"Interpreting Audiences" offers a comprehensive guide to important new developments in the study of media reception. Reviewing a wide range of work done by qualitative audience researchers over recent years, the author charts the emergence of a critical ethnographic perspective on everyday consumer practices. Shaun Moores considers the distinctive features of audience ethnography and outlines its various applications in communication and cultural analysis. Four main areas of inquiry are discussed: the power of media texts to determine the meanings made by their readers; the relationships between media genres and social patterns of taste; the day-to-day settings and dynamic social situations of reception; the cultural uses and interpretations in the communication technologies in the home. Identifying the issues at stake in each of these areas, the author 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 of new media technologies in domestic contexts - he advances a model of creativity and constraint in everyday life. This accessible text aims to provide an introduction to recent work on audiences for students of media, communication and cultural studies, and a helpful analytical overview for media teachers and researchers.
Shaun Moores is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh. He has published several articles and papers on audiences, and was one of the contributors to Culture and Power: A Media, Culture & Society Reader.
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
