Page 148 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 136
and spatially dispersed and continuously changing formations that can never be pinned
down as such.
In other words, if the alternative knowledge we have in mind here can be said to ensue
from the standpoint of actual audiences, it should be stressed that by taking it up we
cannot presume to be speaking with the authentic voice of the ‘real’ audience, because
there is no such thing. Rather, ‘the standpoint of actual audiences’ is a discursively
constructed, virtual position from which we can elaborate always partial and provisional
understandings that evoke the dynamic complexity of television audiencehood rather than
imprisoning it in static grids of information. Which brings me to a last point: what
relevance can such understandings have, not only within the academic world of
communication scholarship but, crucially, outside it?

THE POLITICS OF TELEVISION AUDIENCEHOOD
What I have tried to uncover here is the profundity of the gap between the institutional
point of view on the one hand, and the virtual standpoint of actual audiences on the other.
From the institutional point of view, watching television is the decontextualized,
measurable viewing behaviour that is taken to be the indicator for the existence of a
clear-cut ‘television audience’ out there; from the virtual standpoint of actual audiences
watching television is the ill-defined shorthand term for the multiplicity of situated
practices and experiences in which television audiencehood is embedded. It is a gap that
can be understood in terms of what has been referred to, in a variety of theoretical
contexts, as the opposition between macro and micro, the formal and the informal,
control and creativity, structure and agency, strategy and tactics, communication as
transmission and communication as ritual, the view from the top and the view from the
bottom. It is also a gap that gives rise to opposing types of knowledge: one that strives
toward prediction and control, and another that aims at reaching what could be called
ethnographic understanding, a form of interpretive knowing that purports to increase our
sensitivity to the particular details of the ways in which actual people deal with television
in their everyday lives.
Meanwhile, television institutions and actual audiences remain locked into one another
in so far as the former still to a large degree determine and constrain what the latter can
see on their TV sets. These institutional constraints are being thoroughly reshuffled by
recent changes in the television landscape. The European public service institutions,
especially, are facing a severe crisis, not only in practical (economic, organizational)
terms, but also in terms of their normative founding philosophies. The institutions
themselves, as we have seen, have responded to this crisis by adopting the discourse of
the marketplace in their approach of the audience: defining ‘television audience’ as a
collection of consumers rather than citizens, thinking in terms of ‘what the audience
wants’ rather than ‘what it needs’. The residual markers of difference are formulated
within, not beyond the boundaries of this overall consumerist framework: ‘diversity’ and
‘quality’. Whither public service broadcasting? This is a complicated and multifaceted
political issue which cannot be fully addressed in this context. But I would like to end
this book with a few notes that shed light on this issue from the perspective I have tried to
develop in the previous pages.