Rereading David Morley'sThe 'Nationwide' Audience

Bibliographic Data

ID2163860
AuthorsSujeong Kim (0000-0003-3575-7495, Dongguk University, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume18
Issue1
Pages84-108
Publication date2004-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0950238042000181629
OpenAlexW2041130876
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited1

This article intends to revisit David Morley’s work, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: Structure and Decoding, by reanalysing his findings in a way of revealing some distinct decoding patterns. While The ‘Nationwide’ Audience has been acclaimed as one of the most influential empirical works in audience studies, it has been often misunderstood as if the work failed to find out systemic and consistent influences of viewers’ social conditions on decoding practices. On the contrary, by using a statistical method, this paper demonstrates that the audiences’ decodings of the programme presented by Morley are in fact clearly patterned by their social positions. The findings reveal the over-determined effects of various social conditions such as class, gender, race and age. Particularly, the results seem to restore the importance of social class on the interpretive process, which has been displaced and ignored in many current media studies. Highlighting audiences’ structural social positions, the reading patterns rediscovered here allow us to rebut not only the traditional Marxist view of class determinism but also any relativist accounts of cultural activity

Class (philosophy · Determinism · Epistemology · Marxist philosophy · Media studies · Political science · Reading (process · Social class · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Philosophy · Social and Cultural Dynamics

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