Passive Audience

In discussing genre and Chandler in class, we mentioned the idea of the audience as a passive recipient of the products of the media. Producers make movies of identical plot lines and we as viewers continue supporting them at the box office. Stanley Fish suggests a similar idea, of an audience manipulated by “social and cultural patterns of thought”.
Chandler quotes Fowler, in his essay “Working within Genre”, as stating, “genre makes possible the communication of content”. Chandler continues to elaborate “the assignment of a text to a genre influence how the text is read. Genre constrains the ways in which a text is interpreted, guiding reader of a text towards a preferred reading (which is normally in accordance with the dominant ideology).” The assignment of a text, or any media, to a genre influences the audience as to how to interpret it. Allow me to simplify for the sake of explaining. Labeling the movie Fun with Dick and Jane as a comedy, begs the audience to laugh at Jim Carey’s unemployment due to corporate executive’s money laundering. Had producers left the movie unlabeled, perhaps the audience instead would have responded with outrage at this commentary on the dishonesty such as we witnessed with Enron. As Chandler explains, “one way of defining genres is as ‘a set of expectations’”. The audience will be restricted by the genre label it is a societal constraint.
Stanley Fish in his article “How to Recognize a Poem When you see one” similarly bemoans, and goes so far as to prove, the lack of audience subjectivity. Fish was a nice follow up to Chandler’s article. Fish says; “Insofar as the system [institutional, societal] constrains us, it also fashions us with categories of understanding, with which we in turn fashion the entities to which we can then point”. Fish’s students were products of the educational institution of Christian poetry and it confined their interpretation of the poem/assignment. Eagleton in his essay presents a similar idea; “one is struck by the habits of perception and interpretation which they spontaneously share… Their critical responses were deeply entwined with their broader prejudices and beliefs.” In short, audiences will approach any media with societal influenced view. Fish speculates “all object are made and not found, and that they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion. This does no however commit me to subjectivity because the means by which they are made are social and conventional.”
“Of course poems are no the only objects that are constituted in unison by shared ways of seeing.” We are societal trained beings, allowing us to enjoy socially accepted norms. Fish brings the example of a student raising his hand, a clear indication for everyone that he would like to speak. Similarly, it is socially understood in this country that you extend your hand for a shake on meeting someone new. In Europe, the socially accepted greeting would perhaps be a kiss on the cheek.
As one of the audience myself, I find it difficult to admit that society has so pervaded my judgment, but is certainly a point worth contemplating.