Croteau/Hoynes: Media/Society, 5th Edition
Chapter 8: Active Audiences and the Construction of Meaning
Discussion Questions
1. What does it mean that audience members are “active” readers? What kind of activities do
they participate in?
2. How does class influence how one interprets television? How does it impact the degree of
“realism” one sees?
3. Using Liebes and Katz’s study of the television program Dallas, discuss how one’s culture
can influence one’s interpretation of media. What does this suggest about the meaning of
mass media images?
4. What does Radway mean by the act of reading? Why does she distinguish between the act of
reading and the texts of romance novels?
5. What does it mean that individuals create “oppositional” readings of media texts? What are
they “resisting”? What are the social consequences of “oppositional” readings?
a. How possible or likely do you think resistant or oppositional readings are?
b. Can you give examples of oppositional readings?
c. How can resistant or oppositional readings help create feminist, queer, or racial forms
of identification or community?
6. What is the role of pleasure in media use? How and why should media researchers
incorporate pleasure into our understanding of media?
a. How common do you think the pleasure of resistance is? Where do you think it is
most common or possible? Are these pleasures more possible in digital culture or on
the Internet? Why/why not?
7. What are the ways in which media texts are “encoded and decoded”? What tools help
individuals to decode media texts? What (if any) are the constraints on decoding media texts?
8. What are the social and individual aspects of your own media experience?
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