Andy Ruddock, Investigating Audiences

摘要

Man at a football match: 'I blame the media, all these violent films, video games and this gangsta rap . . . No wonder young people are kniving and shooting each other.' The effects paradigm may well have been thoroughly critiqued and superseded in media studies, but it remains alive and well in common-sense thinking about the media. We can of course insist that blaming the media for violence is a vast generalization, that social violence is far more complex than a behaviourist model can comprehend, but we also need to keep reiterating that media influence and power have to be considered in other ways, and primarily in terms of maintaining a sense of the legitimacy of existing political arrangements, or state-desired extensions to them. In this new textbook, Andy Ruddock reminds us that in making this point in his book Understanding Audiences (2001), he could cite both George Gerbner and Stuart Hall, and this being the case, could draw on cultivation analysis in arguing that quantitative methods are not incompatible with cultural analysis. Quite so, as others had already argued and demonstrated.