Week 5: “Active Audiences”

On what basis that audiences are active creators of meaning?

Barker proposed that audiences are not aggregated, but individualistic. Audiences do not simply uncritically accept textual meanings, but instead they are their own producers of meaning, based on the premise of their own cultural competency which is formed through language and social relationships. Even with the assumption that the nature of an active audience is to resist ideology, the ‘assumed’ level of sophistication and literacy in television  does not prevent audiences from fabricating their own ideologies, therefore undermining the premise and proving that audiences are active creators of meaning.

Barker, C 2003, ‘Active Audiences’, in Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, Sage, London pp. 325-329