ABSTRACT
The very development of the field of media studies has been premised on an understanding of the centrality of the process of media consumption in contemporary social and cultural developments. Over time (as detailed below, in section I) the model of media consumption in play within the field has oscillated between two poles. At one pole there have been models of media consumption which stress the power of the media (or the ‘Culture Industries’) and correspondingly treat media audiences as relatively passive and powerless, ‘victims’ of various kinds of media effects. Against this, especially in recent years, a variety of approaches has been developed, which lay more stress on media consumption as an active process, in which audience members are understood not only actively to select from the range of media materials available to them, but also to be active in their different uses, interpretations and ‘decodings’ of the material which they consume. The development of a model of media consumption which can reconcile the necessary concern with various forms of media power, with a recognition that audiences-or media ‘consumers’—cannot adequately be treated as mere dupes or ‘victims’ of the media, is crucial to the development of the field. Indeed, the debate about this issue has been one of the most contentious within media studies, over the last fifteen to twenty years.
