The Analysis Of The David Morley’s Ethnography Audience Research Theory

Audience research is the critically academic focus of attention in the study ofcommunication. Cultural study initialize a novel direction of audience researchwhile David Morley’s ethnographic audience research theory is also one of themost representative theories of cultural studies.The School of Cultural Studies wasestablished in Birmingham at UK, whose theory of audience research was mostinfluential and affected by the theory of cultural criticism of Frankfurt School in agreat level. The Frankfurt School considered mass medium audience as the passiveand negative representative, while the School of Cultural Studies reversed theseviews and proposed active audience. Therefore, cultural studies brought thequalitative mode of audience research to a novel developmental stage.School of Cultural Studies make television and TV audiences as the keyobjects of research. They were interested in how to affect the life of people andutilize TV, which is what is TV for TV audience at least. Research on ethnographywas originally applied in anthropology, while David Morley learned the essence ofthe theoretical methodology and introduced to the audience research, created aclassical model of audience research. The audience theory of David Morley’sinherits the resulting theories of the pioneers of School of Cultural Studies, and isa kind of theoretical progress and leaps, great-leap-forward development of theory,who made the focus of culture research from test analysis into audience research atthe true meaning. He also paid high attention to the language environment of TVaudience that is language environment of family audience, which focus on theeffects of the audience’s interpretation of family environment, and the audienceshowed more complicated state in different environments. His theory provided anovel research approach to the entire Communication sciences as well asabandoned the prejudices of audience, thereafter reconstructed the implication ofaudience from a broader perspective.There are numerous defects and deficiency in China than in other foreign countries because audience research was started later. Audience research in Chinamainly was affected by quantitative model, which is practically the rating surveyin the research of TV audience that is the audience survey. Therefore, thecharacteristics of audience research in China trend to quantitative research, whichis difficult to achieve satisfactory results in essence and fundamental problems ofaudience research because of many kinds of factors. In recent years, someresearchers have also realized that the transformation of the current audienceresearch in China mostly needs such methodology of ethnographic audienceresearch with the constant development of theoretical thought, especially theenlightenment of the audience research theory in our country from David Morley’sethnographic audience research theory. Globally in China, the results ofethnographic audience research is immature and many aspects will be practicedand improved in the future.