Audiences as Spect–Actors in the Viewership of Television Dramas: Reading Makutano Junction and Siri

Abstract

Audience research is gradually transforming and expanding in its scope from focusing on the traditional role of audiences as passive and vulnerable readers, listeners and viewers to considering audiences as active consumers and (re) producers of meaning in mass mediated messages (Davis & Michelle, 2011). Against the common perception of audiences as a homogenous category, this paper conceptualizes audiences as heterogeneous and focuses on the role that audiences play in the process of meaning making basically based on their individual knowledge(s), experiences and subjectivities otherwise called ‘reading positions’ that are accountable for the multiple readings of a single text. I consider how audiences make sense of the frames of HIV/AIDS based messages in MJ and Siri considering their roles as active (re)producers of meaning in the communicative event. I base this discussion on audience responses from post viewing discussion sessions of selected episodes of the two television dramas. With particular emphasis on how audiences ‘read’ HIV/AIDS based messages, audience subjectivities I argue accounts for the polysemic nature of texts’ meaning and that it is not a short coming but rather a contributing factor towards the richness of the meaning making process of a media text.