Let me tell us who I am - The discursive construction of viewer identity

Previous reception analytic research has tended to either neglect identity construction or portray it as some form of distortion which obscures the real opinions and behaviours of the participants. The current study draws upon the work of both Bakhtin and Billig to suggest that identity construction is a crucial aspect of interview discourse and that participants define self in the midst of meeting interactional requirements. Thirteen interviews were conducted with a total of 19 participants, each of whom watched a video segment of the Nine O' Clock News. Analysis of the interviews demonstrates that claims about the consumption of politics on television, awareness of bias and impressionability were found to vary within individual participants according to the immediate dialogic context. Rather than being understood as obfuscating 'real' activity, identity construction within the current research has been thought of as demonstrating an important social practice in which participants accomplish identity in the act of fulfilling the immediate, linguistically created, interactive requirements.