Page 51 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

42 Cultural change and ordinary life

although they actually reinforce the argument for the SPP rather than detract
from it. Thus, the point is that some Foucauldian ways forward are potentially
more significant for audience study than quasi-Marxist ones and this seems to
have been accepted. Perhaps the problem is in working this through more.
Thus, I have begun to think about this issue in previous chapters, but will also
explore a number of dimensions in what follows. However, I will be arguing
that we need to pay attention to micro-powers in a range of social situations
and that we need to take apart what is meant by the media, to explore the
powers of different media in particular social contexts.
Crawford (2004: 25) argues that: ‘Many single audience groups may
cross-cut all three audience types, even at the same instance, and furthermore
that this occurrence may be increasing.’ He suggests that contemporary sports
events are good examples where simple, mass and diffused audiences com-
bine. While this is indeed a good example of the use of the typology, it does
not represent a fundamental criticism of the model, for two main reasons.
First, the fact that there are different audience positions within a social situ-
ation is part of the overall argument for the SPP. As society and culture become
more spectacular and performance oriented, it will be expected that many
social and cultural situations develop in the same direction. Second, there
is still an important sense in which the sports event has a simple audience at
its core. The event would not be available for the other modes of audience
experience if the simple audience was not present. This is shown by the lack of
‘atmosphere’ when for disciplinary reasons a sports event takes place without
spectators. Thus, while audience experiences may increasingly be intertwin-
ing, the simple audience is at the core. The interaction between simple, mass
and diffused audience processes is a crucial point for attention (see further
Longhurst et al. 2007). Neither the behavioural paradigm nor the incorpor-
ation/resistance paradigm is able to explore these interactions. The emergent
spectacle/performance paradigm can, as it can consider how the audience
is socially constructed and reconstructed (rather than being determined or
structured) through the interconnected processes of everyday spectacle and
narcissism. Attention should focus on the way in which media interact to form
as mediascape (Appadurai 1993), rather than media messages or texts per se.
This relocates analysis of media texts in an alternative framework. Rather
than considering the effects, functions or ideological operations of the media,
we need to understand the interaction between ordinary life, audience pro-
cesses and identity formation and reformation. This does not mean that con-
cepts such as class are irrelevant to this paradigm, rather, in an opposite way, it
suggests that the analysis of the construction and reconstruction of, for
example, class identities requires rather more attention than it has hitherto
attracted (see further, Savage et al. 2001 and Chapters 6, 7 and 8).

Audience positions

In elaborating the SPP, there are five possible positions that audience members
can occupy. At one end of this audience continuum is the consumer, who
interacts with the media in a relatively generalized and unfocused fashion. The
next place along the continuum is that of the fan, who is particularly attached