Page 141 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Conclusions 129
instance the streamlining process has become all but complete: ‘television audience’ is
reduced almost entirely to a set of objective regularities, and seems to be more or less
completely purged from any subjective peculiarities in people’s engagements with
3
television.
The point here is not necessarily to refute the scientific quality of these
conscientiously conducted research projects or to reject their value out of hand, but more
positively to examine exactly what is known through such totalizing inquiries into the
television audience, to query the discursive horizon they construct, as well as what
vanishes beyond that horizon.
Thus, Goodhardt et al.’s duplication of viewing law has led them to conclude that
watching television does not have much to do with people’s preferences and is a quite
aselective practice: ‘there are discrepancies between what viewers say or feel they would
like to watch and what they watch in practice’ (ibid.: 127). But to infer from here that
what people say or feel they would like to watch is of little interest or significance—
because it is not reflected in manifest, measurable ‘viewing behaviour’—would be a
truncated kind of knowledge, which all too easily reveals its complicity with the
institutional point of view. Several authors (e.g. Gunter and Svennevig 1987) have
pointed to the ‘mediating influence of others’ as an explanation for why what people
watch does not correlate with what people say they would like to watch: especially when
people watch in groups, they often end up watching programmes not of their own
choosing, because the choice has been imposed upon them by the dominant individual in
the group—usually the father when the group is the family (Lull 1982; Morley 1986).
Such discovery of ‘intervening variables’ between ‘viewing behaviour’ and ‘programme
choice’ already begins to subvert the decontextualized, one-dimensional definition of
‘watching television’ that is implied in knowledge that takes for granted the institutional
point of view. As David Morley (1986:19) has remarked, ‘to expect that we could treat
the individual viewer making programme choices as if he or she were the rational
consumer in a free and perfect market is surely the height of absurdity when we are
talking of people who live in families’. More generally, what begins to become visible
here is the uneven and variable everyday context in which the practices and experiences
of television audiencehood are shaped and take on meaning for actual audiences.
Ironically George Comstock, one of the leading figures in mainstream communication
research and principal author of Television and Human Behavior, has himself
inadvertently recognized the limited vision of the knowledge produced by academic
researchers. In an article revealingly titled, ‘Television and Its Viewers: What Social
Science Sees’, he notes:

It is sometimes said that very little is known about television and people
beyond the popularity of the former and the fickleness of taste of the
latter. This is not really true, if one is willing to accept a scientific
definition of ‘knowing’. That is, there is a great deal ‘known’ if one is
willing to define the concept of knowing as a state in which there is
verifiable evidence that disposes an observer toward one or another set of
possible facts or explanations without establishing that such is the case
with absolute certainty.
(Comstock 1981:491)