From "audience Control" To "audience Autonomy"

The word "Audience" has become a conspicuous tag since1930s. Numerous scholars from different fields of research had been using it very often while discussing and researching. In the research of communication, all the definitions regarding the target of audience, social category, consumer, commodity, decoder etc., has been constantly changing with the various kinds of visions. According to the overall tendency, the transition of the field of vision reflected the characteristic. The audience were used to be considered as passive, unrational, now they are once more defined as the aggressive, interactive, rational people and custom. The media were used to be defined to consider more about itself, now the audience become has taken the place. More cultural aspects were considered although the social facts were used to be the most important key to the media study.Based on the audience research, the "empirical school"and "critical school"are the two main schools. Denis McQuail has defined it by the research target:whether the target for "audience control"or "audience autonomy".Different value orientation would lead to different formula. Those formulas are influenced by the local culture of TV industry and media atmosphere. Any school is based on the ideology of the country, and defined where the main focus should be, which norm or evaluation system would be operated. Now days in China, the main key standard norm of audience research in the field of TV industry is the rating. The actual interest of the audience was hidden behind the simple rigid rating data. The attitude of the audience was ignored and this caused a problem:the culture function of the TV industry is stuck in the simple data. In this paper, the main develop process in China and abroad has been concluded regarding the key words "audience","audience research","television culture" and "media". Based on the development of the relationship between the audience research and the television culture, four maintain historical stages were defined in this paper:? sounding each other out; ? unbalance between knowledge and operating;? Studying the lost culture; ? Looking for the overall merit. Through these four stages, the history of the audience research in China could be clarified. We could understand the actual situation of the audience research against this background. The background is society with newly developing market economy, industrialization of the media, great growth of the new digital media. Also the facts of the audience research (media study) in Europe and North America were studied for reference in this paper. This would help us to build our own media evaluation system which would be much more scientific, tridimensional, and become a daily data stream in the study. The MIRC's media research project finished in2010was set as the study case for this paper. In this case, the radio and the television audience were studied, and not only the rating was studied but also a difficult problem had been solved. For the first time in China, the attitude and the rating data was collected from the same panel and the data is covered the three important characteristics:instantaneous data, quantification and isogeny. Then the signality of the result in this study was explained in this paper. It also given out the answer why the attitude should be studied and the actual value of the attitude study. The necessity of the attitude study which is done by the new method is based on certain media theory. In this paper, the corresponding theory, developing situation, research methodology and mechanism innovation were also considered for how a new media research system and the audience study should be built in China.This paper is based on mass communication,radio and television art, sociology, psychology, statistics and other cross transdisciplinary theory. Applying documentary method, comparative method, quantitative and qualitative approach and other methods, the author penetrated deeply to the relationship between audience research and television culture. The audience research is always playing a dominate roll to change the television culture. While the globalization is processing rapidly these years, the relationship between audient and media is still full of variable. It would be too early to give out the conclusion now. We are on way to explore the truth.