Polysemic Text

Polysemic text refers to the idea that any text can have multiple meanings rather than a single meaning. Although the concept of polysemic text seems simple, researchers and theorists have examined and debated a number of questions regarding polysemy. For example, are the meanings of a text potentially endless? Are some texts more semiotically open than others (through the use of reflexivity, parody, or nonnarrative style)? Are some meanings more likely or commonsensical, given the impact of ideology on discourse and audiences? How active or free are audiences when interpreting texts? What method or methods are best for assessing the polysemic nature of texts? Do some variables, such as age, gender, race, and class, shape interpretation more than other variables? Scholars interested in semiotics, rhetoric, and reader-response theory, as well as those working within cultural and media studies, have examined these questions.

The catalyst for investigating the polysemic text emerged from three different scholarly strands: children and television reception research, research on [Page 271]media audiences' uses and gratifications, and reader-response theory.

Challenging the thought that children's processing of media messages on television requires no interpretation, empirical research found that watching television teaches children to be visually literate in the same way that reading makes them book literate.

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The literature on children's interpretation of media messages challenged the notion that meaning, particularly in television, is commonsensical and requires no interpretation. Instead, empirical research demonstrated that children watching television learn to be visually literate, not unlike how they become book literate. Research in this tradition also examined how children's level of sophistication in interpretation grows with developmental age.

Empirical media scholarship in the area of uses and gratification also spurred inquiry regarding textual polysemy. This voluminous body of research repeatedly demonstrated how motivated and selective viewers—active audiences—make decisions about what to view and what it means in the light of their needs and the gratifications they receive from these media choices.

Reader-response theory, a branch of literary studies, proved an additional influence. This paradigm criticized literary criticism's traditional focus on high culture, authorial intention, and the interpretation of canonical literary texts at the expense of popular literature and readers' responses to it. Challenging the notion that meaning exists in the text, critics asserted the importance of examining the text-audience interaction. Influenced by the work of Wolfgang Iser and Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly Bakhtin's idea of heteroglossia (referring to texts potentially speaking with “many voices”), this perspective influenced media studies by hastening the shift from a text-based or content-analytical approach to television to a focus on the moment of reception between text and audience.

These three strands of research led to a growth in the 1980s and 1990s of empirically based audience reception research, which emphasized the active viewer's partaking in a complex process of negotiating meaning. Suddenly media texts, no longer monolithic, were polysemic and open for interpretation. Some critical mass communication scholars argued that by focusing on the role of ideology and institutional power in shaping meaning, critics in this tradition minimized or ignored the audience's interpretive role and the potential openness of texts. Similarly, others criticized much of the work by media effects researchers, who, in attempting to account for the extent and magnitude of media impact on audiences' beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, had increasingly relied on impoverished notions of media texts and the contexts in which they are interpreted.

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