Audience as constructivism discourses: Rethinking on the Media Audience Study

Abstract

This article aims to analyze and interpret the following two basic contents. Firstly, we would examine the theoretical viewpoints on the use and gratification of Herta Herzog and Elihu Katz together with encoding/decoding theses of Stuart Hall, which are recognized by the scholastic world as the researches that paved ways for the study of Media Audience. The views of those theorists have led to the discourses on behavioral psychology and meaning construction of the audience in the interactions with the media. The mid-20th century findings have yielded the two research paradigms that focus on the public activism, as opposed to the assumptions of their passivity in the theoretical perspective of the effects study tradition. We evaluate these discourses in the context of the cold war, the Leftist movements, and the ideological innovations of the neo-Marxist school. Secondly, by assessing the two public discourses’ contributions, we will further consider the view of public ethnography and especially the trend of media constructionism. These are two theoretical tendencies in media public research that have taken place from the 1980s to the present. On the basis of the assessment of the strengths as well as the limitations of these tendencies, especially constructionism- a theoretical trend with the ambition to study the public in relation to the media production world, we will yield new claims about the Media Audience study theory.