Post-Network Audience Reception, Media Ethnography, and The Wire as Culturally Legitimated Prime-time Drama

• In Event: 236 - Regular Session. Cultural Studies

Abstract

This paper employs multiple qualitative methods to examine the relationship between middle-class audiences and the reception practices associated with culturally legitimated content in the post-network era. The differing understandings of HBO's The Wire (2002-2008) by undergraduates at Urban State College (USC) and those at High Prestige University (HPU) are indicative of the class-stratified engagement associated with traditional cultural hierarchies. Among USC students enrolled in “American Society and Mass Media,” data gathered through media ethnography reveals that The Wire is understood as television through subjective evaluative frameworks. In contrast, HPU students distance the show and themselves from television's longstanding marginalization by invoking the legitimating discourses associated with the medium's recently elevated status. The author argues that such post-network reception practices should be understood as part of the broader social processes of cultural legitimation including the social consequences associated with the emergence of classed niche audiences.

Author

• Michael Wayne, University of Virginia