Page 14 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 2
imbalance, so that we can begin to improve our understanding of the everyday realities of
television audiencehood. In general, I claim this understanding to be lacking because our
knowledge about television audiencehood has been colonized by what I want to call the
institutional point of view. In the everyday realm, living with television involves a
heterogeneous range of informal activities, uses, interpretations, pleasures,
disappointments, conflicts, struggles, compromises. But in the considerations of the
institutions that possess the official power to define, exploit and regulate the space in
which television is inserted into the fabric of culture and society, these subjective,
complex and dynamic forms of audiencehood are generally absent; they disappear in
favour of a mute and abstract construct of ‘television audience’ onto which large-scale
economic and cultural aspirations and expectations, policies and planning schemes are
projected, allowing these institutions to realize their ambitions to govern and control the
formal frameworks of television’s place in contemporary life. As a result, this
institutional point of view silences actual audiences who nevertheless ‘get along’ with
television in a myriad of creative yet tacit ways, whose details elude and escape the
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formal structures set up by the institutions.
The purpose of this book is to disentangle the process of this symbolic silencing by
examining the pragmatic logic of the institutional point of view from which the television
audience is known. To put it bluntly, the basic problem with the institutional point of
view is that it leads us to treat ‘television audience’ as a definite category whose
conceptual status need not be problematized. The television audience is taken-for-
grantedly defined as an unknown but knowable set of people, not more, not less. In this
way of thinking, the television audience becomes an object of discourse whose status is
analogous to that of ‘population’, ‘nation’ or ‘the masses’. However, as Raymond
Williams (1961:289) has noted, masses are illusory totalities: there are no masses, ‘only
ways of seeing people as masses’. In a similar vein, ‘television audience’ only exists as
an imaginary entity, an abstraction constructed from the vantage point of the institutions,
in the interest of the institutions. This is the central argument that I will try to clarify and
substantiate in the course of this book.
Alternative understandings of television audiencehood, developed from a perspective
that displays sensitivity to the everyday practices and experiences of actual audiences
themselves, can only be successful if we manage to radically dissociate ourselves from
the assumptions and procedures which determine the way in which the television
audience is known from the institutional point of view. The institutional point of view is a
hindrance to such understandings because, as I will describe in this book, from this point
of view actual audiences are constantly objectified, othered, and—if only symbolically—
controlled.

THE INSTITUTIONAL POINT OF VIEW

The institutional point of view is pre-eminently embodied within the institutions that are
directly responsible for planning, producing and transmitting television programming
(television industry, broadcasting organizations, but also, in a more indirect way, the state
institutions that shape and regulate national media policies). These institutions depend on
the actual existence of the audience in very material terms. As John Hartley (1987:127)