Television and American Culture: The Mass Medium and the Pluralist Audience

The study explores the potential influence of television on trends toward cultural homogenization in American society. Depth interviews focused on two variables: the analytic response-viewers' thoughts about the program itself, including, for example, comments on how plot elements relate to the program as a whole or the character of the script or acting, and the interpretive response-viewers' thoughts about the program's relevance to their own lives or broader issues of society and culture. The data support the hypothesis of cultural homogenization revealing similar indices of analytic and interpretive response across educational levels. W. Russell Neuman is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Communications Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, 1980. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 46:471-487 ? 1982 by the Trustees of Columbia University Published by ElsevierScience Publishing Co., Inc. 0033-362X/82/0046-471/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 05:56:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 472 W. RUSSELL NEUMAN ratings point for one program over the course of a year amounts to a potential 15-million-dollar loss in revenues for the network. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the television phenomenon from a sociological point of view is its universality. Television is socially defined as the culture of the masses. And although professors, professionals, and the educated elite in general may claim to have time only for occasional news, sports, and a play or concert on the public channel, the recurrent implication of systematic research is that they watch the same situation comedies and action adventure programs just about as often as their neighbors in blue collars and hard hats (Wilensky, 1965). As Hirsch has put it, television has come to provide a "centrally produced, standardized and homogenous culture" (1978, 400). Social scientists, however, have devoted surprisingly little attention to the long-term impact of this core of shared experience in our society. To what extent has television become a major force of social integration and cultural uniformity? Are individuals from diverse social and cultural backgrounds really responding in the same ways to these common cultural forms? We find that better educated viewers watch slightly less television than the less well educated-about three minutes less per day for each additional year of formal education-but the types of programs viewed are virtually identical.' Are better educated viewers more attentive and do they draw on extensive exposure to literature, theater, and cinema in responding to the television they see? In an attempt to explore whether people from diverse backgrounds who watch the same program actually see the same program, we designed a depth interview technique based on a series of increasingly structured questions about which elements in a program stand out in viewers' minds and how they evaluate what they have seen. Transcripts of these interviews were systematically coded to derive quantitative measures of the attentiveness as well as the level of analytic and interpretive thinking among various social groups in response to a random sample of prime-time television programming. The analysis focuses on four questions: (1) Is television thought-provoking? (2) Is the response to television differentiated by educational level? (3) Does the level of response vary across program types, or was McLuhan right after all, that the medium pretty much determines the I The three-minutes-per-day figure is derived from Bower (1973), Table 6-2, p. 132. Some studies have suggested that longer working hours and more out-of-house social activities rather than cultural tastes explain the small negative relationship between education and television exposure (Samuelson, et al., 1963). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 05:56:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms TELEVISION AND AMERICAN CULTURE 473 message? (4) To what extent do the expectations and attitudes of the viewer (the "social definition of television") influence the medium's impact?