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The importance of ethnography in media research

of a homological culture relation is that an artefact or object has the ability to reflect, resonate and sum up crucial values, states, and attitudes for the social group involved with it.' (ibid.) What Willis is seemingly arguing is culture is formed on a two-way basis where identity is informed by the media, and the media is in turn informed by the receiver. The artefact or object must consistently serve the group with the meanings, attitudes and certainties it wants, and it must support and return, and substantiate central life meanings.' (ibid.) Because context has largely infinite possibilities it is only when the text is seen in a particular context that meaning can ultimately be found. Yet to substantiate central life meanings' (ibid.), Willis goes further through the integral level of meaning'. He states,


the analysis would investigate the degree to which the music exerts and has exerted a direct creative influence on a life style, that is the way it not only reflects central attitudes, values and activities, but actually takes part in determining the nature of these things.' (ibid.)

Simply put, how has the music influenced behavior and the way the society is driven? A very recent example would be the What's Up' Budweiser commercial that had many people reciting the words. Other examples would be hair styles, fashion, and political outlook, but that this would not only be supported and reaffirmed by the music but it would in turn influence the music itself. Therefore, to better understand everyday lived cultures one must base meaning within the context of which text and receiver collide, as Willis concludes:
[if] the music exerted an influence on consciousness, and the social group exerted an influence on the form of the music then it can readily be seen that a dialectical process will have occurred in which life and music were continually brought closer together in to basic homologies.' (Willis, 1974)

That is, to fully understand culture we must accept the audience as producers, and interpret the two-way identity formed by media consumption, and a media influenced by that consumption.

In summation, it's interesting to look at the work of Fiske and his beliefs in audience dominance, because they illustrate an integral importance between culture formation and media text. For example, in video games Fiske argues that the players are using the games as a form of resistance in that they are able to assert their own control over the narrative of the game.' (Abercrombie/Longhurst,


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