Page 142 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 130
He then goes on to review the findings which fit in his definition of scientific knowledge,
only to come to the conclusion that There is no general statement that summarizes the
scientific literature on television and human behavior, but if it is necessary to make one,
perhaps it should be that television’s effects are many, typically minimal in magnitude,
but sometimes major in social importance’ (ibid.: 504). Even the most fervent supporter
of positivist social science must admit that such a conclusion, with its abstracting
emphasis on quantified generalizations (‘many’, ‘minimal’, ‘major’), can at best be called
disappointingly trivial. Is this really all that can be said about ‘television and its viewers’?
One might object that I have given a rather unfair picture of the accomplishments of
communication research here. Indeed, I do not want to risk the danger of slighting all the
more focused research efforts that have been made by generations of communication
scholars into the television audience, for example, in the contexts of the uses and
gratifications approach (which roughly tries to explain ‘viewing behaviour’ in terms of
people’s needs or motives) (e.g. Blumler and Katz 1974; Rosengren et al. 1985), and of
the cultivation analysis perspective (which roughly tries to examine the effects of
‘viewing behaviour’ on people’s conceptions of social reality) (e.g. Gerbner 1969;
Gerbner et al. 1986). However, even though these research traditions originated in a
genuine interest in what watching television implies for the audience not the institutions,
I would argue that they unwittingly tend to deepen, rather than challenge the institutional
point of view, because they overwhelmingly hold on to the conceptual assumption that
‘television audience’ is a given taxonomic grouping of serialized individuals who can be
described and categorized in terms of measurable variables: not only the conventional
variables of ratings discourse but also a host of other ones (depending on the research
project concerned): socio-demographic variables, personality variables, television use
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variables, function variables, gratification variables, effect variables, and so on. The kind
of knowledge about the television audience generated from such research strategies,
mostly using techniques of multivariate analysis, is generally directed toward condensing
measured repertoires of individual responses into aggregated types of audience activity or
experience, ultimately resulting in the isolation of distinct viewer types.
One of the most famous viewer types constructed by communication researchers is the
‘heavy viewer’, on whom all sorts of concerns are projected. Thus, Comstock et al.
(1978:309) take some pains in singling out four demographic categories who ‘typically
are heavier viewers of television’: these categories are ‘females, blacks, those of lower
socioeconomic status, and the elderly’, about whom the authors speculate that ‘because of
psychological and social isolation [they are] particularly susceptible to influence by
television’. Indeed, in a substantive review of the international research conducted on
‘heavy viewing’ from 1945 to the present, Frissen (1988) has shown that communication
scholars have been relentlessly preoccupied with describing and explaining ‘heavy
viewing’ as a problematic behavioural phenomenon, related to invariably negative and
disturbing psychosocial characteristics such as depression, anxiety, lack of ambition,
fatalism, alienation and so on, resulting in a so-called ‘heavy viewer syndrome’ (Gerbner
and Gross 1976). Combined with repeated attempts to set viewers who presumably suffer
from this syndrome apart from other groups, ‘heavy viewers’ tend to be objectified as a
category of stereotyped others. In one recent representative article, which sets out to
construct a typology of European television viewers using a combination of the uses and