-
‘boring’ and did not engage with the item
at all. It is important to understand that none of
these interpretations is ‘correct’.
They are all feasible interpretations of the same
text
(Morley, 1980)
Are we trying to measure how
accurate
texts are?
When you are analyzing a newspaper
story about Indigenous Australians, for example,
or a
film about women, or about gay
men, it is often tempting to interpret the text as
being
‘inaccurate’ –
stereotyped or negative in some way, or not
showing reality. However, when
you are
doing textual analysis in media studies, you must
never
do this.
Never claim that a text is an
‘accurate’ or an ‘inaccurate’ representation;
never claim that it ‘reflects
reality’
The reasons for
this are complex, but rest on the basic assumption
of textual analysis that
there is no
simple, single representation of reality against
which you could measure the
newspaper
story, or the film, against in order to judge how
‘accurate’ a representation it is.
Every version of ‘reality’
that
we might measure our text against
is always
–
inescapably -
another representation
–
another text.
This is best illustrated through an
example.
In a 1998 article called
‘Sourcing the wave: crime reporting, Aboriginal
youth and the
West Australian Press’,
Steve Mickler and Alec McHoul examine
the ways in which
indigenous
Australians were represented in West Australian
newspapers during 1991
(Mickler and
McHoul, 1998). As part of their research for this
analysis, they present a
statistical
analysis of various elements of the stories: They
compare how many crime
stories
involving Aboriginal youth were published. They
contrast the number of stories
published each month with 'Actual crime
data'
–
apprehension rates
of indigenous youth.
This makes clear
that the change in the number of stories each
month bears no relationship
to the
number of reported crimes. As they note, ‘the
crest of a press crime reporting
[in
September 1991 occurs] during a comparative
decline in actual crime’ (128).
But it is important to note that they
do not simply claim that they have measured the
number of news stories against the
‘reality’ of the statistics: for these statistics
are also a
text! They are also an
attempt to make sense of reality, and they must
also be interpreted.
Mickler and McHoul
are well aware of this and state that: ‘The
apprehension rate is
unreliable because
it might also [be interpreted to] indicate such
things as police
inefficiency … [and]
apprehension rates were clearly affected in 1991
by the introducti
on
of a
cautioning system that year …’. Both the newspaper
stories, and the statistics on
apprehension rates, are texts: texts
which attempt to make sense of a particular part
of the
social world
–
indigenous youth crime
–
over the given period.
Surely some texts must
reflect reality?
This is not just a
problem with statistics. There is a philosophical
underpinning to textual
analysis which
suggests that even simple words and descriptions
of the world are
necessarily ‘texts’
–
there is never one, single,
‘correct’ way to describe anything in
the
world. There are always many ways
in which the same ‘truth’ can be accurately
described.
We can see this fact at its
most extreme when we look at different languages,
and the
different way in which they
describe the same phenomena. I choose only a
single, small
example here to try and
make the point concrete, rather than relying on
abstract arguments:
Take … the concept
‘brown’. There is nothing in nature to say exactly
which segment of the colour spectrum is
meant by brown. The concept
depends not
on anything in nature, but on the way the spectrum
is divided
up by a language …[and]
different languages divide the colour spectrum
differently: Welsh, for example, has no
[word for] brown … (Hartley, 1982:
17)
(see also Carroll, ed, 1956)
So a Welsh
speaker organising a group of objects according to
their colour would do so
differently to
an English speaker
–
these
ways of thinking about and categorising the world
are not natural, but cultural. This
means that we can never simply measure a text
against
reality: because every
description of reality is only one
version
of reality (the
Welsh
version of the ‘real’ colour of
an object might be ‘grey’, for example, whereas
the ‘real’
colour in English might be
‘brown’ –
they are both correct, within
those languages, those
versions of
describing the world).
This is not only
true across different languages
–
it also happens within a
single language.
Different texts can
present the same event in different ways, and all
of them be as truthful
and accurate as
each other.
The following headlines all
introduced stories in British online newspapers
about the death
of a British girl from
‘CJD’ –
the human form of
BSE (popularly called ‘mad cow
disease’):
?
?
?
‘CJD kills
girl, 14’ (
Guardian
Unlimited
, 29 October 2000)
‘Millions watched Zoe’s final hours’
(
Electronic Telegraph
, 29
October 2000)
‘BSE safety controls
dropped’ (
Independent
online, 29 October 2000)
To state the
obvious, these are different headlines for stories
covering the same event. Yet,
none of
them is ‘inaccurate’ or ‘false’. Despite the fact
they are very different, they are all
stories that present the ‘facts’ of
this case. The first foregrounds the disease and
the girl’s
age; the second personalises
her with a name, and comments on her status as
national
spectacle; the third puts her
into a context of national policy on disease
control.
Obviously some texts have very
little connection to our normal ways of thinking
about the
world
–
for example, if a headline for the above story
claimed that:
aliens: invasion
imminent
not mean that there is only a
single
, ‘true’ account of
any event.
In short, even
if this section seems irrelevant, there is a
simple axiom which expresses all
of
this:
Whenever anyone claims that a
particular text is ‘accurate’ or ‘truthful’
or ‘reflects reality’ –
what they are really saying is ‘I agree
with what this
text is saying about the
world’
Some students get
very depressed when they first realise that this
is an assumption of
textual analysis.
Without the reassuring safety net of simply
appealing to ‘reality’ as
something
simple and obvious, how can we do anything useful
as we attempt to understand
the media?
This need not be the case: for although
there is no single, accurate representation of the
world - and we can prove that
–
we still we all get on
with our lives pretty well. We all
make
sense of the world we live in; we all use
language; and we reach a consensus of
understanding about the society that we
share. And this, ultimately, is the process that
we
investigate and describe in textual
analysis: how do we make and share sense about the
world we live in?
Why is it important to try to
understand the likely interpretations of media
texts?
Because there is no simple,
single, correct interpretation of reality, it
becomes very
important to understand
how media texts might be used in order to make
sense of the world
we live in. We
cannot simply collect facts about our society
–
statistics, for example
–
and
then say
that we understand our society and culture:
because these facts and statistics are
just more texts. If we want to
understand the world we live in, then we have to
understand
how people are
making sense
of that world.
To return to the Mickler and McHoul example
from above, simply collecting
statistics about police apprehension rates about
Indigenous
people in Western Australia
doesn’t tell us much about the ways in which
Indigenous
people are represented and
understood in Western Australia: but we
can
get some sense of
that by doing textual analysis on such
texts as newspaper stories, television stories
–
even
on
statistics and government reports. By doing this,
we get a better sense of how members
of
that community are interpreting the world around
them.
If we’re interested
in likely interpretations of these texts, why
don’t we just interview
audience
members and ask them what interpretations they
make?
If we want to understand the
possible interpretations of texts, it may seem
that the best
thing to do would be to
simply go out and interview audience members
–
ask them how
they are interpreting the texts.
Indeed, audience research can sometimes
produce interesting insights into the unexpected
ways in which media texts are
interpreted by audiences
–
for example, Henry Jenkins
discovered
in his work with
Star Trek
fans that a distinct subgroup of female audience
members thought that the relationship
between Captain Kirk and Mr Spock had a powerful
erotic undertone, and interpreted the
films and episodes of the television program in
light
of this sexual relationship
between the two men (Jenkins, 1992).
However, this approach
–
audience research
–
can also have practical
and theoretical
drawbacks.
In practical terms, the biggest problem
with audience research is that it is expensive and
can be cumbersome. If the audience’s
responses are not simply to be ticks in boxes (see
the
section on ‘content analysis’ below
for a discussion of the limitations of such
numeri
cal
approaches), then
it requires a significant amount of time to
interview a large number of
audience
members
–
either
individually or in focus groups
–
and transcribe this data.
The fact that this is a lot of work
would not, in itself, be a reason to avoid
audience
research, were it not for the
second, theoretical, problem. Audience research
often sets
itself up as finding out
‘the reality’ of the interpretations made by
audiences (see McKee,
1999). But this
is not, in fact, the case
–
at least, not in the way it is often understood.
Audience research does not find out
‘reality’: it analyses and produces
more texts
Because when you
ask a viewer what they think of a particular
program, or magazine, or
film, you do
not find out what they think about the program per
se
–
rather, you find out
what they
say
about a program, to an academic who is
interviewing them, in answer to a
specific question! This is a very
different thing.
Ellen Seiter describes
some audience research she conducted where she
became
particularly aware of this fact:
Throughout this interview [with two
television viewers] it was uppermost in
these men’s minds that we were
academics. For them it was an honour to
talk to us and an opportunity to be
heard by people of authority and
standing. They made a concerted effort
to appear cosmopolitan and
sophisticated… [they] began the
interview with a disclaimer about the
amount of time spent viewing … This was
an unusual start for an interview
because Mr Howe had answered a
newspaper advertisement asking to
interview soap opera viewers … [one]
then offered an excuse for why they
do
watch: to see the homes and locations on the shows
(Seiter, 1990: 62, 63)
Often people
will emphasise the ‘quality’ programming that they
watch, and denigrate
programs that
they actually like (‘those soap operas,
they’re crap’) because they think that
this is what researchers want to hear
(even if it isn’t). Or they might have seen a
program
once, but not consciously have
thought
anything
about it
until asked by the researcher
–
again, we do
not find out what they ‘really’ think about it
before we ask the questions –
and we never can.
On another
level, as viewers we learn how to make sense of
and discuss media just like we
learn
any other parts of language. So it is often from
public discourse
about the
media that
we pick up the terms we use
to make sense of it. Because of this, we often
find that
audience research can be an
expensive and time consuming way to find out what
we
already know, and what is already
obvious.
Take as
an example
my own work on ‘Images of gay men in the media and
the
development of
self-
esteem’. I wanted to find out how
important television was for young
gay
men growing up, so I interviewed a number of gay
men about their memories of the
medium
(McKee, 2000). What was most noteable for me in
this research was that I could
have
predicted exactly what I was going to find out
before I even started the project
–
even
though I
was careful in my questions not to set the terms
of discussion, and asked open
questions
about their memories of television. Most of the
men I interviewed complained
that they
didn’t like seeing ‘effeminate stereotypes’ of gay
men on television –
and they
wanted to see more ‘positive images’ of
‘ordinary’, ‘normal’ men. I did not
introduc
e any
of these terms
in my questions
–
but I
could have predicted this result before I began
the
research. This is not to denigrate
the men in any way
–
rather,
it is to point out that they,
like me,
have learned from public debates certain useful
terms and ways of thinking about
images
of gay men.
This is a common issue in
audience research
–
what you
actually discover in your research
is
that audience members draw from publicly available
knowledges in order to make sense
of
texts. It is in part as a way of recovering those
publicly available knowledges that
textual analysis works.
And
sometimes, audience research can tell you less
than textual analysis. This is because
as soon as you set the terms of the
questions, you have in some ways determined the
ans
wers. So if I had asked
the men in my survey, ‘Do you think there should
be fewer
stereotypes of gay men in the
media’, I am almost certain that I would have had
100%
saying ‘Yes’ –
simply
because it is public knowledge that stereotypes
are bad. But such an
approach would
close down a load of other questions that could be
asked, through textual
analysis: for
example, are stereotypes always bad things? Can a
stereotype also be a
positive image at
the same time? Who decides what counts as
‘positive’ in a posi
tive
image? So audience research can end
simply discovering the same things over and over
again
–
, for example, ‘stereotypes are bad’
–
and never proceeding any further in
thinking
about the way in which the
media functions.
So how do
we discover the likely interpretations of a text?
As you attempt to make sense of a text
–
say, for example, a music
video
–
first and most
important thing to remember is:
context, context, context.
There is no way that we can attempt to
understand how a text might be interpreted without
first asking, Interpreted by whom, and
in what context? So, for example, say we were
trying to understand a music video that
was made and first broadcast in the late 1970s. It
features a lot of blue eyeshadow,
crimped hair and very glossy, bright pink
lipstick. How
can we interpret these
features? What does blue eyeshadow
mean
?
If we are
talking about the video when it was first
broadcast on
Countdown
in
1979, the we
know that these elements
of the text would have suggested style, fashion,
and the cutting
edge of youth culture.
But if the same video was broadcast in the late
1990s on a nostalgia
retrospective
program like Bob Downe’s
Fabulous,
Famous and Forgotten
, then exactly