Chris M. Worsnop

Voice is more than the vocal tones used to communicate. It includes the impression made by the speaker, the relationship established between the speaker and listener, and much more.

UK scholar, Douglas Barnes, remarked in his book From Communication to Curriculum, that every human utterance contains at least two sets of information. The first is the factual content of the utterance, and the second is a social message which contains information about who the speaker assumes him or herself to be, who the listener is assumed to be, and what the relationship between the speaker and listener is assumed to be. The concept of voice, therefore, is intimately involved with the concept of audience and social relationships between authors and readers.

We could call this part of the communication the intent to separate it from the content.

Cultural studies scholars use the terms locate and position to describe how authors approach audiences and audiences approach texts. Authors make assumptions about audiences and try to position them or place them in a relationship with the text. Advertisements are classic examples of texts that try to position their audience.

Audiences the readers of texts approach texts with their own agendas and expectations, based upon what they know about the author and the text already, and also on their own experience. If an audience approaches a film positions or locates itself – expecting the text to challenge and inform the intellect and finds instead that it tries to sell a product, the match between the author and the audience is a poor one. If the author knows the audience consists of young children, yet insists on using language and concepts completely beyond their grasp, then the match between author and audience is a failure.

Every text has both an intended audience (target audience) as well as an intended (dominant) meaning. But because audiences and their responses to texts are so varied, dominant meanings are very frequently altered in the audience’s perception/response. This is an important reason for disputing effects theories in media education.

Granted, many texts target or position audiences as victims of their dominant meaning this much of the effects theory may be valid. What does not work, though, is the assumption takes the audience for granted as if it were some unitary, amorphous mass, lounging in lumpen obesity on innumerable sagging sofas, surrounded by snack food and oceans of sugary water, with scarcely the energy or initiative to thumb the remote control, just waiting for the media to sneak up and damage them.

These media education models seem never to credit the audience with intelligence, discrimination, imagination, critical insight or significant personal experience. There is hardly a sign of any awareness of the variety of audiences or of audience responses to any single media text – just an assumption that media can harm audiences in a hypodermic fashion. The audience is not seen as a participant in a process, but as the victim on the receiving end of a cause-effect relationship.