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The . . . true human genius and necessity is to build up models of reality by the agency of differing types of symbols--verbal, written, mathematical, gestural, kinesthetic--and by differing symbolic forms--art, science, journalism, ideology, ordinary speech, religion, mythology. . . . In trying to understand the meanings persons place on experience, then, it is necessary to work through a theory of fictions: a theory explaining how these forms operate, the semantic devices they employ, the meanings they sustain, the particular glow they cast over experience.
This is a process of making large claims from small matters: studying particular rituals, poems, plays, conversations, songs, dances, theories, and myths and generally reaching out to the full relations within a culture or a total way of life. For the student of communication, other matters press in: how do changes in forms of communication technology affect the constructions placed on experience? How does the technology change the forms of community in which the experience is apprehended and expressed? What under the force of history, technology and society, is thought about, thought with, and to whom is it expressed. (Carey 1975:190)
[Emphasis mine]
SOAP OPERA AND SOCIETY
This study explores how and why
the soap opera Guiding Light provides its particular potential
for experience. I studied the production process for the program
to determine the actual
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practices, conventions, and legitimations employed by people making them. In abstract terms, my aim was to explore the relationship between expressive mediated culture and society.
In more concrete terms, I wanted to discover how a soap opera reflects the society and the process that generates it.
Conventionally, scholars in both the social sciences and humanities, as well as culture [1] critics tend to focus on the symbolic form--a novel or a television program--as a finished product and to analyze its form and content. As a result, a text is studied independently of its context of production and use. Inferences are then made about cultural themes or trends, the social sources of such content, and/or the impact of the content. I argue instead that the connections between society and symbolic forms as sources of potential experience can be best identified empirically through a study of the production process in context. I look at the context of production and examine the product as part of an event. As Raymond Williams says, "we have to break from the notion of isolating the object and then discovering its components. On the contrary, we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions" (1973:16). Given the objective of determining the actual processes involved, I primarily employed participant observation to construct this account.
This study poses and answers the following questions:
1. What is the nature of the symbolic world in soap [2] performances generated by the production process?
2. How and why are organizationally controlled resources made available for the production and distribution of soap operas?
3. How do the goals of organizations affect the kinds of performances (soaps) made available, particularly in terms of story creation, selection, and realization?
4. How is the work process organized, hierarchically and as a form of collective action involving an elaborate division of labor?
5. How do people in various roles, particularly producers, directors, and actors, adapt to the pressures, risks, and conflicts between personal or occupational goals or skills and the requirements of work on a soap?
6. What are the major visual, audio, and musical conventions that are embodied in soaps that structure and influence the potential experience of performances?
7. How have technological developments
affected or been incorporated into the work process?
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8. How do people who work in soap production perceive the viewing audience, and how do they arrive at those perceptions? What are the patterns of interaction between the audience and the producers?
The specific questions and overall study take soap opera seriously. I see televised soap operas as one aspect of the transformation in social conditions and human experience that has been part of the spread of urban-industrial society following the development of mass media and popular culture. We typically distinguish popular or mass culture from elite, folk, or traditional expressive culture or distinguish electronic culture from print and oral cultures. From another perspective, there has been a change from ceremony and ritual to performances and fictions as representations of popular experience (Turner 1977a; Chaney 1979). Major contemporary examples of this development are televised dramatic performances.
In most parts of the world, since the spread of television, there has been a scale and intensity of dramatic performance which is without precedent in the history of human culture.
Many, though not all, societies have a long history of dramatic performances of some kind; but characteristically, in most societies, it has been occasional or seasonal. . . . It is clearly one of the unique characteristics of advanced industrial societies that drama as an experience is not an intrinsic part of everyday life, at a quantitative level which is so very much greater than precedent as to seem a fundamental qualitative change . . . it is clear that watching dramatic simulation is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern. (Williams 1975:59)
The creation of the potential for experience through the deliberate restoration or simulation of behavior in myriad forms appears to be one of the characteristics of modernity (MacCannell 1976; Schechner 1981). Victor Turner notes the change from ritual to performance and notes "its conversion into a multiplicity of performative arts gives us a hall of mirrors, each reflecting the reflections of the others" as they systematically magnify and distort reality (1977b:73). The extent of this 'hall of mirrors" is enlarged and its
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nature changed and complicated by the proliferation of media constructing and reflecting reality.
The growth in the number of sources of mediated performance or expressive culture and information has created a complex situation. This is particularly true because media organizations draw upon the constructions of other media and organizations. The creation, use, and reuse of mediated constructions and resources suggest a social process underlying the realities constructed or reflected. This social process has been labelled a "media culture" (Elliott 1972; Chaney 1972) or the product of Enzensberger's "consciousness industry" (1979).
The existence and pervasiveness of so many mediated performances, images, and information make separating mediated from nonmediated experience in our continuing personal and social constructions of reality and behavior extremely problematic. Each draws from the other. With so many sources of experience, identifying the origins of our conceptions of self and, particularly, our conceptions of society "out there" becomes exceptionally difficult.
Television, as a source of mediated experience, has received the most attention, both popular and academic. As with other areas of study of mass communication and popular culture--which I will refer to as mediated communication or mediated expressive culture--much more attention, by far, has been paid to television's content and purported effects than has been paid to the forces that shape television programming.
[But] as more and more people look to television for information and entertainment, it becomes increasingly important to ask not only what effect does it have on them, what do they make of it, what do they get out of it; but also how is it that these are the programs made available, how is the material selected and created . . . ? (Elliott 1972:6)
In the case of media content, we conventionally tend to make a distinction between fictional and nonfictional accounts or constructions. In the case of a number of media, particularly television, our culture has taught us to identify news or documentaries as informative, more or less truthful accounts reflecting reality. These are distinguished from a range of fictional (created) genres such as westerns, detective stories, situation comedies, and soap operas. Both types of programming have been the focus of an on-going concern about their effects, but much more attention has been given
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to fictional programming. This attention is often expressed in terms of its potentially harmful consequences for children or society in general, particularly because of a reliance upon violence and sex in such programming.
Network television is dominated by entertainment programming. Bogart surveyed network television programming for the 1976-77 season and determined that "86% of the network programs were devoted to fictional drama of one kind or another" (1980:209). Only 5% was devoted to nonfiction programming. ironically fictional drama has received the least attention in terms of how such programming is produced, while it has also occasioned the most alarm.
Over the last decade, a number of production studies have appeared, but the number of empirical studies is still limited and largely concentrated on nonfictional programming. [3]
Although the last five or six years have seen a revival of interest in questions of production among researchers on both sides of the Atlantic, most of the resulting studies have concentrated on actuality television--on news, current affairs and documentaries. This work is certainly overdue and has added considerably to our knowledge, but unfortunately it has not so far been matched by a comparable series of studies of fiction and entertainment production. Paradoxically, then, we know the least about the production of the very programs that are the most popular with the viewers. (Murdock and Halloran 1979:274) [Emphasis mine]
I have chosen to study soap opera
as a form of fictional programming. The mere mention of soap operas
tends to elicit strong opinions. For some people they are the
epitome of television's penchant for the unrealistic and fantastic,
a waste of time, a sop for the lonely and bored housewife, a manipulative
commercial vehicle to sell soap. With the recent increase in younger
viewers, familiar warnings are issued about their impact on youngsters
who cannot separate the programming from reality. For others,
soaps are engaging dramatic fare, programming that deals with
real life problems in a way that prime-time television does not,
a web of social relationships and significance they participate
in, an exciting, and ultimately pleasurable, experience that complements
or compensates for the experience of other portions of the day.
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That people react strongly to soaps is an indication of their seriousness. The traditional justification for studying forms of mediated expressive culture, such as a soap, is that they are extremely popular. Their longevity, the size and demographic characteristics of the audiences they reach, and their economic importance for the networks and advertisers can all be cited to justify their study. Approximately 50 million women a week watch soaps, with approximately one quarter of all women in America between the ages of 18 and 49 watching on any one day. The networks make about 1.5 billion dollars a year on soaps (Steinberg 1980; Brown 1982a). Yet, despite their evident significance, there are no in-depth academic studies of the production of an afternoon television serial. [4]
In addition to these more traditional and apparent economic and social considerations (and justifications), the issue of the construction of fictions that are taken as realistic and that resonate with conceptions of everyday reality is extremely important. News, textbooks, and documentaries all play a part in our conceptions (constructions) of what society is like or should be like. Along with a range of fictions or performances in various mediated or nonmediated forms, soaps also play a role in the development of our notions of what society "out there" is like, should be like, or could be like. The experience and participation in the could be, or "as if," when we are engaged by a performance have implications for other orientations, or other frames for experience.
One way of understanding what is going on in popular fiction is to look at different types of story-telling as different ways of thinking about what the collectivity we share is. In other words, what are the implications of discussing social experience for the nature of the experience that is being discussed, the reflexivity of self-consciousness. (Chancy 1979:29)
The characterizations of society that people develop, the distinctions they make between private and public realms, and the conceptions they have of what the collectivity we all share is like or should be like derive from the basic capacities and qualities of human consciousness. Similarly, the quest to document (capture) behavior in ethnographic form itself is related to the production of fictions and theater, and to the symbolic and reflexive character of human consciousness (Ruby 1982). Both this ethnographic account and
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Guiding Light show society in process. Both present and explain the character of experience, each for a time claiming to convey what is really important. Guiding Light, of course, does not overtly and consistently claim such a stance. The common general argument that the program is about everyday life and that it reflects society supports this contention. Guiding Light and this account are both reflections of and reflections on social process.
It is only logical to argue that an ethnography, as a symbolic form, itself can be and should be understood and assessed as a product of social practice. While taking different stances, both soaps and ethnographies provide accounts of society in process, and thus provide occasion for forms of communal self-reflection (Turner 1977a; Chaney 1979).
Placing soaps and ethnographic accounts in the same frame may be disturbing to some readers. While anthropological ethnographic accounts are serious and privileged as forms of knowledge and experience, soaps are not. But lumping them together forces us to recognize that the social conditions and processes of making sense of the world, and of constructing the world, apply to both soaps and ethnographic accounts.
This ethnography is interpretive in that it deals with meaning in relation to social conditions, empirical in that it is rooted in self-conscious observation of specific practices, and critical in its description and analysis of communicative and sociocultural processes (Bernstein 1978). It is critical in two interrelated ways: it challenges our conventional frames for experience by focusing on the socially constitutive nature of expression and experience; it lays bare dynamics and relationships that may have been unrecognized and thereby contributes to the formation of practical options for people. Put differently, this ethnography plays a role in our social self-understanding through its exploration of how and why we tell ourselves the stories that we do.
SOAP OPERA AS A CONSTRUCTED REALITY
In the development of the social scientific study of the media, neither "administrative research nor the critical tradition of the Frankfurt school paid much attention to the way cultural products are actually created. Research focused on the content of the cultural product, on its homologous connection to broadly characterized political and social forces or on the response to the product among audiences. But what concrete social structures shaped the product itself?
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This question has come to be a centre of research interest in the sociology of
culture in the past decade. (Curran and Schudson 1982:1)
This study is part of an emerging tradition of production studies that focus precisely on how the product is shaped. I approach the soap opera as part of a communicative process that is both socially structured and culturally patterned. I have drawn upon two major research traditions. One is American and anthropological, the other British and part of what has been termed "cultural studies" (Carey 1975; Hall 1981).
One important body of recent anthropological research has its foundation in the effort to broaden the anthropological study of communication. Research from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and "sociovidistics" [5] has sought to explore communication events and symbolic forms as socially structured and culturally patterned. This ethnography follows in that quest.
A major foundation for my research is the work of Dell Hymes, Sol Worth, and Richard Chalfen. Hymes, a linguist interested primarily in speech, has argued for the compilation of ethnographies of speaking (1964) and more recently has broadened his conception to include the study of all modes, media, and codes (1974). Sol Worth (1966) and Richard Chalfen have examined visual communication as a culturally patterned and socially structured activity, applying Hymes's suggestions to different codes and contexts. Worth's major empirical study, written with John Adair, explored the cultural patterning of film communication among the Navajo after they had introduced film media to the Navajo (1972). Chalfen has explored visual communication by nonprofessionals, again approaching communication as a socially structured and culturally patterned activity or process. In one study, he observed how teenagers differing in sex, race, and class went about making first films. He noted how the films differed as products and, to a lesser degree, observed the films as part of exhibition events (1974). One important result has been the development of a sociovidistic framework for the study of visual communication. This study is a further development of the perspective and in Chalfen's language can be considered "an ethnography of mass communication."
Another important source and resource is British cultural studies. A number of scholars, including Raymond Williams (1961, 1974), David Chaney (1972, 1979), Phillip Elliott (1972, 1979, 1982) and Stuart Hall (1981), have explored
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the relationships between expressive forms and social order. They begin from the premise that reality and meaning are socially created. On the one hand, they explore the character of the experience various symbolic forms make possible, often by intensively and extensively examining particular products or cultural artifacts, as Williams calls them, much as an art critic or historian might do, whether the product be a ballet, a comic strip, a film, or a classroom lecture. On the other hand, they view the particular product as part of an event or process and relate the character of the experience made possible or embodied in the form to the conditions and practices that generated it and to the conventions relied upon for both construction and interpretation.
A major concern is that the study of symbolic forms not be limited to elite notions of what is valuable or creative, nor should such a study be limited to the theoretical and methodological approaches built upon those premises. In Williams's view, art entails the creative description and interpretation of experience in the context of changing organizational patterns of society, thus rendering the patterns of personal experience significant. Given that all reality is a creative and social construction, and that the meanings of art are intimately associated with the meanings of other domains of experience, the study of communicative behavior is broadened to include all forms of discourse, whether conversational or mediated, mass produced or specialized, formal or informal, elite or popular (1961, 1974).
Chaney suggests, and I agree, that we treat popular culture and expressive culture seriously as a way of exploring social consciousness (1979). Clear-cut distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, serious and popular, superior and inferior, reflect an epistemological and social stance that precludes seeing all experience of reality as a construction or fiction, related to social negotiation, and embedded in a number of contexts. Instead of accepting a priori distinctions between fiction versus fact, popular and elite, serious and worthwhile versus frivolous and inferior (and prejudging the worth of the audience through those categorizations), we can view symbolic forms as realized in and through various social practices and relationships, and as having implications for other realms of experience and activity. Chaney emphasizes the "constitutive social relations of production" (1979) for the understanding of expressive or popular culture. His insights and suggestions are an important basis for this ethnography.
The growing importance of production studies and the focus on symbolic forms are reactions to the many limitations of
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previous mass communication research. James Carey provides a useful overview of conventional American and European research:
American studies are grounded in a transmission or transportation view of communication. They view communication, therefore, as a process of transmitting messages at a distance for the purpose of control. The archetypal case of communication, then, is persuasion, attitude change, behavior modification, socialization through the transmission of information, influence or conditioning. . . . By contrast, the preponderant view of communication in European studies is a ritual view of communication: communication is viewed as a process through which a shared culture is created, magnified and transformed. The archetypal case of communication is ritual and mythology, for those who come to the problem from anthropology; art and literature, for those who come at the problem from literary criticism and history. (Carey 1975:177)
The major American research tradition can be labeled scientistic or positivistic, with all the pejorative connotations those terms imply. The dominant European tradition, conversely, has primarily concerned itself with complex and elite systems of thought and experience from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge and aesthetic inquiry, and often in less than empirically satisfying ways (Merton 1968).
The major corpus of the American research tradition makes use of a stimulus-response (S-R) model of communication as part of the dominant paradigm and has been labeled "administrative research" (Gitlin 1981; Curran and Schudson 1982; Thomas 1982). Halloran characterizes the research as "having a mainly value-free, positivistic, empiricist, behavioristic, psychological emphasis" (1981:23).
As a consequence, many of the difficult questions never get asked: questions about the nature of media as institutions as part of a larger sociocultural context, as agencies of socialization that define social reality, legitimate social arrangements and changes and that set the public agenda (Gitlin 1981; Halloran 1981).
By its methodology, media sociology has highlighted the recalcitrance of audiences, their
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resistance to media generated images, and not their dependency, their acquiescence, their gullibility. It has looked to effects" of broadcast programming in a specifically behaviorist fashion, defining effects so narrowly, microscopically as to make it very likely that survey studies could show only slight effects. . . . It has tended to seek "hard data, often enough with results so mixed as to satisfy anyone and no one, when it might have more fruitfully sought hard questions. By studying only the effects that could be measured experimentally or in surveys, it has put the methodological cart ahead of the theoretical horse. (Gitlin 1981: 73-74)
The European tradition, however, while asking hard questions, has often done so in less than empirically adequate ways. Instead of focusing on opinion and effects, the European tradition has focused on knowledge, its production by experts, and what happens to knowledge and elite culture when it is reshaped and largely distorted as part of popular culture. The Frankfurt school, for example, has discussed popular culture and mass communication often critically, but from an elitist bias and with little empirical support to its assertions (Gans 1974).
The dominant view in European studies is a ritual view, in which "communication is viewed as a process through which a shared culture is created, magnified and transformed" (Carey 1975:177). Much of the research, however, is limited by its reliance on what might be termed literary or formal approaches. The productive emphasis on myth, ritual, and social experience has been undercut by an emphasis on texts or codes as a result of the influence of structuralism and semiotics on European researchers and theorists.
The text, in the content analysis of televisual communication' is analyzed as if it exists independently of maker, user, and analyst. The idealist emphasis is connected with the complex associations and assumptions characteristic of print.
The durability of the printed word seemed to give the written tradition an independence from any particular social or cultural locale, any discrete age or place. Paul Ricoeur suggests that writing lends discourse a peculiar
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autonomy and it is by analogy with the autonomy of texts that intellectuals begin to talk of the "autonomy" of superstructures and cultural traditions in general. In the mass of inscriptions a world of meaning is created which is parallel to, but nowhere wholly coincident with social and cultural realities....Because of the autonomy of texts and the much more obvious autonomy of the entire tradition from any particular social context, writing and print were seen as media of transcendence, a means by which individuals could remove themselves in mind from their social place.This severance of superstructures, of the world dependent upon documents, duplicable texts, and visual representations, from infrastructures, from the activities in which men reproduce the material conditions of their lives, is generally thought to be one of the characteristic marks of modern societies. (Leed 1980:55-56)
Conventionally, a performance is viewed as a product or thing that can be discussed independently of the constitutive relationships and capacities rendering the product meaningful. We often speak as if symbolic forms are miraculously snatched out of the air and given concrete form by a writer. At other times we proceed as if an analyst's reading of a performance is in the performance and that the meaning is the real meaning.
Typically, an analyst examines how codes and subcodes are deployed within the text and then makes statements about the meaning of the text in terms of the social context that generated it or in terms of the cultural themes it reflects.
However well conceived and executed, textual readings remain a variety of content analysis and as such suffer from the intractable problems of inference. It is one thing to argue that all cultural forms contain traces of the relations of production underlying their construction, and of the structural relations which surround them. It is quite another to go on and argue that analysis of form can deliver an adequate and satisfactory account
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of these sets of relations and of the determinations they exert on the production process. They can't. In our view, the sociology of culture and communication has been seriously incapacitated by the tendency to overprivilege texts as objects of analysis. (Golding and Murdock, 1979:206-07)
For people interested in the social and cultural character of performances, structuralist interpretations are particularly unconvincing. They often seem to reflect the categories of the analyst who is eager to illustrate the universal principles of ordering in the human mind. The categories, however, seem more often to be in the mind of the analyst. Even the work of Roland Barthes (1973), while critical and insightful, suffers from this characteristic.
One final major criticism is that studies of mass communication and popular culture have generally been pursued without an explicit or developed conception of society and culture. Research that does not take into account social and cultural processes, that deals solely with "communication, is necessarily limited and misleading. Golding and Murdock suggest we need ethnographic studies of mass media that view the communicative process as a social process and that consider both production and use:
In our view, the primary task of mass communications research is not to explore the meanings of media messages, but to analyze the social processes through which they are constructed and interpreted and the contexts and pressures that shape and constrain the constructions. To accomplish this, we certainly require more adequate theories and conceptual schemes, but they
need to be themes of social structure and social process, not themes of communication. (1980:72)
Given these insights, I have focused on the actual production process and described and analyzed the way the performances are shaped by the production process. This meant relating the performances and practices that generated them to the larger society in terms of organizational relationships, market competition, the hierarchical and collective nature of the work process, and the interaction with the audience.
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FICTIONS AS FRAMES
The fundamental premise of the study is that reality is a social construction that partakes of both social conditions and patterns of meaning or symbolic codes. I find it useful to employ the concept of framing as a way of discussing how experience is organized. Frames are fictions or symbolic forms that people use to make sense of the world and organize experience.
I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events--at least social ones--and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify. (Goffman 1974:10-11)
Goffman argues that humans have the ability to transform, that is, shift everyday, conventional activity to another context through keying and rekeying:
[We] have the capacity and inclination to use concrete, actual activity--activity that is meaningful in its own right--as a model upon which to work transformations for fun, deception, experiment, rehearsal, dream, fantasy, ritual, demonstration, analysis, and charity. These lively shadows of events are geared into the on-going world but not in quite the close way that is true of ordinary, literal reality. (1974:560)
The concept of key refers to the process of switching or transforming what is experienced and how it is identified and interpreted. A key is a "set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants as something quite else" (Goffman 1974:44).
While all human communicative interaction and experience involves makings or fictions, at times the boundaries between the fictions as frames become problematic and confusing. Play can stop being play, or what was considered a utilitarian, everyday article becomes a "work of art." Categories get crossed, genres become blurred (Geertz 1980); real life seems to be confused with a dramatic performance. People take a soap as real life, confuse the performers with the characters they play.
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Again, while all communicative expressions are fictions, we have been led to make fundamental distinctions between fictional and nonfictional constructions or creations. Some fictions, such as televised domestic comedies or soap operas, are generally clearly identifiable as such whereas other fictions such as news and documentary films are not. They are, in fact, labeled as nonfictional in nature. As Chaney says, They are fictions that deny their authorship."
The distinction between fiction and nonfiction provides a different grounding or persuasive basis for our assent, with implications for how we relate the experience to other frames for experience. At times, however, the boundaries are unclear and problematic. Historical fiction, docudramas, and the new journalism render the strength of our distinctions and convictions about categories suspect and, perhaps, frighteningly or amusingly arbitrary.
The strength of the common-sense distinction between fiction and nonfiction is reflected in the concentration on elitist or nonfictional knowledge in the sociology of knowledge and mass communication. As I noted earlier, European studies have traditionally dealt with specialized, intellectual, elitist knowledge whereas American research has dealt with opinions, attitudes, and so on, particularly as related to political decision making (Merton 1968). Only forms of consciousness or knowledge that are serious and real have been considered worthy of study.
Another consequence of this distinction is that content is largely considered as information, as either true, false, or harmful in its effect on behavior. This has prompted much discussion of the accuracy of news and documentaries as well as of fictional presentations. Truthfulness is assessed by the correspondence between a media event or product such as news and the real event. Fictional content is also assessed as information that is accurate or inaccurate and that is potentially effective in stimulating behavior.
The positivist bias and the desire to avoid subjectivity has had other consequences for the study of mediated communication. What people experience clearly depends upon their engagement or involvement in a performance, a point that applies to an academic analyst as well as to viewers in their home. Given this realization, we understand that the conventional reliance on coding categories of the analyst may not uncover what people actually experience (Gans 1980). Similarly, the tendency to view content as discrete bits of information that fit the analyst's categories and facilitate the quantification of the data" ignores the narrative frameworks, in and through which the content is meaningful (Peacock 1975:132).
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Whereas products/performances have an objective existence, the meaning/experience of them is a result of subjective engagement. But it is easier to focus on a product than on its meaning. That focus in turn makes it easier to proceed as if one were discussing a world independent of engagement and subjectivity. Just as we often proceed as if there were a world of facts that can be gathered like eggs in a basket, so we tend to ignore the constitutive nature of experience.
As a symbolic form the soap opera is potentially part of our experience. As part of a communication process, it is related to a range of social contexts, relationships, and patterns of meaning. The form is not reducible to a statement describing its content but is part of a participatory process. The traditional distinctions (both popular and scholarly) between producers-content-audience, with a message produced that is transmitted to the audience, can be replaced by a more wholistic and processual understanding.
Symbolic form is based on the cultural and social experience of the people who participate, whether they are producers, performers or audience. It breaks down these distinctions. Content analysis on the other hand suggests the creation of content by producers in terms set out by the traditional mass communication triad. (Elliott 1982:589)
Studying a performance entails linking all participants and considering how a performance or symbolic form articulates with associative patterns of meanings. Whereas a soap, for example, might be considered entertainment and escapism, as a form of expressive (mediated) culture, it can be linked to patterns of meanings as values, beliefs, and norms and as affording kinds of participation. Questions can be raised about the social relationships, values, beliefs, and norms expressed through soaps and about how they articulate with other realms of experience. Do they challenge or reaffirm particular patterns of meaning? Do they stimulate, resolve, and restimulate ideal expectations and related frustrations? Content, then, is not reducible to a summary descriptive statement of information in a program.
Similarly, if a symbolic form is part of a socially structured process, it can be related to a number of contexts and relationships, particularly contexts of production and use. Elliott (1972) proposes a useful way to explore these issues by relating various types of programming to society as
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source and to society as audience. Whereas he studied nonfictiona1 production largely in terms of the content as information, his general approach is applicable to fictional productions because it facilitates the exploration of the way the soap frame is made available to be experienced as a performance.
By looking at society as composed of different and potentially contending groups whose interests and values may vary, we can examine the realm of public fictions for evidence of these points of contention or agreement. Given the heterogeneity of groups and viewpoints in American society, it is clear that the world in a soap frame provides a very restricted and repetitive frame for experience and a very narrow view of social life. A crucial question is: why are some views ignored while others are incorporated or changed to fit within the frame of a soap? How soap production reflects or furthers contending forms and beliefs and/or encompasses such differences within the dominant frame is best understood by examining the actual production process and observing how and why the world in the frame takes on its characteristics.
Elliott (1972) developed a useful typology for examining how society is incorporated into a program and, thus, how the program provides a conception of society that ultimately is a resource through which people interpret and construct their world (see Table 1-1).
In the documentary Elliott observed being made, the production organization relied on personal contacts, legitimated organizations and representatives, and previously produced material in such a way that the production organization could get the job done easily but could also claim to have been unbiased and objective. They filtered what came from, or was constructed during, the production process.
I have studied soap production in an analogous manner by looking at the practices that not only constrain what becomes part of a performance but are themselves resources through which they are-generated. Soaps are fictional dramatic presentations that are created, but they must appeal to audiences and be believable and authoritative. Even though they are fictions, they must draw upon widely shared resources, including notions of what society is like or should be like embodied in nonfictional accounts such as news and documentaries.
Whereas a soap may be considered entertainment, it is also a form of public entertainment and thus open to the Potential criticisms and attacks of competing characterizations of life, or better competing life forms or cultural
Table 1-1
A Typology of Mass Communication
| Production Function |
|
|
|
| Scope of Production: Limited | |||
| Technical facilitation |
|
|
|
| Facilitation, selection |
|
|
|
| Selection, presentation |
|
|
|
| Selection, compilation |
|
|
|
| Realization, creation |
|
|
|
| Scope of Production: Extensive | |||
| Creation, origination |
|
|
|
Source: Elliott 1972:155
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worlds. The world in the soap
frame enters into public consciousness and self-consciousness,
becomes both a window on and a mirror of experience, and, as such,
a resource for constructing experience.
Proceed to Chapter 2