"Understanding Media Users discusses approaches to audiences which maintain that viewers actively interpret content, a perspective to be distinguished not only from structuralist media theory but from passive audience “effects studies.” Effects studies consist of research conceptually articulated from a predominantly US behaviorist perspective. In these accounts, akin to “bullet” or “hypodermic needle” theory of media content’s mechanically pushing viewers’ behavior, events on screen are a two-dimensional cause of three-dimensional consequences. Media stimulate a passive response not mediated by viewer reflection. Active audience theory has been consistently criticized as indeterminate (Roscoe et al., 1995). What do we mean when we (favorably) characterize an audience as “active”? In answering this question we can turn to the philosophical psychology of phenomenology and its literary offspring, reader reception theory. Here, interest focuses on the media user’s activity of “reading” screen narrative. Research perceives the audience’s making sense of content as a structured cognitive – sometimes very expressive – process. Emphasizing the viewer’s achievement in making a program intelligible, such hermeneutic (Devereux, 2003: 96) media analysis asks the question: what are the enabling conditions of successfully coming to understand screen text? In answering we focus upon cross-cultural consumption of television or Internet. Taking phenomenology on board, media user theory enables the multisite research exemplars set out in this book. We can integrate active audience theory’s political emphasis on audience perceptions of their “positioning” by the screen and philosophy’s account of the cognitive activity with which “readers” meet such alignment of viewers by texts. This reading process is hermeneutic – media users render cellphone and cyberspace narrative meaningful." (Introduction, page 3)