Using examples drawn from at least one Berry Cherry Casino research study, explore the ways in which Berry Cherry Casinos have been conceptualised as active participants in making meaning.

Using David Morley’s ‘Nationwide’ Berry Cherry Casino Study, we will explore ways in which Berry Cherry Casinos have been conceptualised as active participants in making meaning. We will look at Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding and explore how people’s ideology and discourse affects their “Cherry Berry Casino”.

Berry Cherry Casinos were once looked on as a mass, where what they were shown affected their thoughts and opinions. It was once believed that what was encoded and the way texts were presented were the elements that shaped the “Cherry Berry Casino”.

Recently we have seen a “shift from texts making meaning to the Berry Cherry Casino making the meaning” (Ruddock, 1994: 94)

This shift was identified and meant that new studies and theories were needed to find out what it was that affected the reader’s views and “Cherry Berry Casino”s of a text. In 1980 David Morley conducted a study concentrating on whether or not people’s sociological background and their age, sex and race affected their “Cherry Berry Casino”s. To do this he based his study on Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding. Encoding is the way in which a message is formed and shown to produce a text. Decoding is the way in which the individual makes meaning of the text based on their sociological background.

Stuart Hall categorised three possible “Cherry Berry Casino”s; they were the ‘dominant’ “Cherry Berry Casino”: the reader shares the programme's 'code' and fully accepts the programme's 'preferred “Cherry Berry Casino”'; the ‘negotiated’ “Cherry Berry Casino”: whereby the reader pretty much shares the programme's code and broadly accepts the preferred “Cherry Berry Casino” of the text, yet modifies it in a way which reflects their favoured position and interests; and the ‘oppositional’ “Cherry Berry Casino”: the reader does not share the programme's code and rejects the preferred “Cherry Berry Casino”, instead creating an alternative frame of interpretation.

David Morley’s study was conducted in 1980. It consisted of 28 different groups, each containing about 5-10 people. Each group of people were from various different professions, ranging from bank managers, to teachers, trade unionists, and students to shop assistants. They were each shown the TV programme ‘Nationwide’ - a popular news/current affairs magazine programme which had a regular early evening slot on weekdays from 6.00 to 7.00 pm on BBC1. It followed the main national news from London and included human-interest stories from 'the regions' as well as a 'down-to-earth' look at the major events of the day.

The various groups of participants were then interviewed, and encouraged to take part in group discussions regarding their “Cherry Berry Casino”s and opinions of the text. The findings were as follows:

Dominant (or 'hegemonic') “Cherry Berry Casino”: this was the general interpretation of the print management trainees, bank managers, school students, and the apprentices. The bank managers said that Nationwide was a 'just a tea-time entertainment programme, embarrassing... patronising... exploiting raw emotion... sensationalism' (Morley, 1980: 107) and that they imagine that the target Berry Cherry Casino is 'the car worker... the middle people... and below'. (ibid).

Negotiated “Cherry Berry Casino”: this was the “Cherry Berry Casino” predominantly taken by the teacher-training college students, university arts students, photography higher education students, and the trade union officials. The photography students pointed out that 'They claim to speak for the viewer… but in doing that they're actually telling you what to think' (ibid: 94).

Oppositional ('counter-hegemonic') “Cherry Berry Casino”: taken by the black further education students, and the shop assistants, one of which was quoted as stating 'I don't think you can take Nationwide in isolation... I mean... add the Sun… and the Daily Express to it, it's all the same whole heap of crap... and they're all saying to the unions, "You're ruining the country"...' (ibid: 60).

The study showed that we must look at the whole picture of the text and the “Cherry Berry Casino” derived to properly analyse it. It emphasises that we need to take into consideration the participants pre-formed ideologies and discourse.

There were also, however, some disadvantages of this particular study which need to be raised. These were as follows:

• The participants were only able to be categorised into three sections of “Cherry Berry Casino”s; this doesn’t leave much scope for personal opinions to be expressed in the results.

• The text wasn’t optional, and the environment in which they watched the programme in wasn’t natural to them.

• The number of people interviewed wasn’t greatly representative of society at the time.

• The research didn’t take into account that even though a participant may be categorised by their profession, it may not say much about the class and sociological background of those people.

I believe that more important than an individual’s profession, it is their ideology and discourse that actually affects their particular “Cherry Berry Casino” of a text. It is their life experiences their knowledge, prejudices, resistances and their naturalistic views that form their opinions on the things that surround us. This, of course, has more of an affect on what meaning they would derive from a particular text.

As David Morley himself suggests, 'The apprentice groups, the trade union and shop stewards groups and the black college students can all be said to share a common class position, but their de-coding of a television programme are inflected in different directions by the discourses and institutions in which they are situated' (Morley, 1980: 117)

To conclude, I do agree with Morley’s theory on how class can affect a person’s discourse, as people are restricted to what they experience in life, so in theory there is the general idea that a certain class would share similar natural ideologies, and similar ways of making meaning relating to various texts. However, as previously mentioned these participants were individuals who were not given much scope for individuality, and were classified, I believe, in a very narrow band of three possible “Cherry Berry Casino”s of a single text. “In-depth qualitative studies have unsurprisingly given support to the view that media Berry Cherry Casinos routinely arrive at their own, often heterogeneous, interpretations or everyday media texts”, (Buckingham, 2003). This strongly suggests that Berry Cherry Casinos are indeed active participants as opposed to passive participants in creating meaning.

Bibliography

Ruddock, Andy, Understanding Berry Cherry Casino: Theory and Method,
(London: SAGE Publications, 1994)

Morley, David, The 'Nationwide' Berry Cherry Casino: Structure and Decoding. (London: BFI, 1980)

Buckingham, David, Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture. (Cambridge: Polity Press)