Studying Television Audiences psychologists and sociologists presented a contradictory picture. Discoveries regarding individual psychological differences and social categories enabled media researchers to formulate concepts such as selective exposure, selective perception, and selective retention which, in turn, led them to believe that the effects of mass media were limited. 96 The most influential perspective in the limited effects tradition is the uses and gratifications school of mass communication research. Arising primarily out of a critique of the deterministic assumptions of the effects approach, this perspective focuses on 'what people do with the media' rather than on 'what the media do to the people' (Katz, 1959; McQuail, 1991). Influenced by Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this perspective suggested that motivated by differential needs and interests, people expose themselves selectively to particular media content, resulting in need gratification. This view represented the audience as active readers, listeners, and viewers sifting through a wide array of media alternatives and making conscious, deliberate choices. This perspective was a major advance in the field of mass communication as it took scholars away from the conception of the audience as a homogenized mass that responds to media messages in similar ways. It also held out the possibility that a media text could contain multiple meanings and emphasized the role of the audience in constructing those meanings. However, the functionalistic character of the approach (what Blumler, et al (1986) called "vulgar gratificationalism") and its conservatism, allowing producers of 'bad' media content to claim that they are only fulfilling the needs of the people, have come under criticism. A significant shortcoming of the uses and gratifications approach is its psychologistic orientation, relying on mental states, needs and motives, abstracted from the social situation of the individuals. Although the audience reception of media messages is not conceived in mechanistic stimulus-response terms (as in the effects tradition),-the audience is still conceived as an atomized mass, removed from groups, subcultures, socio-economic structure, and shared cultural codes. Further, the conduciveness of a text to audience interpretations may have been exaggerated by the uses and gratifications approach. As Stuart Hall (1973) cautions, "polysemy must not be confused with pluralism." He suggests that every media message is "structured in dominance" by what he called "the preferred reading." In his famous essay, "Encoding/Decoding," Hall argues, with particular reference to television discourse, that the coding of a message does control its reception, but with each stage of communication (i.e., production, circulation, consumption, and reproduction) having its own determining limits and possibilities. He then offers three hypothetical forms of decoding that might occur in audience interaction with television texts: (a) the acceptance by the viewer of the message in the same terms of reference in which it is framed or the preferred reading; (b) a negotiated decoding which involves acceptance of the dominant ideology at a more general, abstract level, and opposition insofar as it is applied to the particular situation in which the viewer is located; and (c) oppositional decoding within an alternative frame of reference. This analysis has allowed Hall to introduce a semiotic framework into a social context, providing a critical impetus to both textual and ethnographic work. This was to form Journal of Arts 6' Ideas