Page 145 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Conclusions 133
Consider, for example, a woman’s account of the TV viewing habits of her family,
mentioned by Hermann Bausinger in his article, ‘Media, Technology and Daily Life’
(1984:344): ‘Early in the evening we watch very little TV. Only when my husband is in a
real rage. He comes home, hardly says anything and switches on the TV.’ Here,
comments Bausinger, ‘watching television’ has a very particular meaning, profoundly
immersed in ‘the specific semantic of the everyday’: ‘pushing the button doesn’t signify,
“I would like to watch this”, but rather, “I would like to hear and see nothing”.’
This example suggests clearly that ‘viewing behaviour’ can only be adequately
accounted for when it is grounded in the concrete situation in which it takes place.
‘Watching television’ is always behaviour-in-context, a generic term for heterogeneous
kinds of activities whose multifarious and shifting meanings can only be understood in
conjunction with their contexts. Of course, ‘context’ itself cannot be reduced to a fixed
number of ‘background’ variables, because contexts are indefinite, and indefinitely
extending in time and space.
The practical consequences of this fundamental undecidability of ‘watching television’
and its ‘contexts’, can already be traced in the increasing difficulties encountered by the
ratings services to measure ‘television audience’, as we have seen in Part II.
Developments within the television industry and the changing television landscape have
forced the ratings services to expand the scope of their operationalization of ‘viewing
behaviour’ so as to include an ever increasing number of individual and situational
variables. To date, it is unclear when and where, if ever, this stubborn search for more
encompassing objectification of ‘television audience’ will stop. Theoretically, however, it
is clear that the loss of control in the audience measurement endeavour signifies a
fundamental epistemological crisis. Karin Knorr-Cetina has given a fine characterization
of this crisis:

As the fineness of the grid and the number of relevant attributes increases,
we are less likely to guess what the outcome of each arrangement of
attributes that marks a social situation will be. This is one way in which
we can make sense of the definitive role and the unpredictable dynamics
of the situation.
(Knorr-Cetina 1989:28)

For all practical purposes, the consequences of this crisis cannot be acknowledged as
such within the television institutions because their very existence depends upon clearcut
measures of ‘television audience’. But they can be taken up by academic scholars as a
starting point for charting new avenues for understanding television audiencehood.
Rather than despair over the insolubility of the crisis, I suggest, we should gladly
embrace it, and develop another kind of knowledge on its ruins. Such alternative
knowledge—knowledge that is constructed ‘from the point of view of actual
audiences’—would differ from established knowledge, not only in substance, but also in
its political uses. It goes without saying that I can only sketch the outlines of this
alternative, for it is only in the process of developing it and articulating it that we will be
able to refine and sharpen its focus.
So far as epistemology is concerned, we can follow Knorr-Cetina’s (1989) proposal to
adopt the principle of ‘methodological situationalism’ in developing new research