Page 13 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction

(Not) knowing the television audience

A certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock
of existence—even, and perhaps above all, in those aspects
of it that are most familiar, most solid and most intimately
related to our bodies and to our everyday behaviour.
Michel Foucault (1980b:80)

A QUESTION OF PERSPECTIVE

In 1976, a group of friends from Los Angeles who often gathered together in order to
indulge in hour-long sessions of television viewing, decided to call themselves ‘couch
potatoes’. With tongue-in-cheek publications such as The Official Couch Potato
Handbook (Mingo 1983) and The Couch Potato Guide to Life (Mingo et al. 1985), they
started a mock-serious grassroots viewers’ movement that promoted the view that
watching television is at least as good as, and perhaps even better than, many other ways
of spending leisure time. In their view, people should stop considering television viewing
as bad and harmful, something they should be ashamed or secretive about. At least
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television viewing does not cause air pollution! A few years later, the term ‘couch
potato’ has become so popular in America and other English-speaking countries that it
has come to denote television audiencehood as such. Now there is at least a standard
catch-phrase people can use to refer to that activity which is so mundane and familiar and
yet so little understood.
The rapid integration of ‘couch potato’ in everyday speech illustrates a rather simple
observation: namely, that although television has become an integral part of our everyday
lives, there is no sophisticated public discourse that does justice to the complexity of the
multiple practices and experiences that television audiencehood involves. Instead, we are
stuck with a poor vocabulary full of unhelpful stereotypes, such as that because we ‘telly
addicts’ are ‘glued to the box’ we are now living in a ‘global village’ and ‘amusing
ourselves to death’. In less than fifty years, television has become a massive cultural
institution whose impact can be felt in almost all aspects of public and private life. With
the coming of cable, satellite and video, television’s presence has become even more
ubiquitous, and as a consequence so it has its prominence as an object of social and
political concern. However, whether television is considered as a profitable economic
venture, a powerful educational apparatus or a symbol of cultural decline, the ordinary
viewers’ perspective is almost always ignored. Instead, the television audience is spoken
for or about from a position of distance—by critics, scientists, journalists, teachers,
politicians, law makers, advertisers, television producers.
There is, in other words, a profound disparity between everyday practice and official
or professional discourse. This book is intended as a contribution to redress this