John Fiske (media scholar)

John Fiske (born 1939) is a media scholar who has taught around the world. He was a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His areas of interest include cultural studies, popular culture, media semiotics and television studies. He is the author of eight books, including Power Plays, Power Works (1993), Understanding Popular Culture (1989), Reading the Popular (1989), and the influential Television Culture (1987). Fiske also acts as a media critic, examining how cultural meaning is created in American society, and how debates over issues such as race are handled in different media. In May 2008, Fiske received an Honorary Degree from the University of Antwerp.

Fiske was educated in Britain. After graduating from Cambridge University he taught throughout the world including Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. He was the general editor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University in Western Australia, Australia during the 1980s to early 1990s. He is the author of books on television studies on popular culture and mass media. Fiske's books analyze television shows as "texts" to examine the different layers of meaning and sociocultural content. Fiske disagrees with the theory that mass audiences consume the products that are offered to them without thought. Fiske rejects the notion of "the audience" which assumes an uncritical mass. He instead suggests "audiences" with various social backgrounds and identities enabling them to receive texts differently.

Fiske's 1987 textbook on television, Television Culture, introduces the subject of television studies by examining the economic and cultural issues and the theory and text-based criticism. It also gives an overview of the arguments by British, American, Australian and French scholars. It was "one of the first books about television to take seriously the feminist agenda that has been so important to the recent development of the field." Fiske is considered one of the first scholars applying semiotics to media texts following the tradition of poststructuralism, and coined the term semiotic democracy.

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