On John Fiske's Media Cultural Theory

This thesis makes a detailed exposition of John Fiske's media cultural theory , a famous theoretician of media and one of the representative figures of the school of Cultural Studies since 1980's. Fiske drawed a analogy between modern mass media and the bard of Middle Ages, then, pointed out that mass media has a function which moulds collective culture. Under the influence of Gramscis's theory of " hegemony", he thinks that media text is open space with diverse meaning and regards media text as popular producerly text through using the concept of "open/ciosed" text of Eco and "writerly/readerly" text of Barthes. On the basis of inheriting the theory of "encoding and decoding" of Hall, he also absorbs the theory of "resisting" of Decerteacc. Then, he thinks that audience don't simply passively absorb while contacting media, but have a kind of strong positive initiative, can "produce" and "consume" the meaning from the text according to their own demand. Fiske's theory gives us a great deal of enlightenment ,but there are some defects, and his theory was developed in western capitalist society. So when we absorb and make use of his theory, we should carry on explaining and transformation creatively to it proceeding from our realistic national conditions in order to establish its legitimacy and rationality in our native country.