Page 146 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 134
strategies, in replacement of the methodological individualism that underlies most
research on the television audience (see also Lindlof and Meyer 1987). Giving analytic
primacy to concrete situations of television audiencehood rather than to decontextualized
forms of ‘viewing behaviour’ implies a recognition that the social world of actual
audiences only takes shape through the thoroughly situated, context-bound ways in which
people encounter, use, interpret, enjoy, think and talk about television.
The analysis of micro-situations of television audiencehood should take precedence
over either individual ‘viewing behaviour’ or totalized taxonomic collectives such as
‘television audience’ because micro-situations cannot be reduced to the individual
attributes of those participating in the situation. Thus, the viewer as such does not exist as
the stable and unproblematic source of ‘viewing behaviour’. As John Fiske (1989:57) has
put it, ‘any one viewer…may at different times be a different viewing subject, as
constituted by his or her social determinants, as different social alliances may be
mobilized for different moments of viewing’. In other words, rather than conceiving
viewers as having a unified individuality that is consistent across circumstances, they
should be seen as inhabiting multiple and mobile identities that fluctuate from situation to
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situation. Furthermore, situations not psychological dispositions (needs, preferences,
attitudes and so on) tend to determine the kind of ‘viewing behaviour’ that people
actualize. For example, Bausinger (1984:349) refers to the apparently contradictory
situation of ‘the same man who swears because the sports programme has been delayed
by ten minutes because of the Pope’s visit, then spends the sports programme working on
the flower stand he is making, and hardly notices the programme’. This suggests that in
everyday contexts the distinction between viewing and non-viewing is radically blurred.
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In day-to-day reality audience membership is a fundamentally vague subject position;
people constantly move in and out of ‘television audience’ as they integrate ‘viewing
behaviour’ proper with a multitude of other concerns and activities in radically contingent
ways.
Pushed to the extreme, the principle of methodological situationalism holds that ‘we
cannot ever leave [the] micro-situations’ (Knorr-Cetina 1989:32) in which ‘watching
television’ is practised and experienced in an indefinite number of spaces, at indefinite
times. However, this does not mean that micro-situations are completely self-contained,
merely following their own, unique principles of organization. On the contrary, micro-
situations as interrelated in many different ways and things happening in such situations
often transcend the immediate situation. Occurrences in a situation always have
references to, and implications for, other situations (ibid.: 36).
One obvious situation-transcending factor is presented by the institutionally-defined
constraints placed upon the structural conditions in which watching television can be
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practised in the first place. The very framework of broadcast television implies the
imposition of when and what people can watch. Prevalent scheduling and programming
practices impose a temporal arrangement based upon predictability, regularity and
repetition (Scannell 1988); the very composition of the menu of programmes being
served is determined by the institutions. People cannot, in whatever situation they watch
television, outdo these constraints; they can only negotiate with their terms and develop
fragmentary tactics to subvert those constraints without ever escaping them (Silverstone
1990). As a result, all micro-situations of watching television are virtually connected to
one another in so far as they have to realize themselves in relation to given institutional