Audience Studies (3P18) Blog Post #2
In her discussion on radio listeners during the Great Depression in the United States and Canada, MacLennon (2008) observes how the rapid commercialization of radio serials were due to the fact that most listeners were women in need of a leisure activity during the daytime hours (p. 619). Additionally, MacLennon (2008) observes how specific radio programming were most popular with the female audience in the 1920’s and 1930’s, such as health, talk, child programming, and most prominently, the serial drama. Because of its popularity with women, many critics have stated that radio seriality (and serial narratives in a more general sense) are understood as a “low” form of culture (Allen, 1985) and therefore not worthy of any real study. This blog will analyze such ideas in more depth as well as connect them with concepts and theories that shed light to listener intelligence and the way that female radio listeners interpret a given text (i.e., serial drama). Additionally, this post will cover an economic perspective of serial drama by observing advertisements on the radio and the political economy as a whole.
To put the audience experience of radio serials in a bigger perspective, analyzing the ways in which women during this time interpreted the serial dramas is dire. In the 1980’s, research conducted by the Birmingham School suggest that listeners of a text all interpret messages differently. Sullivan (2013) touches on a specific model that listeners go through to decode a message from a text. The Encoding/Decoding Model by Stuart Hall (1980) explains that that there are two “determining moments” a listener experiences when consuming a text (Sullivan, 2013, p. 140). In the first moment, the producer of a message encodes the message, and must place it in a format that listeners are able to extract meanings from. The second element involves the audience’s reception of the encoded message, the decode process (Sullivan, 2013, p. 141). In order for the message to have a desired effect on its audience, it must be “appropriated in meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded” (as quoted in Sullivan, 2013, p. 141). Because a large population of American and Canadian women consumed many of the same radio serial, it was inevitable that multiple interpretations and different encoding/decoding processes happened as a result. Serial narratives brought about discussions of domesticity and became an escape for women from whatever events were happening in their lives.
Hilmes (1997), in her discussion of the popular radio serial Memory Lane (1928), provides an example of a serial drama in which many women personally connected to. Radio dramas such as Memory Lane took place in small towns and provided visions of community and family life (Hilmes, 1997, p. 102). For this particular radio drama, Memory Lane followed the life of a family moving from an urban city to a small rural town. Many listeners could relate directly to the lifestyle told in the narrative, but others (such as female listeners living in urban areas) could not, although one woman stated that it was an escape from working life to hear about a peaceful “home” town (Hilmes, 1997, p. 103).
Listeners of the Memory Lane example can also connect to another group of concepts stemming from the Encoding/Decoding Model. Sullivan (2013) explains polysemy and the three subject positions listeners may take when interpreting a text (p. 142). Texts can be polysemic – capable of being understood in a variety of different ways (Sullivan, 2013, p. 142). Media decoding can be taken in one of three ways. First, a listener can take a dominant position, meaning that the listener accepts the message derived from the text in exactly the way the creator intended it to (Sullivan, 2013, p. 142). In the Memory Lane radio serial example, the listeners who directly related to the plot line also accepted it as the leading ideology or message that it projects onto its listeners – the idea of domesticity and family life. Secondly, a listener could also take a negotiated position when consuming a text (Sullivan, 2013, p. 142). Listeners relate to and accept the dominant message, but at the same time “filter” it through their own experiences and relationships. The specific listener who stated that she somewhat related to the stories told in Memory Lane takes a negotiated position because although she knows what it is like to live in a rural town, she does not any longer; therefore unable to completely connect to the story and its characters. In the last position, a listener can take an opposing view. This is where the listener focuses solely on the connotative meanings of a text in order to “mount an ideological struggle against the message and/or its producers” (Sullivan, 2013, p. 142). Listeners who take an oppositional position on radio seriality would pose the argument that it promotes storylines that limit women to being simply housewives and focusing solely on a domestic lifestyle that not all women want to achieve.
To look more closely to the economic aspect of radio serials, it is important to note that the creators of radio serials seek to make the most profit out of their audience. Content creators know that women will seek serials that they can relate to most, and profit off their continued devotion to these serial dramas. Susan Smulyan argues that the reason radio serials were so successful was because radio networks recognized women as serious potential as a devoted audience and the accompanying advertising (MacLennon, 2008, p. 619). In this sense, radio programmers sought to exploit common themes that seemed enjoyable to women and roll with it. This is where the term political economy comes in to oppose the norm. Political economy refers to “the study of social relations, particularly power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources” (as quoted in Sullivan, 2013, p. 78). Political economy is a term used to challenge the status quo and the institutions that uphold it. Following the first World War, distinctions between leisure time and work became more prominent, thus causing a divide. This brought about a need for capitalist structures to monitor workers’ viewing habits outside of the workplace (Sullivan, 2013, p. 80). In this sense, the political economic environment in which the creators of serial narratives through radio served to uphold the status quo that women tend to enjoy serial dramas that lack any real form of “culture” and are merely “mindless” forms of entertainment.
To continue on a target market aspect of radio dramas, the phenomenon can be attributed to what Dallas W. Smythe calls “the audience commodity” (Sullivan, 2013, p. 81). Smythe argued that “the mass media, rather than simply serving an ideological function supportive of capitalism, was instead part of the economic system of capital itself” (Sullivan, 2013, p. 81). This, in turn, creates the audience commodity – listeners of commercial advertisements actually serve to perform labour for advertisers simply by investing time in learning about their products and services.
In relation to advertising through the radio, Hilmes (1997) notes that advertising agencies became interested in using the radio as a new medium to promote products and services, which was something new (and exciting) since they did not have to rely solely on print media for advertising. Hilmes (1997) explains an advertising campaign launched on air for “Mineralava”:
“the William H. Rankin Agency, one of the heaviest early users of station WEAF’s toll service beginning in 1922, which provided one of the earliest examples of Hollywood-agency-radio interaction by inviting actress Marion Davies to give a talk on “How I Make Up for Movies” for its client Mineralava. By most accounts this was the first time a premium was offered an autographed picture of the actress herself to all those who would write in to say they heard the broadcast, and the ‘thousands’ of requests that poured in helped to establish radio as an effective medium for reaching a consuming public.” (Hilmes, 1997, p. 114).
Therefore, radio audiences during this advertisement were reeled in to product, further boasting the product sales by using a celebrity on the radio that audiences took a liking to and possibly related to. Audiences become apart of the experience of selling by taking initiative to devote time into learning about a product, generating more profit for advertisers in return.
Since the 1920’s and 1930’s, radio serials have evolved to take the form of soap operas on modern televisions. Soaps uphold similar narrative structures as radio dramas and are just as popular with the female audience in the same aspect. In his discussion on soap operas, Allen (1985) points out different ways media critics have characterized the genre as encompassing a “low” form of culture, unworthy of appraisal or even of study. This argument assumes that soap audiences (i.e., women) lack the level of intellect and taste required to enjoy (and understand) “higher” forms of culture. More recent studies suggest that audiences are way more intelligent than scholars made them out to be. Uses and Gratifications theory asserts that audiences actually pick and choose what media they want to consume for a particular need at any moment (Sullivan, 2013, p. 113). Katz, Gurevitch, and Haas (1973) organized these needs in five separate categories: cognitive needs, affective needs, integrative needs, social needs, and escape needs (Sullivan, 2013, p. 114). For women watching soap operas, whether being regular viewers or casual viewers, all watch the programs to fulfill some type of need. Women watching soaps often do so as a form of escapism from their daily lives or as a way to widen their social status. Whatever the purpose, soap operas serve a need for every woman who watches them.
In conclusion, radio serial dramas and, similarly, soap operas, all serve a purpose to entertain. In this case, it is to entertain the female audience. Although many arguments have been made against serial narratives, it continues to be enjoyed by some female audiences as their preferred form of media. It is important to note that culture is a term used by scholars to attempt to create a hierarchy of what is regarded as “low” and “high” culture. It doesn’t exist. The end.
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