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Croteau, Media/Society, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2019
Chapter Outlines
Chapter 8: Audiences and Creators
Purpose and Goals of the Chapter
Chapter 8 is intended to explore the ways that audiences interact with, use, and
create mass media. The chapter focuses on various forms of audience activity as “users.”
Users are people like us; the nonprofessionals who consume, share, and sometimes create
media content. Chapter 8 highlights the active role users play in the media process with
an emphasis on the ways that audiences interpret media messages. As audience members,
they interpret the media content they read, listen to, and watch. As creators, they use
digital tools to make their own content to share with others. The chapter also explores the
pleasures of media consumption and considers the possibility that audiences can “resist”
dominant meanings in mass media.
Outline of Key Chapter Themes
• Audiences are active in balancing their relationship to media through agency and
structure.
• Different audiences, drawing upon different interpretive frameworks, can construct
different meanings from the same media text; media texts are at least partially open to
such different readings.
• Social structure shapes the distribution of cultural resources that audiences use to
interpret media texts.
• The social context in which we use media helps to constitute the meaning of those media.
• Audiences can produce oppositional readings of media texts; when coupled with
collective activity in the social world, this “oppositional decoding” is sometimes defined
as a form of “resistance.”
• Media consumption is a source of pleasure for many audience members; how and why
we enjoy media needs to be part of our explanation of the role of media in society.
• The social context of media use becomes a defining feature of interpersonal relationship
building, contextualizing interpretations, and framing resistance (culture jamming).
Chapter Outline
• The Active Audience: Balancing Agency and Structure
o Polysemy: Media’s Multiple Meanings
o Interpretive Constraint: Encoding/Decoding and Social Structure
• Decoding Meanings and Social Position
o Class and Nationwide News
o Gender, Class, and Television
o Race, News, and Meaning Making
o Resistance and Feminist Identity
Croteau, Media/Society, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2019
o International Readings of American Television
o Making Meaning Online: Second Screens
o Social Position Online: Black Twitter
• The Pleasures of Media: Celebrity Games
• The Social Context of Media Use
o Romance Novels and the Act of Reading
o Watching Television with the Family
• The Limits of Interpretation
• From Active Audience to Resistant Actors
o Interpretive Resistance and Feminist Politics
o Culture Jamming
• Content Creation and Distribution
o Participatory Culture
o Participation Online
o Who Are the Content Creators?
o Why Create?
o Media Fans
o Users as Gatekeepers and Distributors
• Conclusion
