Page 144 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 132
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theoretical standpoint’. What’s more, she found that even the very operationalization of
‘heavy viewing’ itself has been done rather sloppily, in purely arbitrary and pragmatic
ways, in some cases in terms of number of hours watching (e.g., two hours, three hours,
four hours, ten quarters of an hour per day, sixteen and a half hours per week), in other
cases just by slicing a certain percentage of the total population that spends the most time
watching television (e.g., 25 per cent, 30 per cent) (ibid.: 142). This raises the question
whether ‘heavy viewing’, as a type of ‘viewing behaviour’, is not an artefact designed to
simplify the researcher’s task rather than an actually existing ‘syndrome’ of a definite
category of people. As a generalized concept, it is devoid of meaning.
To avoid the unwarranted construction of such artefacts which is one of the liabilities
of taxonomic thinking, we should seriously recognize that ‘watching television’ is always
in excess of the sum of the isolatable, measurable ‘viewing behaviour’ variables in which
it is operationalized. It should be seen as a complex and dynamic cultural process, fully
integrated in the messiness of everyday life, and always specific in its meanings and
impacts.

FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF ACTUAL AUDIENCES

My critique of mainstream communication research, then, is directed at ‘the overly
condensed character of the variables’ (Fielding 1989:9) used in too many research
projects which claim to try to examine the television audience, resulting in quite
simplistic, empiricist assumptions about what ‘watching television’ implies as an activity.
As Pierre Bourdieu has remarked,

the absence of…preliminary analysis of the social significance of the
indicators can make the most rigorous-seeming surveys quite unsuitable
for a sociological reading. Because they forget that the apparent constancy
of the products conceal the diversity of the social uses they are put to,
many surveys on consumption impose on them taxonomies which are
sprung straight from the statisticians’ social unconscious.
(Bourdieu 1984:21)

The solution is not simple:

the only way of completely escaping from the intuitionism which
inevitably accompanies positivistic faith in the nominal identity of the
indicators would be to carry out a—strictly interminable—analysis of the
social value of each of the properties or practices considered—a Louis XV
commode or a Brahms symphony, reading Historia or Le Figaro, playing
rugby or the accordion and so on.
(ibid.: 20–1)

What Bourdieu calls for, in other words, is the evocation of the irreducible dynamic
complexity of cultural practices and experiences, and ‘watching television’ is no
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exception.