CyberneticsA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWethnographic (approach to audience
measurement); response codes.
▶Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Studying
Popular Culture (Routledge, 2000); Graeme Turner,
Understanding Celebrity (Sage, 2004); Annette
Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual
Television (Routledge, 2005); P. David Marshall, ed.,
Celebrity Culture Reader (Routledge, 2006); Anita
Biressi and Heather Nunn, eds, Th e Tabloid Culture
Reader (Open University, 2007); Sean Redmond and
Su Holmes, eds, Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader
(Sage, 2007); Matt Briggs, Television, Audience and
Everyday Life (Open University, 2009).
Cultures of organizations See organization
cultures.
Custom audience research That which is
commissioned or undertaken by a company
or client into audience response to the media
marketing of its product or services, generally
targeting specific media outlets. Such studies
produce rich, focused data while at the same
time incurring doubts concerning the objectivity
of that data. In contrast, syndicated studies are
grander in scope as, like the Nielson ratings, they
measure the audiences of multiple media outlets
of audience response.
As Peter V. Miller says in ‘Made-to-order and
standardized audiences: forms of reality in audi-
ence measurement’ published in Audiencemak-
ing: How the Media Create the Audience (Sage,
1994), edited by James S. Ettema and D. Charles
Whitney, ‘the unique, made-to-order nature of
the custom study is both its chief benefi t and its
major cost’. He goes on, ‘Th e syndicated study
offers comparative, longitudinal information
about audiences that can be used to sell advertis-
ing space and time. Unlike the custom study, the
syndicated eff ort provides the advertisers with
a standard way to judge alternative vehicles for
their messages.’ See audience measurement.
Cybernetics Th e study of communication feed-
back systems in human, animal and machine.
Taken from the Greek for ‘steersman’, the term
was the invention of American Norbert Wiener,
author of Cybernetics: Or Control and Commu-
nication in the Animal and the Machine (Wiley,
1949). Essentially an interdisciplinary study,
cybernetics ranges in its interest from control
systems of the body to the monitoring and
control of space missions. Cybernetics concerns
itself with the analysis of ‘whole’ systems, their
complexity of goals and hierarchies within
contexts of perpetual change. Th e Greek steers-
man used the feedback of visual, aural and tactile
indicators to chart his passage through rough
seas. Today we have computers: the potential foras Whitehall, the Monarchy, the courts and
Parliament. Th is deference also helps create and
supports consensus against ‘enemies’, against
foreign rivals, in war or in business. See jour-
nalism.
Culture: popular culture Something of a
redundant term in that all culture is to a degree
‘popular’; otherwise, if it is ‘unpopular’ – that is,
if it does not attract or involve an audience – it
vanishes. Th e term has come to mean the culture
of ‘ordinary people’, of the working class, the
non-elite majority as contrasted with so-termed
high or highbrow culture. Popular culture gener-
ally signifi es cohesion, high culture diff erence
- diff erence, that is, from popular culture and
those with whom it is associated.
Popular culture has traditionally been looked
down on as something banal, trashy, unchalleng-
ing or even potentially harmful: an elite stand-
point. In their time, theatricals, dancing, ‘pulp
fi ction’, the press, posters, postcards, comics,
soap opera, the hit-parade and the cinema have
varyingly been defined as the kind of culture
which contains the potential for subversion –
usually of ‘standards’.
According to the French philosopher Pierre
Bourdieu, popular culture is basically associated
with that section of the population who lack
both economical and cultural capital. Since
at least the 1960s popular culture has become
the focus of critical attention and re-evaluation:
it is studied – analysed, measured; in short,
taken seriously.
In Cultures and Societies in a Changing World
(Pine Forge Press, 1994), Wendy Griswold writes,
‘Scholars examining previously despised works,
genres and systems of meaning found them to
contain complexities and beauties; at the same
time, deconstructing previously esteemed
works, genres and systems of meaning, they
found widespread representations of class, hege-
mony, patriarchy, and illegitimate canonization.’
Culture, whether popular or ‘elitist’, cultivates,
hence its fascination for researchers, commenta-
tors and students of media. Television, it has
been claimed, has appropriated popular culture
and by doing so redefined the term to mean
‘that which is popular on TV’. The nature of
participation by the populace in generating and
taking part in popular culture has not been lost
on TV programme-makers: audience participa-
tion is the key to popular quiz and competition
programmes and to so-termed ‘reality’ tv
series, in many cases turning that which tradi-
tionally has been private and intimate into public
display. See audience: active audience;