Interpreting Audiences

`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

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.

Part 1 Approaching audiences: what is an audience anyway?; ethnography as a method of cultural investigation; textual power and the determination of readings; patterns of preference and contexts of consumption; communication technologies in the home. Part 2 Ideology, subjectivity and decoding: screen theory and the CCCS critique; the encoding/decoding model; nationwide - text-reader relations; interpreting TV news and current affairs; reformulations for audience ethnography. Part 3 Taste, context and ethnographic practice: towards an anthropology of everyday consumption; gender, genre and reading context; the power relations of family viewing; on childern watching television; ethnography and the politics of research. Part 4 Media, technology and domestic life: understanding the technology; society relationship; early radio and the formation of a family audience; televisions, videos, computers and telephones; consuming technologies - the HICT project; satellite TV as cultural sign. Part 5 On cultural consumption: Bourdieu's sociology of taste; market segmentation in the commercial sphere; De Certeau and the tactics of popular resistance; style, meaning and youth subculture; creativities and constraints in everyday life.