The Impact of Soap Operas on Different Audiences

The University of Tuzla

Faculty of Philosophy

Department of English Language and Literature

Introduction to British Cultural Studies Ι

The Impact of Soap Operas on Different Audiences

Professor:                                                                                                              Student:

Dr.sc. Jasmina Husanovic, vanr. prof.                                                                EdinaVehabović

                                                   [pic 1]

                                                 Tuzla, June 2015

The Impact of Soap Operas on Different Audiences

• Introduction

Television became very important in everyday life. It has a great impact on people of all ages and from different social backgrounds. It affects ones opinion and belief, habits and behaviour, style of talking and dressing, and body language. People who control media, who create television programmes/  the message are those who decide what kind of message is going to be sent. Ideals and views of the creator and of the receiver of the message are not the same, because people are different, they perceive and think differently. One of the forms of entertainment media are soap operas. Soap operas have impact on people, it can be good or bad, it depends on the person. The aim of this essay is to critically analyze the impact of soap operas on different audiences.

• Soap Opera

A Soap opera is a dramatic serial broadcast mainly intended to entertain. The name was originally coined in the United States Radio serials of the 1930’s, which were sponsored, in large part, by Procter and Gamble, the soap corporation whose advertisements were primarily aimed at the female audience especially housewives and working woman. Subsequently the term ‘Soap Opera’ came to be associated with a melodramatic style of drama serials. ^[1]

• Encoding, Decoding

Stuart Hall's influential essay offers a densely theoretical account of how messages are produced and disseminated, referring particularly to television. He suggests a four-stage theory of communication: production, circulation, use (which here he calls distribution or consumption), and reproduction.

The 'object' of these practices is meanings and messages in the form of sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of communication or language, through the operation of codes within the syntagmatic chain of a discourse. The apparatuses, relations and practices of production thus issue, at a certain moment (the moment of ,production/ circulation') in the form of symbolic vehicles constituted within the rules of 'language'. It is in this discursive form that the circulation of the 'product' takes place. The process thus requires, at the production end, its material instruments - its 'means' - as well as its own sets of social (production) relations - the organization and combination of practices within media apparatuses. But it is in the discursive form that the circulation of the product takes place, as well as its distribution to different audiences. Once accomplished, the discourse must then be translated - transformed, again - into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective. If no 'meaning' is taken, there can be no 'consumption'. If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. The value of this approach is that while each of the moments, in articulation, is necessary to the circuit as a whole, no one moment can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is articulated. Since each has its specific modality and conditions of existence, each can constitute its own break or interruption of the 'passage of forms' on whose continuity the flow of effective production (that is, 'reproduction') depends. ^[2]

• David Morley “ The Nationwide Audience“

In the NWA study his major concern was 'with the extent to which individual interpretation of programmes could be shown to vary systematically in relation to... socio-cultural background' (1981b, p 56). He was investigating 'the degree of complementarity between the codes of the programme and the interpretive codes of various sociocultural groups... [and] the extent to which decodings take place within the limits of the preferred (or dominant) manner in which the message has been initially encoded' (1983, p. 106).