Agency and the Media User: The construction/realization of the active audience
CarrieLynn Reinhard, MA Comparative Studies 711 March, 2007
2 I had a realization the other day when talking to an undergraduate interesting in going for a major in my department, Communication. He was concerned because all the communication classes he had had to that date were about persuasion -- how to get people to do what you want them to do -- whether in the area of marketing, public relations, or even health or political communication. He was concerned that these types of jobs and goals were all that a communication major had to offer. I tried to reassure him that this was not the case, that one could also study communication for the sake of empowering the receiver rather than the sender. His response: What is empowerment? This exchange with the student helped me to see the disparities that exist in communication scholarship and studies. There are three perspectives on what type of communicating you should be studying, all founded on the end-result you desire from that communicating. First, there is the perspective of persuasion, to help the sender of the message to align the receiver with his intentions. Second is the perspective of empowerment, to help the receiver actively choose how to receive the message, even to the point of resisting. Then there is the perspective of dialogue, to simultaneously or at least concurrently help the sender and the receiver to comprehend one another, even if absolute consensus does not occur. Now, as a survey of the current field of communication scholarship -- especially in the United States -those of the Persuasion camp have the most members, followed by the Empowerment camp, and both far outnumber those of the Dialogue camp. One can easily surmise that this is due to the capitalist nature of our society, where the goal is for the sender to sell and the receiver to buy. Those who then study Persuasion are well-encouraged in their pursuits, and those who study Empowerment are in active resistance against such oppression; but, as they are less encouraged, they are less in numbers. And without a solid base of Empowerment, Dialogue cannot exist -- if one does not see the receiver as having power in communicating, then how can one envision the receiver in dialogue with the sender? If dialogue is the sought for goal in communicating, then understanding empowerment
3 -- what it is, how it can be achieved -- is a necessary step. The intention of this essay is to follow the trajectory of how empowerment, from the stance of human agency, has been constructed and realized as a characteristic of mass media and communication use and engagement, with an outlook for what still needs to be done in terms of theory and research. Taste of history In looking into how the concept of agency has been discussed and debated in Western philosophy, it quickly became apparent that providing a full accounting of the history and genealogy of the concept would require a book on its own. Indeed, agency has been a fundamental concern of philosophers, indeed of all humans, as one of the core concerns of what it means "to be". Not only does it have an extensive chronological consideration, it has also been discussed under a variety of labels: human agency, freewill, personal autonomy, responsibility, self-efficacy, free thought, human rights -- and that's only in the Western hemisphere. The trajectory covers René Descartes' cogito ergo sum and Thomas Hobbes' treatise on the citizen's relation to the State; both Arthur Schopenhauer's will and Immaneul Kant's rationalism; Karl Marx's natural man and Sigmund Freud's Id. From these discussions current concepts of human rights, social justice, theories of citizenship and morality, rationalism and humanism have all flourished. The conceptualization this essay will be focusing on is the term "agency." More specifically, the definition I most adhere to is the concern over a human's ability to choose to engage in some activity, be it internal (thoughts, feelings, decisions) or external (observable behavior), and in this activity's having some level of impact on the world around the human, such as to other humans or to natural or man-made denizens and environments. The concern is not over how these activities come into being -- although many have been largely concerned with this question, thus the polarity between freewill and determinism. When I speak of agency here, I am concerned with the human being's ability to be active in that she is able to in some
4 way determine her own path; hence, empowerment, as referenced above, is the goal of aiding and enriching this activeness. I take my conception from Anthony Giddens' work on agency and structure, as I take my philosophical stance on this debate from his structuration theory, which will be discussed at length below. Giddens focuses his definition not on motivations, intentions or reasons, all of which can only ever be inferred or at best psychoanalyzed, but at the ability of the person given the circumstances in which s/he acts. "Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place... Agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently. Whatever happened would not have happened if that individual had not intervened." (1984, p. 9).
Giddens' approach to agency has been adopted by media studies scholars, especially those concerned with issues of socialization and the internalization of structural norms, allowing researchers to combine an individual's active use of a media with the possible effects of the media (Rosengren, 1994a, b; Rubin, 2002). However, in order to understand how the marriage of structure and agency currently informs media studies, it is first important to understand the trajectories that comprised mass media studies for the past century. Trajectories in mass media studies I am limiting my investigation to mass media studies because scholarship concerning any aspect of human communication, from rhetoric to linguistics, is a) beyond the capabilities of this essay and b) beyond the purview of my interests. In looking at this specific type of scholarship, I draw upon two different yet complimentary tracks of thought: social scientific and critical/cultural. In Germany, the Frankfurt School members, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Hornheimer, voiced their concerns over the mass distribution of culture in the 1930s. Following Marx's political economic models of criticism, they analyzed the "culture industries", believing this mass culture to be detrimental to the citizen's engagement with their culture and nation as
5 well as reproducing the oppressive ideology of capitalism, socializing people to be workers/consumers (Kellner, 1995). It was assumed that the mass media reinforce and foster the alienation and passivity that makes capitalism possible.1 In the United States, social scientists, while not directly reflecting Marxist concerns, followed the philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Mass media scholarship began largely over the concerns of radio as it "infiltrated" the households and everyday lives of the citizens during the early 1900s. The radio listener was seen as a passive receptacle for information. Advertisers wanted to know who they were reaching and how effective the radio was in selling their products, while researchers were concerned about the assumed passivity listening to the radio fostered. This two-fold concern spread into other mass mediums -- newspaper, magazines, cinema, television -- and continues today with the newer media of digital games, the internet, and mobile devices like cellular phones. As members of the Persuasion camp, marketing and media effects have a circular relationship, feeding into each other -- marketing wants to know what effects the media have, and media effects study the impact of advertising. However, their simplistic conception of the audience (as a collective) and the media user (as an individual) as an always passive receiver has largely been abandoned. The idea of a "hypodermic needle" approach to media consumption began to dissolve in the mid-1900s, even as propaganda research amplified under post-WWII and early Cold War conditions. The realization that the audience may not all be affected the same way, and that the user may actively respond to the messages she receives, began as Lazenfeld and colleagues investigated the uses people have for the media.2 This kernel germinated during the 1950s and 1
Sonia Livingstone (2003) presented an interesting analysis by tracing the active audience to those who watched Shakespeare's play in the 16th century -- an audience that was notoriously rowdy, opinionated and interactive. Over time, the wealthy class appropriated theatre-going and made being passive as the only respectful mode of reception, meaning only the "vulgar" working class engaged in active reception. 2
In the 1940s and 1950s, Paul Lazenfeld and his student, Elihu Katz, are often credited as those who began to appreciate what may influence the audience on what media they used and how they used it. However, it was in the 1930's that Paul Cressey began to look at the agency of the individual in using radio programs (Staiger, 2005). In Europe, this trajectory was followed by Denis McQuail, Jay Blumler, and Karl Erik Rosengren in the 1960s and 1970s.
6 1960s, in the United States and in Europe, to challenge American media effects research with what would become known as "uses and gratifications" (Lull, 1995; Ruggiero, 2000). Considered as a paradigmatic approach to mass media studies, uses and gratifications (UG) conceives of the media user has having reasons for choosing to use the media and texts she does; thus, the researchers' main assumption from the beginning was that media use was active and goal-oriented (McQuail, Blumler & Brown, 1972/2000; Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974/1995). These reasons are assumed to be gratifications sought, that the user has some desire they believe or expect the medium or text will satisfy, and thus they use the media or text to gratify that desire. This basic approach has seen some theoretical modification since it became established in the 1970s, but to a large extent the empirical trajectory has remained unchanged. Whether using qualitative or quantitative methodologies, media users are asked to describe their motivations for the uses they make of a particular medium or a particular type of content, and then these uses are arrayed in a typology of reasons (Palmgreen, 1984; Ruggiero, 2000; Rubin, 2002). Some attempts have been made to meta-classify the typologies and create a universal list of gratifications sought/obtained. While there does appear to be some stability in the types of reasons, there has been no theoretical work that enables the UG researcher to predict or generalize with any statistical power these reasons to actual, everyday media engagements. This lack of theoretical and statistical power is only one criticism that has been leveled against UG research (Ruggiero, 2000; Barker, 2006). Others have complained that it goes too far in individualizing media engagement and does not take into account social and historical contextual elements that may be influencing this choice. Actually, that is not entirely true -- UG researchers have created models that show how external and internal factors impact media choice (Katz et al, 1974/1995; Palmgreen, 1984). I would argue what they do not adequately allow is true agency. UG researchers come from American psychological or sociological domains, which focus on confluences of factors and variables in order to construct a human
7 being's activity as a mathematical model to thus enable statistical prediction. Hence in UG studies the reliance on general, aggregate media use rather than specific, situated media use, as well as the creation of typologies to enable classification into categories. This construction of human agency is to serve the Persuasion camp -- marketers can focus on people who have their social companionship needs gratified while political communication scholars can focus on those who use the internet for surveillance needs. 3 While UG researchers acknowledge that humans do have agency when it comes to making media choices, they are constructing these choices as general tendencies, based upon psychological and sociological factors, and not actual activities as the person copes with life. They are not realizing everyday, actual human agency. Also, UG researchers are primarily concerned with the activity surrounding selection of media or text. This was how they defined use: selection for the purpose of gratification. However, this is not the only definition of use, nor is it the only type of activity seen when engaging with media texts. Selection is the activity that occurs before media engagement; it is the impetus for engagement. Reception is the activity that occurs during media engagement; it is the way in which the receiver interprets the communicated message. UG has not yet addressed this aspect of engagement, outside of the assumption that the individual must have interpreted the message in such a way as to satisfy their need. Analyzing reception becomes the purview of the second trajectory of research from the critical/cultural field, which will be outlined following this passage. However, what neither of these trajectories really explores is the third aspect of engagement. Incorporation is the activity that occurs after media engagement; it is the way in which the receiver actively employs what is learned or received from the message in their everyday life. Now, both reflect on incorporation as the goal they 3
Indeed, UG research has been termed by some a subtradition of media effects research, and its adoption by media industries in order to target audiences makes it suspect to many in the Empowerment camp (Ruggiero, 2000). However, UG researchers laud and seek this merging, in order to promote limited and conditional effects rather than direct, overall effects (Rubin, 2002).
8 hope to learn about from the research, but few have directly addressed this third aspect, and fewer still have addressed all aspects systematically in the course of one study.4 Somewhat in answer to the epistemological critiques leveled against the social sciences approach, in 1973 Stuart Hall, of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, wrote Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. The result of this essay was another approach to human agency and media use that ignited in cultural studies a new way of studying how humans engage with culture in their everyday lives. Indeed, those today who consider themselves "audience reception" scholars cite Hall's encoding/decoding model (E/D) as the foundation for their work, although the actual work has undergone some modifications. In taking on the issue of dominant ideology operating through the mass media, Hall outlined that humans have the ability to actively resist the ideology encoded in the media's message that they subsequently decode. When receiving a media text, that because it is part of a capitalist industry has encoded in it the ideology of the dominant culture, a media user can decide to adopt the meanings of the text without resistance; however, this is not a "given" as the receiver may just as likely negotiate this dominant meaning to better fit their own lives, or they may reject this preferred reading and read it in a completely oppositional manner. The BCCCS saw the first generation of researchers to try to empirically provide evidence for these potential decoding positions with David Morley's work on the project around the BBC program Nationwide in 1980 and Dick Hebdige's analysis of the resistance styles of musical subcultures. Others followed, such as Janice Radway and Ien Ang, who conducted audience ethnographies combined with textual analyses. They sought the dominant encoded meanings to compare to the readings provided by the users they studied. As this line of analysis continued through the 1980s into the 1990s, it became apparent to the researchers that the formation of the relationship between encoding and decoding was too basic for proper 4
Since 1995, Steele and Brown's work in constructing the Media Practice Model through their studies of teenagers' bedrooms is one of the few studies to analyze reasons for selection, aspects of interpretation, and methods in which the media has been incorporated into the user's life.
9 application to the reality of the everyday. They argued against the rather individualistic approach that although it accounted for dominant ideology in the encoding process did not account for the same during the decoding process. E/D researchers began to focus on the sociohistorical contexts in which decoding occurred, sometimes called "interpretive communities", to investigate different social categories in their reception of the same text and make arguments for how the impact of being in such and such category influenced decoding (Alasuutari, 1999). However, again, agency is lost. As with UG research, human beings were once more classified into categories. This time, instead of being classified on their general desires, they were classified on their social positions, a categorization they may have even less ability to decide for themselves. While Hall's intention was to show in what ways the human being can actively engage with the dominant structures that surround her, by focusing on contexualizations for understanding decoding, the principles of structuralism have reappeared. Human agency is again subject to the structure, even if it is a sub-structure reacting to a larger, overriding dominant structure5. Now, this does not mean that human agency is completely divorced of structure. Anthony Giddens, also in the 1970s, wrote of the symbiotic relationship between agency and structure when he proposed his structuration theory. Writ briefly, this theory postulates that agency is responsible for producing and reproducing the rules and regulations that manifest in structures. While the individual may internalize the rules or norms of the structure, it is only through the activities of the individual that the structure will continue. By that logic, if enough individuals decide to no longer act upon such rules, the structure, in danger of collapsing, would have to adjust. We find similar conceptions of the relationship between the individual and 5
As Lawrence Grossberg pointed out, cultural studies are sometimes called anti-humanistic not because the field denies real people, but because "it does place them in equally real and overdetermined historical realities. What they are, as individuals and human beings, is thus not intrinsic to them." (1989, p. 417). This line of research can be seen as stemming from Morley's ethnography reporting on reception of the Nationwide BBC program (Morley & Brunsdon, 1980/1999) -- although in more recent writings, he has started to move from this contextual position (Morley, 2006).
10 society in Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus.6 However, Bourdieu is not so giving in allowing the individual to have agency when all societal factors are accounted for; Giddens does. Media studies and audience reception researchers have adopted Giddens and Bourdieu's theories, but largely to the extent of explaining the need to understand the context in which media choice and engagement occur. At the turn of the millennium, the focus on the categories reigned supreme. Agency in the machine The "new" media have been routinely made to be the site of much hope, danger, and confusion. There is one thing all agree on -- the new media offers and requires a much more active mode of engagement than ever possible with "traditional" media. It is this construction/realization of agency that appears at the centre of much concern and celebration. Some worry that their children will be able to learn the A to Zs of sex, racism, or any other taboo topic. Some celebrate the ability for people across the globe to engage in the same criticism of some social injustice. Agency is promoted as helpful to promote democracy or lambasted as detrimental for physical social engagement and community building. To expand the debate, not only does the "new" media foster agency, but because of it's inclusion in the media environment, all forms of media are being affected. Over the past 30 years in modern capitalist societies, the choices individuals have had in terms of media, channels and content have exploded. Whereas in the 1960s, the average US citizen living in New York City may have been able to choose from four broadcast networks, a dozen magazines, two newspapers, and a dozen radio stations, that same individual today has at least six broadcast networks, hundreds of digital cable networks, hundreds of magazines, newspapers from around the world, dozens of radio stations, hundreds of digital games (both video and computer), and the seemingly infinite cyberscape of the internet. It is required of the 6
Bourdieu theorized habitus as a product of history that produces an individual in accordance with the scheme of a particular sociohistorical field, thereby ensuring the reproduction of history and thus society without the individual being consciously aware of this role she has been given. Although there is an infinite array of possible thoughts, these possibilities are dictated by the confines of the sociohistorical field from whence they originate (Bourdieu, 1980/2002). Little is left for agency once the influence of this field is accounted for (Rosengren, 1994b).
11 average US citizen (those who can afford access to this diversity) to be far more active in regards to their media choices than during the time when UG researchers and Hall began their work. Where perhaps concerns over human agency in relation to media use and engagement could before have been the purview of researchers concerned with Marxist struggles, the fact is that active audiences and users are now or will shortly become the dominant form of life (Livingstone, 2003, 2004). With this as the current state of affairs, the question remains how to conceptualize agency. I would consider Gidden's structuration theory to be the most likely and useful approach as we move into understanding the current state of affairs. The relationship between structure and agency, as he outlined it, allows for a more circular, nonlinear causal relationship, whereby changes in the one will impact the other. If we look back over that time span of 30 years, we can see this symbiosis occurring. The structure, here the capitalist media industry, began to introduce new channels and technology that offered more types of media use and engagement. However, because the amount of total time possible to spend with such media cannot likewise increase for the majority of people, that means the media user had to begin to make more active choices in what media would be used when and where. To the industry's viewpoint, this means their potential audience was fragmenting -- by giving people more things to choose from, the industry had simultaneously reduced the number of people who were likely to be consuming one specific thing at any given time. The structure modified the agency, but then the agency modified the structure as the industry adjusted to this fragmentation and expanded their offerings to take advantage of it. Buzzwords like fragmentation and niche-broadcasting have become the way of life for the industry. The more the industry offered, the more the media user became active, and the more the industry saw them as fragmented and thus became determined to address them as such, thereby locking them into this position as being fragmented. From cable to the internet, this
12 spiraling pattern has not varied, as we now see the industry securing aspects of the internet to further maintain this conception of the active, fragmented audience. Gidden's theory thus seems apropos to theorizing this current state of affairs. The question remains, how to empirically address it? Future empirical directions UG researchers have approached the current state of affairs in the same ways that they approached the old one: ask people to describe their general reasons for using some media or text and then create typographies based on those reasons -- to largely find similar patterns in their reasonings between then and now (Ruggiero, 2000). E/D researchers continue to expound the need to understand active reception in context, with studies looking at the impact of globalization and the resistance of local media users to foreign media texts. In the end, both of these trajectories continue to construct human agency in ways they did in the past. Another trajectory has recently been added from psychology that would reduce agency to physiological responses to sensory cues inherent to specific media and their texts. Here again, agency is not directly studied, but is instead inferred as being the result of neurological responses. What all three trajectories fail to do is something Giddens himself admonished researchers for: the failure to fully understand the human as an interpretive animal7. UG and E/D presume to do such, but they then fall back upon their respective social sciences or critical/cultural perspectives to the same culprit of essentialism (Elliot, 1974/2000; Livingstone, 1994; Morley, 2006). UG falls back to demographics, personality characteristics, and now physiological temperament, whereas E/D relies on social positions, in order to explain their findings. With their respective units of analysis being the individual and the social category, they are less focusing on the creative tactics used to cope with everyday life, whether it be in 7
This conceptualization first appears in Giddens' 1976 work, New rules of sociological method: a positive critique of interpretive sociologies, when he outlined what a new program of interpretive sociology should entail. Giddens repeatedly called for the need to conceptualize the human being as a "purposive agent" who is capable, if allowed, to discuss the constraints their agency faces, as well as their intentions, even if they may not be able to discuss the underlying drives or motives for their actions without relating it to a specific instance (1979/2002, 1984).
13 resistance to domination, or in ignoring the need to resist and just "going with the flow" -- both of which would be examples of agency (Fiske, 1989/2003, 1992; Grossberg, 1989; Lull, 1995). UG researchers assume agency, but want it to be statistical and thus generalizable and universal; oftentimes the research provides a media user with a list of predigested reasons, written presumably in the "user's" language, to which the user is asked to reply favorably or unfavorably. Not only is their agency divorced from everyday circumstances by asking to respond to a general pattern, but it is also divorced from their actual interpretation of their engaging with their own experiences. Now, there have been more qualitative studies that have allowed users to interpret their experiences in their own words, but they again fall into a more general pattern of usage, which is not how we experience our lives. On the other hand, E/D researchers stick largely to the qualitative methodology, asking people to describe their experiences to specific media or texts in their own words. As such research wants to understand how the "common man" struggles with the media and his life, this empirical approach is mandated. The concern lies with the researchers' continual analysis of individuals as members, sometimes unwillingly or unwittingly8, of some social categorization without also getting the individual's interpretation of their social position on this media engagement. They thus go a step further than their social scientist counterparts by recognizing the role of power and structure in the process of media use and engagement, but they have not taken the additional step to understand how the media user thus sees herself as an agent in relation to a structure (Livingstone, 1994). Brenda Dervin's work with the Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) offers a solution to this theoretical and empirical quandary of wanting to understand agency but not adequately
8
Reliance on pre-existing social categories, to which individuals belong, becomes further complicated when considering, in a post-modern society, the extent to which a social category, or group membership, may be emergent from the individuals rather containers into which people are placed (Bauman, 1992/2002; Berger, 2003). Only very recently have E/D researchers begun to focus on performative identities, constructed by the agent, rather than social identities, imposed on them by the structure (Morley, 2006).
14 addressing it9. SMM is founded on Richard Carter's idea that human beings are traveling through life, confronting and negotiating situations that contain "gaps" or problems with whatever tools are at their disposal. While in confronting some situations the person may fall back on habitual patterns, or what we as researchers would expect them to do based on some fixed identity (such as demographics or social category, depending on your epistemological perspective), in other situations they may confront the gap in ways completely unique and original -- all within the purview of what structure or power allows. SMM then mandates for the researcher to not seek out the general pattern of behavior, because most likely you will only find these habitual patterns that disguise agency. Instead, one must focus on specific situated gapfacings -- the context of the gap-facing and the process of the gap-facing. In addition, one is to rely on the actual words of the individual and not presuppose what they would say by giving them a series of predigested items, thereby allowing for the agent's experience to be known and revealed in their own words. Also, not only are you to ask them about how they negotiated the gap, but it is likewise mandated to get their interpretations as to what caused the gap, which includes asking about power. Dervin's SMM has been applied to UG studies, showing the complexity that exists among the reasons given for use when the individual is allowed to expand upon their reasons rather than just given one, and if the individual is allowed to situate their reasons rather than talk in the aggregate.10 The most important aspect is that this approach it takes the strengths of both UG and E/D and corrects their weakness by including a stronger interpretive stance, thus allowing for the double hermeunetic called for by Giddens. SMM is only beginning to make its force felt in mass media studies, having already established itself in library and information 9
A collection of Dervin's work in 2003 outlines the fundamentals on the theory and methodology, and examples of her studies, as well as studies using her approach, can be found at http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sensemaking/default.html. 10
A qualitative study, Dervin and Song (2005) looked at uses and gratifications of different media sources, channels and contents, allowing people to name more than one gratification as they probed deeper into the user's interpretations of the media engagement. A quantitative study, Reinhard and Dervin (2007) looked at three different types of game-playing situations and asked individuals to indicate the extent to which previously found gratification classifications applied to those situations.
15 studies, but it has a potential for showing human agency as it is, rather than constructing it as it is thought to be. Concluding thoughts In looking back to my conversation with my student, I should have spoken with him about his engagement with the media he chooses, the texts he interprets, and the ways in which he has incorporated these cultural products into his daily life. We could have chatted about specific times when something in the media helped him connect to another person, gave him an idea for solving a problem he had with a loved one, or gave him an idea for a new dance move. All would be instances of his agency shining through in how he engaged with and used the media, and would have allowed me to talk about empowerment not as some praxis term but as an embodied concept of his everyday life. Does that mean his agency is spontaneous to him, that it is generated from his freewill and thus untouched by any other power? Or, conversely, that his choice was completely predetermined by his circumstances, his gender, his family's class, or even the fact that he lives in this era of capitalism versus another? Neither of these questions, with their presupposed answers, appears to adequately answer the reality of my student. If I assume freewill, then I must assume all individuals are different, and this can only lead to such specificity that anarchy appears immanent. If I assume determinism, then we fall into the dangers that predictive social science or, worse yet, neuropsychology appear headed. Both seem rather hopeless avenues of pursuit. If instead I assume an interaction between the individual and the society, between the agency and the structure as Giddens saw it, then I can see hope. It is from that position that I can talk to my student about what he does and what he thinks of what he does. I can get at both the hows and the whys from his position, thereby understanding agency as he understands it. Because in the end, it is his concept of agency that matters the most -- he is the one deciding and acting. If he sees himself as doing both under freewill, under determinism, or under some combination thereof, then he will decide and act
16 accordingly. He has the agency to consider his agency, and it is in this consideration that his agency is expressed. As we are becoming entrenched in a media environment that calls upon each media user to make decisions and engage in activities in order to navigate this environment, and as so much is riding upon these decisions and activities (from profit to democracy), then it behooves us to understand this individual and the agency s/he feels empowered with.
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