structures of meaning.” (Steiter, p. 463). While the other readings engage with cultural hierarchies of entertainment, I believe there is also methodological hierarchies. In my experience in Communication, those who primarily do quantitative work wield a sense of superiority that sometimes comes with the hard sciences. As thought the numbers dictate the answers. I believe in a mixed methods approach, but certainly believe, when considering audiences, the decoding process is far more nuanced and complex than what can be expressed through a survey or likert scale.  

I appreciate Seiter’s succinct explanation of “Bourdieu’s empirical research and this theories of the role of aesthetic distinctions in the construction of social hierarchies have resonated with questions about television audiences, the importance of the domestic sphere as a site for the inculcation of tastes and a place of aesthetic consumption, and the accentuated awareness of the variability of interpretations of aesthetic texts” (Seiter, p. 470). It seems that TV is always under some level of scrutiny for hierarchical status. Film always seems to take artistic precedence. I am interested in further questioning this notion of what culture counts and who decides what is high art or simply entertainment. Why is accessibility or audience enjoyment a reason for considering something as mass or midcult rather that high culture? Wouldn’t art that inspires more creativity, such as the fan engagement described by Jenkins, be a quality of the finest art? Art that is the catalyst for creation and imagination?

However, even within television studies there appears to be culture hierarchies. Jenkins quotes Hunter (1977) “ ‘If there were no fandom, the aired episodes would stand as they are, and they would be just old reruns of some old series with no more meaning than old reruns of I Love Lucy’ (Hunter, 1977, p. 77). The one text shatters and becomes many texts as it is fit into the lives of the people who use it, each in her or his own way, each for her or his own purposes” (Jenkins, p. 492). I feel the need to push back against this statement, because from ages to 10-13, I created my own I Love Lucy fanfiction. I have journals of mock episodes scripts, using the characters and plot tropes, but with my own storylines and dialogue. Furthermore, I consider myself in the I Love Lucy fandom and know several others who also collect the memorabilia and discuss episodes in great detail. It is certainly not as widespread at the Star Trek fandom, but the phenomenon still exists and there are audience members engaging and poaching from I Love Lucy in a very similar way. Fan hierarchies and the accumulation of different kinds of cultural capital would be an interesting topic to study. I am thinking about audience and fan behavior at Comic Con as an example. Which panels, which booths, hold the most value and why? To tie this in to the beginning of my post, I believe qualitative methods, such as ethnography, interviews, or focus groups, would be the most effective for gathering this kind of data and insight.