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Recapturing the audience: An encoding/decoding analysis of the social uses of Channel One
Abstract
This study analyzes the ideological effects of Channel One, the commercial television news program currently being implemented in the nation's public school systems, from a cultural studies perspective. These effects are traced primarily through an audience study of 627 high school students and 39 teachers from public schools in a small city in Ohio. The qualitative research design involves a modified application of the "encoding/decoding" model for studying media effects, developed by Stuart Hall and operationalized by David Morley. Specifically, I apply the encoding/decoding model to analysis of the social uses of Channel One, rather than to the content of Channel One. In doing so, I expand the model to integrate political economic determination of the encoding/decoding process, by treating this as a distinct "level of preference" to be explored within a qualitative research design. The findings of the audience study are examined against the backdrop of the overall cultural context within which Channel One has emerged. I argue that Channel One is an exemplary "post-Fordist" cultural form that arose in response to both a crisis in capital accumulation and a crisis in symbolic overaccumulation in contemporary U.S. culture. Its fundamental role amidst these crises is to reassert control over an increasingly fragmenting semiotic landscape, and thereby to recapture an increasingly fragmenting media audience. The audience study finds that Channel One is profoundly hegemonic in its attempt to police and control audience interpretations of its social use as a media form and as an 'official' educational tool.
Subject Area
Mass media|Communication|Educational sociology
Recommended Citation
Easter, David Paul, "Recapturing the audience: An encoding/decoding analysis of the social uses of Channel One" (1996). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9638952.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9638952