Active audiences and the construction of public knowledge

This article examines key arguments in media and cultural studies including the “encoding/decoding” model which have been used to emphasise the active nature of audiences and their capacity to resist messages as well as to create their own. It compares these with recent studies which show that audiences can indeed sometimes be active and critical but which also found strong evidence pointing to the power and influence of media. This dimension of media power is often neglected in current scholarship. The arguments which have led to this “reduced” view of media effects are re-evaluated in relation to contemporary evidence on the nature of reception processes