Page 143 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Conclusions 131
gratifications approach and cultivation analysis, the researchers permit themselves to
typify the category as follows:

For those viewers who are interested in all types of programme [i.e. ‘non-
selective’ viewers], watching television is probably a habit, a ritualized
way of occupying free time; little time would then be left over for other
activities and for the use of other media. An ideal type in this category
would be an older manual worker with a low level of education and low
income. The image that emerges is of an unresourceful, uncritical, passive
person who apparently prefers the world of television to his own world.
(Espe and Seiwert 1986:320)

Such a characterization, which is by no means untypical (see Frissen 1988), can only be
5
made from a distant, exterior perspective on this trumped-up audience category. So,
what started as a genuine interest in viewers apparently unrelated to the institutional
concern for audience control, ends up foregrounding a discourse that is just as
objectifying and othering as institutional knowledge! By concentrating so heavily on
differentiating between groups of viewers, academic communication researchers are
driven toward drawing ‘fictions’ of rigid, reified audience categories, a kind of
knowledge that forecloses understanding of the concrete practices and experiences of
people because those ‘fictions’ are regarded as reflecting essential viewer identities that
are taken to sufficiently explain certain patterns of ‘viewing behaviour’. Consequently, in
a paradoxical leap of argument it is (some categories of) the viewers that are implicitly
put on trial, not the institutions that provide the programming—as the case of the ‘heavy
6
viewer’ suggests.
The epistemological limitations of the pull toward generalized categorization implied
in the search for viewer types can be illustrated, in an anecdotal but telling fashion, by
returning to the couch potatoes, whom we encountered at the very beginning of this book.
They are self-proclaimed heavy viewers, who cannot be understood by referring to the
academically constructed fiction of this type of viewer. Faced with the idiosyncratic, self-
reflective, witty, utterly recalcitrant ‘behaviour’ of the couch potatoes—and there is no
reason to dismiss them as ‘atypical’ in advance—communication researchers are
ultimately left with empty hands, or better, want of words. This suggests that the pull
toward categorization should at least be complemented by the opposite one of
particularization (Billig 1987): rather than reducing a certain manifestation of ‘viewing
behaviour’ to an instance of a general category, we might consider it in its particularity,
treat it in its concrete specificity, differentiate it from the other instances of the general
category. Only then can we begin to understand the multiple practices and experiences of
actual audiences, rather than get stuck with abstracted, simplified fictions of categories of
‘television audience’. Only then can we go beyond (statistical) ‘significance without
much signification’, as James Anderson (1987:371) has put it.
More fundamentally, the very notion of ‘viewing behaviour’ which undergirds any
taxonomic demarcation of ‘television audience’ and its partitioning into fixed categories
needs to be questioned. In her review, Frissen (1988:149) has concluded that after
decades of researching heavy viewing, ‘communication researchers apparently have not
yet reached the point where they describe and explain heavy viewing from an explicit