ABSTRACT

This paper originates in a study of “readings” of the television serial Dallas by viewers of different cultural backgrounds. Theoretically and methodologically, it stands at the intersection of several converging research traditions. First, it reflects a renewed interest in the study of television as “text” — as programs rather than as medium. While concurring in Beverle Houston’s (1984) interest in the relationship among text, situation-of-contact, and viewer involvement, the study reported here relates to the tradition of research on real readers, rather than the “ideal readers” of literary theory or of content analysis. It also relates to the longstanding traditions of study of the uses of mass communication (reviewed in Blumler and Katz, 1974), current concern with empirical study of the ideological effects of the media (Hall, 1980; Gerbner, 1979; Morley, 1980; Laulan, 1980), and the belated rise of interest in the psychology of entertainment (Houston, 1985; Tannenbaum, 1980). A good example of the parallel development in the humanities is Radway (1983). On the whole, these developments — sometimes grudgingly — assign viewers and readers a more active and critical role than heretofore (Himmelweit, 1980; Neuman, 1982). Thus, Stuart Hall’s concept of “encoding and decoding” and Newcomb and Hirsch’s (1983) “cultural forum” both posit process of negotiation between television texts and their decoding — comprehension, interpretation, evaluation — by viewers anchored in social and cultural contexts different from those of the producers.