Reception studies
This Study, Theoretical and Methodological Bases of Reception Studies: An Analytic and Critical Study on the Nature of the Audience Researches in , is an attempt to evaluate an ensemble of academic researches conducted at the Department of Information and Communication Sciences,
The Above named decade, conceived as a necessary time for socio-political and economic transition from oriented to liberal society, had witnessed an important development in media studies in general including the audience researches that statically have moved from less than 1%, before 1995 to nearly 20%, by 2005.
This new liberal orientation, generated by the globalisation process, and especially supported by the new information and communication technologies, seem to be the main factor leading to a new concentration of media studies on the audience as a market and an electorate mass.
Nevertheless, political and trade marketing considerations could not be the only factors to develop audience studies in the academic level.
In liberal societies, especially within the Anglo-Saxon sphere, audience studies have been developed throughout the last century following the nature history of the media and the ever-sophisticated developments in information and communication technologies.
Based on theoretical and methodological developments, the different approaches to study the media audiences have included the most recent technological and political events in an attempt to understand and explain behaviours of different individuals and groups toward, for instance, the use of the Internet as a domestic technology besides the use of TV; and the "war on terror", started in late 2001, after the famous attacks on the Twin Towers of the TWC in New York and the Pentagon Quarters in Washington.
Technically speaking, The Globalization process is, strongly, taking place through the generalization of TV and Radio Direct Broadcasting via Satellites (DBS) and the use of the Internet, that is not, contrary to the first generation of new technologies literature, a monolithic or placeless ‘cyberspace’; rather, it is numerous new technologies, used by diverse people, in diverse real-world locations.
The suitability of the Ethnographic Approach to study the social and technical interactions in this “Cyberspace” comes from the premise that one cannot understand the one without the other.
The most suitable approach to study the media global audience behaviours starting from local communities, may have many things to do with the Ethnographical approach in use since 1980’s, when David Morley started focussing on TV viewing, on Domestic technologies, on family dynamism and on social micro-analysis.
In inviting the global audience studies literature through the natural history of media researches and the nature of the audience researches in Algeria, we advocate a comparative ethnographic approach and we suggest that there are lines of enquiry, linked to dimensions of new media use, that can be usefully pursued across a wide range of settings; and that there are issues about social transformations in new media contexts that generally concern social science and other communities.
In this study, we rarely address the question of whether the ethnographic findings are specific to a determinate area, or common to many areas. We simply do not have grounds for answering such question.
The conclusion is a clear advocacy in favor of an alternative approach in the study media audience in , namely the ethnographic approach that is suitable for the specific global and local aspects of the Algerian society.