Patterns of Involvement in Television Fiction: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

This article analyses discussions of an episode of Dallas by focus groups of different ethnic origins in Israel and the United States. It identifies four rhetorical mechanisms by which viewers may 'involve' themselves in or 'distance' themselves from the story: referential v. critical framings; real v .play keyings; collective' or universal v. personal referents; and normative v. value-free evaluations. Use of these mechanisms varied across the groups, and when the cultures were arrayed along a multidimensional involvement scale overseas viewers appeared to be more involved in the programme than Americans. Possible roles for involvement in the process of viewer susceptibility to programme messages are then discussed. Disciplines Communication | Social and Behavioral SciencesThis journal article is available at

Modes of Reception: A Consolidated Analytical Framework

“…Perhaps the most substantial work to date is that of Liebes and Katz (1986, who identify two distinct modes of reading in their analysis of cross-cultural receptions of Dallas. The first, a referential reading, makes connections between the fictional "reality" depicted on screen and the viewer's own knowledge and experience of the world--as with the categories of inferential reading, indicative involvement, and trivial/ random personal association.…”

“…This mode may also be expressed in viewers' identifications of what could or should have been said, but was not. In its syntactic element, Liebes and Katz (1986 suggest that being "critical" implies recognition that the text is produced or constructed, as evident in comments about the formal conventions of genre, narrative formula, the dramatic function of characters or events, or the imperatives and constraints involved in media production. For these theorists, syntactic criticism reflects a distanced viewing mode in which viewers "step back" from the "reality" of the text.…”

“…My understanding of this second mode of reception draws on the categories of inferential reading (Worth & Gross, 1974), indicative involvement (Schrøder, 1986), trivial/ random personal association (Dahlgren, 1988), and referential reading (Liebes & Katz, 1986. Whereas a transparent mode is one in which viewers relate to media texts on their own terms (whether as unmediated reflections of "real life" or coherent fictional worlds of their own), a referential mode is one step removed, in the sense that viewers perceive the text as standing alongside the real world, and make comparisons and analogies between that depicted reality and their own knowledge and experience of the extra-textual world "out there"--experience which may be first hand, or itself mediated through encounters with other cultural texts.…”

“…My understanding of this third mode of reception draws on insights derived from the categories of attributional reading (Worth & Gross, 1974), analytic decoding (Neuman, 1982), mediation reading , media awareness/ demystification discourse (Dahlgren, 1988), syntactic criticism (Liebes & Katz, 1986, and discrimination (Schrøder, 2000) undermining the text's ideological effectivity.…”

Communications Research Since Lazarsfeld

“…This is the hard way-but the only way-to talk about television imperialism. And we have resurrected the focus-group method to do so (Katz and Liebes, 1985;Liebes and Katz, 1986).…”