The production of messages for mass communication is rooted in the *culture of the producers and that of the supposed audience. Messages are sets of cultural meanings and are effective as communication only if they fit with the structure of cultural meanings held by the audience. For example, the Brazilian prime time, evening television telenovelas, social dramas or soap operas, that have become a national obsession in Brazil, incorporate and reflect basic cultural assumptions, such as the dominance of the †extended family in social life and the emphasis on †status rather than work in values and *identity (Kottak 1990).
The producers of Brazilian telenovelas, which run for many episodes, keep a close watch on audience reaction, and shift story lines and juggle characters to hold audience interest and enthusiasm. In this case as in most others, ongoing production is maintained and producers prosper by drawing audiences and thus making profits, either directly from audiences or from commercial advertisers. Directors of Tamil films in South India, as with producers everywhere, must therefore cater to the tastes of the audiences, such as for escape fantasies or heroic violence, even if they do not directly approve of those tastes (Dickey 1993). These directors, like others, sometimes insert morals to instruct and ‘improve’ the audiences.
In addition to commercial factors, producers must deal with the power and governmental structures in the societies in which they work. Media regulation and censorship boards are used, to one degree or another, by powerful societal elites to control and limit messages disseminated in the media. Producers and their programmes vary in degree of conformity and subversion. Producers do have at their disposal many symbolic ways of expressing views and representing problems which may not be expressed explicitly and represented directly.
Symbolic codes that make up the content of programmes speak to issues in the lives of the audience. The long-running, popular space programme ‘Star Trek’, which has spawned several ‘spin-off programmes, expresses basic themes in American life, such as space travel representing the quest for adventure and exploration and the interaction, collaboration, and co-membership of beings from different planets representing ‘the incorporation of strangers and diversity within an expansive American culture’ (Kottak 1990:101)
To be successful, films or programmes must be ‘culturally appropriate, understandable, familiar and conducive to mass participation’ (Kottak 1990:43). At the same time, success requires satisfying the culturally-conditioned psychological needs and desires of the audience. In the case of Tamil films, ‘viewers…seek out movies as entertainment and as an escape from the difficulties of their lives’ (Dickey 1993:141). But they also look for relevance to their lives.
[Viewers] see very personal connections between themselves and their relationships, on the one hand, and the characters and relationships shown on the screen on the other, and occasionally see more general class level connections as well… They focus on themes…central to [their] lives: …among other things the effects of marriage on individuals and families, possibilities for romantic love, the responsibilities of children or siblings, and the disregarded inner virtues of the poor. Films create utopian resolutions of these issues. Escape and reality are intimately connected.
(Dickey 1993:141)
Viewers are active in responding to the messages sent through the mass media; they do not passively absorb what the mass media brings them. There is an ongoing interplay and feedback between producers and audiences of the mass media.
The active nature of audience response does not mean that the audience is unaffected or uninfluenced by messages sent through the mass media. Some messages may be rejected or ignored, as in the case of *development information in Indian villages (Hartman et al. 1989). But other messages, intended or inadvertent will be consciously or unconsciously accepted and assimilated. At the very least, the mass media has an ‘agenda setting’ function; it cannot successfully tell people what to think, but it can effectively tell them what to think about by including some issues and ideas in messages and excluding others.
The interplay between mass media and culture becomes even more complicated when, as often is the case, messages are transmitted across cultural boundaries. Much of the world’s film and television production takes place in a small number of urban centres: San Paulo, Delhi, Rome, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Hollywood, London and Bombay. The economics of production and the technology of transmission favour wide distribution, and so audiences in small countries, in less developed countries, in rural remote regions, see films and programmes that have grown out of quite different cultures, in codes based upon those cultures, and which tend to advance values from those cultures, such as individualism, commercialism, consumerism, and romanticism, which sometimes clash with the established norms, values, and beliefs of local society. Such influence can be seen, depending upon one’s point of view, as liberation or as cultural imperialism.
