Core Post #4 - Week 6

 This week I chose to dive deeper into Seiter’s article on qualitative audience research. The consideration of ethnographic methods towards the producing of media research around television caught my attention, but also made me realize the gap/consideration in how invasive ethnographic methods are to non-white communities. It made me weary, especially of how vulnerable non-white communities are to these academics interested in surveying the viewing habits of folks that do not control or have claim to the images of themselves on screen.  As I continued to read, the exploration of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding began to lessen my anxiety toward ethnographic methods and provided a nuance based the allegiance that viewers have to ideologies. “The encoding/decoding model insists on the Strule involved in gaining people’s agreement with ideology; both because television is complex in how it tells stories and because how people read television will necessarily be based on their own experiences,” (Seiter, 465). With this preface, I thought the case study presented by Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis of The Cosby Show was particularly engaging. It was very clear about the functioning of encoding/decoding as it applied to audience research and their viewing of The Cosby Show.  “In some ways. The Cosby study tells us little about television itself, since the researchers were eager to move beyond the subtleties of audience interpretation to get to the more important overarching theme of racism. The danger in such a design is that television is used as a mere pretext for conversation and insufficient attention is given to the complexities of television form,” (Seiter, 467). And even now with the deeply complicated positioning of Cosby’s legacy, it is interesting to see the success of the show Blackish, which has modeled itself in the production format similar to The Cosby Show. Outside of structural similarities (two-parent upper-middle class household, house full of kids and the success of spin-offs), Blackish differs by not including anti-Black rhetoric that was spewed through The Cosby Show, but they still are operating from an upper class narrative. I’d wonder what that encoding/decoding process would look like for this show