Interpreting Audiences
The Ethnography of Media Consumption
- Shaun Moores - University of Sunderland, UK
The author considers the distinctive features of audience ethnography and outlines its 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 relationship between media genres and the social patterns of taste; the day-to-day settings and dynamic social situations of reception; and the cultural uses and interpretations of communication technologies in the home. Assessing the theories of Bourdieu, De Certeau and others, as well as drawing on his own investigations of new media technologies in domestic contexts, Moores advances a model of creativity and constraint in everyday life.
`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
