ABSTRACT
The history of audience studies during the post-war period can be seen as a series of oscillations between perspectives which have stressed the power of the text over its audiences and perspectives which have stressed the barriers “protecting” the audience from the potential effects of the message. One point of interest here is that these “television zombies” are always other people. Few people think of their own use of television in this way. It is a theory about what television does to other, more vulnerable people. The other key perspective on the audience which has been developed in recent years is the body of work, principally within film theory, based on a psychoanalytic perspective, which is concerned with the positioning of the subject by the text. However, it must also be recognized that, within this psychoanalytic perspective itself, the gap between real, empirical readers and the “inscribed” ones constructed and marked in and by the text has increasingly been recognized.
