Remote Control

Chapter eleven

On the critical abilities of television viewers

Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz

 

The status of the viewer has been upgraded regularly during the course of communications research. In the early days, both major schools of research – the dominant, so-called, and the critical – saw the viewer as powerless, and vulnerable to the agencies of commerce and ideology. Gradually, the viewer – and indeed, the reader and the listener – were accorded more power. With the rise of gratifications research, the viewer began to be seen as more selective and more active than was originally supposed, at least in the sense of exercising choice in the search for satisfaction, and less isolated.¹ The new-Marxists, for their part, have recently acknowledged ...