Croteau&Hoynes: Media/Society, 5th Edition
Chapter 8: Active Audiences and the Construction of Meaning
Test Bank
1. One of the following terms denotes the idea of an active audience that not only
consumes media contents but also creates them. Which is it?
2. If the audience interpreted a media message differently from its popular or
producers’ intended meaning, then such an interpretation can be called a(n)
_______ reading.
3. Which of the following choices would best fill in the blanks in this quote:
“Producing and consuming ______ allows for a play with reality, which can be felt as
liberating because it is fictional, not real. In the play of ______ we can adopt
positions and “try out” those positions, without having to worry about their reality
value. “
4. Which of the following is not true about the American TV show Dallas and its
interpretation?
5. Remaking billboards to create counter-advertisements with messages that parody
or criticize the original ad is an example of:
6. Which of the following is not considered a characteristic of an active audience?
7. The “Media and the Social World” model views audiences as:
8. The term polysemy is defined as the notion that:
9. In Jhally and Lewis’s study of The Cosby Show, the authors found that white
audiences interpreted the Huxtable family to be:
10. When audience members interpret the meaning of media, they are:
11. The “encoding–decoding” model in media research includes the following except:
12. Which of the following does not fit with David Morley’s theory of audience
member?
13. “Discursive” resources:
14. Hunt’s study of audience responses to news coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles
riot concluded that:
15. Radway finds that for women who work in the home, the act of reading is:
16. In his study of television viewing in the home, David Morley finds that:
17. Within the process of meaning-making, what is meant by the term interpretive
community?
18. The “No Comment” feature in Ms. magazine is a space where readers:
19. In Joshua Gamson’s study of celebrity watching, he found that some audience
members do all of the following except:
20. What is meant by “the pleasure of resistance”?
21. Which of the following is not considered a collective action by active audiences?
22. In decoding media contents, readers’ social positions often matter. Which of the
following is not a social constraint that may affect the decoding process?
23. A(n) ________ suggests both the social structural forces—our membership in
communities—and the forces of human agency—the act of interpretation—are at
work in decoding media contents.
25. Which of the following concepts most closely relates to the idea of an active
audience?
Type: E
26. What is meant by “active audience”? In what ways are today’s media audiences
active? What kind of activities do they participate in? How do today’s active
audiences differ from traditional media audiences?
27. What does polysemy mean? Explain this concept in relation to the following
media content.
28. According to Radway’s research, many women read romance novels that would
generally be considered “sexist.” Why would women read such low-brow novels
whose depictions of women are not favorable?
29. According to John Fiske, some active audience members engage in “interpretive
resistance” when they interpret mass media messages, and that such a process
gives them pleasure. What is meant by the term interpretive resistance and how
can audience members receive pleasure from it?
30. Members of an active audience are interpretive “free agents” who can interpret
media text as they please.
31. Stuart Hall’s Encoding-Decoding model of communication indicates that media
messages need to be transmitted via interpersonal channels.
32. According to Morley’s audience research, individuals’ social class determines
how people interpret media messages.
33. The “Second Screen” phenomenon refers to an audience producing and
consuming media at the same time, creating and circulating their own small bits of
content in response to the media they are experiencing.
34. The term “user” implies that a media audience is passive.
35. “Polysemy” refers to the idea that media texts can have multiple meanings.
37. According to Radway’s research on women’s romance novel reading, women
read the novels primarily to increase their literacy level.
Croteau&Hoynes: Media/Society, 5th Edition
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