Page 149 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Conclusions 137
What contribution can ethnographic understandings of the social world of actual
audiences make to assess the dilemma? To put it bluntly: little, in a direct sense at least. It
cannot—and should not—give rise to prescriptive and legislative solutions to established
policy problems, precisely because the ironic thrust of ethnography fundamentally goes
against the fixities of the institutional point of view. What it can do, however, is
encourage public debate over the problems concerned, by informing critical discourses on
television—as a cultural form, as a medium ever more firmly implanted in the everyday
texture of modern society—that are independent from established institutional interests.
Seriously taking up the virtual standpoint of actual audiences is likely to highlight the
limitations of any particular institutional arrangement of television, and can thus serve as
a vital intellectual resource for the democratization of television culture.
Let us assume that there is something truly worthwhile to be lost if the seemingly
unstoppable process of commercialization would wipe out all institutional undertakings
of television provision that are not based upon the overall motive of profit making. Let us
assume that some sense of ‘public service’ should indeed be upheld against the risk for
all cultural and social values to be subsumed to purely economic ones. But such political
judgements, which presumably must eventually lead to decision making at the level of
macro-institutional policy, need not necessarily concur with a defence of the existing
institutional embodiments of the public service idea. Nicholas Garnham has usefully
remarked that a much more profound cultural politics is at stake here:

In the battle for the hearts and minds of the public over the future of
public service broadcasting it is important to stress that the historical
practices of supposedly public service institutions, such as the BBC, do
not necessarily correspond to the full potential of public service and may
indeed…be actively in opposition to the development of those potentials.
(Garnham 1983:24).

What we should discuss, then, is what that ‘full potential of public service’ could be in a
time so engrossed with ‘free enterprise’ that the very idea of public service broadcasting
seems hopelessly oldfashioned, at least when we persist to conceive it in its conventional,
historically-rooted institutional form. As Graham Murdock (1990:81) has asked, ‘can we
arrive at an alternative definition of public broadcasting which is capable of defending
and extending the cultural resources required for citizenship?’
It is in this respect that ethnographic understanding of the social world of actual
audiences may feed the imagination needed to come to such alternatives. We have seen
how public service institutions have generally originated in some idealized, mostly rather
patronizing concept of what ‘serving the public’ means, but that it proved to be
impossible to uphold such Utopian, philosophical definitions of the ‘full potential of
public service’ in the dirty reality of broadcasting practice. I would suggest that we
should take this dirty reality seriously if we want to come to new visions of public service
television, that do not prematurely comply with the limitations imposed by existing
institutional arrangements. This dirty reality, of course, is ultimately nothing other than
the intransigence of the social world of actual audiences.
Take the issue of ‘quality’, one of the spearheads of modern-day public service
institutions such as the BBC and VARA. ‘Quality’ as formally defined and