Page 11 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

hopefully contribute to a rethinking of the pervasive ‘commercialization’ and
‘Americanization’, real and perceived, that European public service broadcasting is
undergoing in the present period.
Finally, this book aims to encourage the further development of an ethnographic
understanding of television audiences. I argue that ethnography, conceived not just as a
research method but as—within the academic field—a discursive practice par excellence
that foregrounds the diverse, the particular and the unpredictable in everyday life, is
especially suitable to free us from the desperate search for totalizing accounts of ‘the
audience’ that characterizes much official knowledge about this overwhelmingly massive
category. Only then, I suggest, can we arrive at understandings of the predicaments of our
television-saturated culture that overcome unhelpful sweeping generalizations and
meaningless abstractions.
The scope of this book then is both historical and theoretical, both political and
epistemological, both institutional and cultural. If anything, what I have tried to unravel is
the complex and contradictory operations of the power/knowledge connection in the
context of an entrenched institutional practice—television broadcasting—which is
undergoing rapid change in the era of the new communication technologies. In this
situation, new forms of knowledge are demanded, but are often onesidedly oriented
towards the strengthening of vested commercial and bureaucratic interests. It is in order
to challenge this bias that I squarely put ‘the audience’ at the centre of this book—not as
an unproblematic object of study, not as an empirical point of departure, but as an
uncertain discursive construct, a moving resultant of the power-laden ways in which it is
known.
Many people have, in one way or another, played a supportive role in the creation of
this book. I became familiar with the contradictory workings of American commercial
television particularly during my stay as a Fulbright scholar at the Department of
Communication of Hunter College, City University of New York in 1986. I am indebted
to many people who made my stay in New York worthwhile, both professionally and
personally. I would like to specifically mention John Downing, then chairman of the
Department, and members of the Salon for Media and Culture at the Graduate Center of
the City University. Furthermore, the Television Information Office, the Museum of
Broadcasting and the New York Public Library made resources accessible to me for
getting acquainted with the history of American television.
Material about the Dutch Socialist Broadcasting Organization (VARA) was kindly
made accessible to me by the management. I am especially thankful to VARA chairman
Marcel van Dam for his co-operation, and to Paul Pennings, former teaching assistant at
the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam, for his judicious
help in going through the VARA archives. I also thank researchers Wim Bekkers
(Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation) and Dick Wensink (VARA) for the information
they gave me about the role of research in public service broadcasting in general, and
Dutch broadcasting in particular. Furthermore, the staffs of the libraries of the
Netherlands Press Institute and the Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation have always
been pleasantly co-operative, for which I am grateful.
Most of all I am indebted to my supervisor Denis McQuail, who has never failed to
support me and has given valauble advice throughout this project. Especial thanks also go
to Simon Frith for his good-humoured encouragement and stimulating comments on my