Audiences and Television Soap Operas (Women’s Readings of Parvaz- Dar- Hobab)

Mohammadi, Jamal

doi:10.7508/ijcr.2008.02.004

Audiences and Television Soap Operas (Women’s Readings of Parvaz- Dar- Hobab)

Author

Jamal Mohammadi

Assistant professor of Sociology, University of Kurdistan

10.7508/ijcr.2008.02.004

Abstract

This research is an attempt to explain how audiences read and decode the dominant or preferred reading of television soap operas ( here, one of them named : Parvaz Dar Hobab ). The main problem of this research is that in what way TV soap operas prefer or make dominant some meanings, ideas and values and how audiences interpret and decode these meanings and ideas and values. From this viewpoint, a soap opera is an articulation constructed of different, and sometimes contrast, elements which are unified around a nodal point. In other words, a television soap opera is an articulatory discourse which is constructed through some technical, social and ideological codes by hegemonic system. In a TV soap opera, as a discourse, some ideas and meanings are preferred over the others. The question is that how social subjects, who have an objective position in the social structure, read and decode these dominant ideas and meanings? In this research, in the first part we have used the semilogical- structuralist method to explain the preferred reading of TV soap operas, and in the second part we used focused group interview to study women readings. To mention one of the conclusions of this research, we can say that this soap opera attempts to hide that social nihilism which is the main factor of addiction. Most of the audiences have an oppositional reading of this problem.

Keywords

Decding

Discourse

Encoding

Hegemony

Interpellation

Organic Ideology

Power Bloc

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