Transcultural Audience Research

Bremen.
The final speaker for the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference is Miriam Stehling, whose focus is on doing a comparative study of globally traded television formats; she’ll use the Top Model format as a case study. The key challenge here is to understand transculturality: new forms of cultural phenomena that go beyond or across cultures. There no longer is necessarily a congruence between culture and territory, and binary approaches to researching international communication cannot work here; instead, there needs to be a focus on similarities and connections between cultures.

Transculturality, then, requires new methods for empirical research, differentiating between transculturality as a research perspective and transculturality as practices of discourse and social action. Miriam’s study of global TV formats provides a perspective on this: there is a strategic transculturality that is used to maximise global profits, but also a transculturality of text (a common subject matter that makes sense for diverse audiences), and a transculturality of reception – in the production of transcultural meanings and/or in transcultural modes of reception.

The format of such TV products provides a constant stimulus here. Such products have a world-wide audience, and for each local instance of a global TV format, similar practices of discourse and social action exist within different cultural contexts. But there is little direct communication between viewers from different countries.

In a transcultural approach, then, specific countries should be seen as cultural contexts for the reception of global TV formats, rather than as unified entities; it is important, though, that they be broadly comparable in order to be able to identify meaningful similarities and differences. It is also important to standardise research methods, and to ensure that the investigation is appropriately contextualised, at each stage of the production of meaning.

Reception needs to be understand as an interpretive appropriation of texts that takes into account cultural preconditions, cultural and social conditions for media use and reception, and individual conditions for use; these may be local, national, and global factors. A transcultural approach to audience research means thinking beyond mere differences.