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The importance of ethnography in media research

of human behavior, then to work backwards to address how these patterns came to be.' (ibid.) Willis sees the audience as cultural producers and therefore we must work backwards from the context' (whether that be class grouping, political bias, or even time of day) of which any particular text is received in order to better understand culture and the media's place within society.

Taking television as an example, Ang sees that the:
audience is becoming increasingly fragmented, individualized, dispersed, no longer addressable as a mass or as a single market, no longer comprehensible as a social entity, collectively engaged and involved in a well-defined act of viewing'. (Ang, 1996. pg 67)

In essence, more focused research is required like ethnology, that enables the researcher to see these fragmented' and individualized' receivers in their own environment to understand more fully how cultural identity is formed, how it changes, and why. Television is seen as an entertainment medium but for instance, some people find horror movies entertaining' and some do not, while a sitcom may be entertaining after a hard days work but not at other times. Ang questions which meanings are concretely actualized, however, remains undecided until we have caught the full multicontexually determined situation in which historical instances of television consumption take place.' (ibid.) In other words, to fully understand audience interpretation of the media and their consumption of it, the researcher must see it as it happens in the ever changing contexts of which it occurs, and ethnography allows one to do this.

One of Willis' investigations concerned itself with young people and their relationship with pop music. He saw this relationship to be on three levels the indexical' , the homological' , and the integral' which basically brings the indexical and the homological together. Firstly, the indexical stage looks at to what extent the music is indexed into everyday lifestyle and goes back to what Ang was discussing about context. Here the culture has to be observed, as Willis states, The indexical formation of culture is to be seen wherever a human group is in contact with a particular artefact or object.' (Willis, 1974) Therefore the context of which the interaction occurs is vitally important when is the music listened to, when is it switched off, when is music bought etc.? The homological aspect then attempts to understand these actions in a formulation of meaning. The essential base


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