Page 125 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

116 Cultural change and ordinary life

mediatisation, perhaps even spectacularisation, of certain aspects of everyday
life’ (p. 182). This is an important argument and I now turn to the implications
of this retheorization of power for the theory and study of the audience.
Couldry (2005) has used these sorts of argument concerning the nature
of power to argue that audiences can be retheorized. He contends that the
characterization of contemporary society and culture via the idea of the
extended audience has much to recommend it. However, in addition to
the concerns that he has about the way in which power is theorized, he also
raises concerns about the way in which it is argued that people are becoming
both media performers and audience members. However, he tends to treat this
idea in a relatively narrow way. That is, while it can be argued that people are
performers within the media frame as summarized earlier, this is not quite the
same thing as suggesting that they are performers within the institutions of
the media. Thus, Couldry tends to slide into a discussion of the specific roles
that people have within the media within, for example, TV reality shows and
their more informal contacts with the media. There is nothing wrong with
this per se; however, the argument that we were making and that I have been
discussing in much of this book is itself wider. It is that social and cultural
relations in the wider sense are being changed through such processes. How-
ever, while this is, I would suggest, an important rider to Couldry’s argument,
it does not mean that the wider points about the audience are not useful to
my approach. Moreover, I have no desire to argue that media corporations do
not possess or exercise power, rather that such power has to be theorized in
the context of changing relations of ordinary life. In my view this is not
the same as arguing that this power is reduced (as Couldry 2005: 196 character-
izes our view), but that it has changed, that it is indeed dispersed and that
media fragmentation means that the media frame is less consistent than it
once was.
On the basis of these criticisms, Couldry argues that the idea of the
diffused audience should be replaced by that of the ‘extended audience’. He
says that:
The notion of the ‘extended’ audience requires us to examine the whole
spectrum of talk, action and thought that draws on media, or is oriented
to media. In this way, we can broaden our understanding of the relation-
ship between media and media audiences as part of our understanding of
contemporary media culture.
(Couldry 2005: 196)
This seems perfectly fine to me, but I am unable to agree that the idea of
extension fits the bill better than the idea of diffusion. Indeed, my suggestion is
that the idea of the extended audience tends to take too much of the baggage
of previous theorizations of the media and power with it. Thus, the idea of
extension tends to suggest that previous understandings of the audience need
to be extended to fit the sorts of new audience situations that Couldry (2005)
considers and has addressed in his previous work (2000b, 2003). These include
reality TV, the visits to media sets, webcam culture, and so on. While this, on
one level, may be seen as a terminological dispute, it does refer to issues of how
one can distinguish different audience positions. This is where the distinctions