Custom Essays and Free Coursework

McQuail in general was critical of this with regard to his earlier work and suggests that social origins and ongoing experience are important in understanding audience and media relations, which fell outside the initial behaviourist and functionalist leanings of the research. These however are not so easily measured. Social origins, any person's class background, for example, can be translated into quantitative terms (as more or less formal and informal schooling), but ongoing experience may, for any one person, take a multitude of forms that need not even relate directly to one another: from what one learns from an individual film or article in a magazine, to witnessing everyday racism or parental neglect in the street, to boredom doing a job that has seemed so exciting. Theoretically, uses and gratifications never really develops. It is impossible to establish whether uses indeed precede gratifications in time, or whether gratifications are legitimized by inventing uses. If the latter is the case, the uses and gratifications model cannot free us from the dominant paradigm: we are still seduced by the media, to such an extent even that we invent needs for what is basically imposed on us by capitalism (commercial media) or paternalist nation-state (PSB). It is also important to stress that gratificationist research as it has also been called, was not initially understood to be a mainstream or conservative approach to media and society. On the contrary, it appeared to break with a tradition of only looking at effects (mass communication research) or at texts (such as the film criticism of the British journal Screen) in order to conclude something about audiences. Gratifications research at least asked people and made them part of the media meaning society equation. It is only when gratificationaist research is used as a spearhead in debates about the possible convergence of quantitative and qualitative traditions in media research (the first seen as conservative and mainstream, the second as its challenger), that media critics such as Ang (1989) offer a strong defence of ethnographic method against individualistic quantitative research and of taking a closer look at what we mean by the term active audience. Ang (1989) argue that it is basically impossible to bring the two traditions in mass communication research together. The social scientists who work with quantitative method in uses and gratifications research and have here been labelled mainstream may superficially be seen to use the same terms the critical researchers use, but this does not mean that the two have consensus over the way in which the object of study needs to be conceptualized, or infact over the goals and aims of science or social research as an enterprise.