Seongbae's questions for week 7

1. On page 174 of Ien Ang’s “On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research,” Ang says, the “ethnographic approach has gained popularity in both critical media studies and mainstream mass communications research.” The definition of ethnographic from the article wasn’t clear enough to me, so I did some research on this topic to clarify the term. The most helpful definition of ethnography I found was “"a descriptive account of social life and culture in a particular social system based on detailed observations of what people actually do” (Johnson 2000). So does this mean ethnographic studies are more of a behaviorist approach? Meaning that thoughts and motives are not too important since it can’t be measured?

2. According to Ien Ang, qualitative methods are more effective and acceptable than quantitative ones in ethnographic studies. Since ethnographic studies tend to generalize certain characteristics about certain group of people, shouldn’t we rely more on quantitative method? Conducting in-depth interviews, of course, can be helpful. I just believe bigger sample sized study such as survey are more useful to generalize certain characteristics about particular group of people.

3. Ang makes an interesting argument about gender differences for TV audiences. “Husbands regard home as the site of leisure while wives view it as the site of work.” This seems like a convincing statement, but I think Ang (1991) and Brunsdon (1986) were too hash to draw a conclusion based on typical stereotypes of husbands and wives. Are there ways to prove this? I remember reading a newspaper article about women watching TV more than men thus having more relaxed feeling when watching TVs. Could that statement about men and women’s TV viewing attitude still applicable today?

4. After reading Dick Hebdige’s article about subculture and Ien Ang’s article, I became curious about relationship between ethnographic approach and subculture. Aren’t those basically same approaches? Both of them focus on particular group with certain cultural common ground. To me, the core concepts are really similar.

5. Stuart Hall on “Encoding/Decoding” talks about importance of decoding for message to have an effect. He says, “Before message can have an effect, it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded. It is this set of decoded meanings which have an effect, influence, entertain, instruct or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological, or behavioral consequences.”

I don’t necessarily think this is true. We all know how subconscious mind can play a role when media effect kicks in. For example, people do not decode messages of advertisements most of the time. People might still watch it but do not process the information as a meaningful discourse. Some of the advertisements, however, still carry certain effects on consumer wants and behaviors. So is meaningfully decoding message is really a prerequisite for media effects to occur?