Page 150 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 138
operationalized by the institutions in their programming decisions may well not at all
correspond with what in practical terms counts as ‘quality’ in the social world of actual
audiences. We should realize, as Charlotte Brunsdon (1990) has remarked, that people
constantly make their own judgements of quality when they watch television, judgements
which can vary from situation to situation, depending on the type of satisfaction they look
for at any particular time. From this perspective, ‘quality’ is not a fixed standard of value
on which the professional broadcaster holds a patent, but is a radically contingent
criterion of judgement to be made by actual audiences in actual situations, ‘something
that we all do whenever we channel hop in search of an image or sound which we can
identify as likely, or most likely, to satisfy’ (ibid.: 76).
This is to point out that there is much more to ‘quality’ than the assurance from the
broadcasters that they will try to provide us with what they define as quality programmes:
apart from professional quality, presumably a formal characteristic of programmes, there
is ‘lived’ quality as it were, related to the concrete ways in which television is inserted in
people’s everyday lives. To put it differently, rather than being seen as a predetermined
yardstick, ‘quality’ should be posed as a problem, a problem of value whose terms should
be explicated and debated, contested and agreed upon in an ongoing public and
democratic conversation about what we, as publics, expect from our television
institutions. Ethnographic understanding of the social world of actual audiences can help
enrich that conversation because it foregrounds a discourse on quality that takes into
account the situational practices and experiences of those who must make do with the
television provision served them by the institutions—an open-ended discourse that
conceives quality as something relative rather than absolute, plural rather than singular,
context-specific rather than universal, a repertoire of aesthetic, moral and cultural values
that arises in the social process of watching television rather than through criteria
imposed upon from above.
A similar case can be made about ‘diversity’, the second ideal which contemporary
public service broadcasting claims to represent. Several problems pertain to how this
concept is generally treated. First of all, defending diversity is often conflated with the
expansion of consumer choice, that is, with quantitative rather than with qualitative
diversity. It is in this respect that public service discourse becomes almost
interchangeable with commercial discourse. Of course, ‘diversity’ is often defined in
more formal terms, that is, in terms of the broad range of programme genres that public
service institutions are obliged to transmit, corresponding to the multiplicity of functions
that broadcasting is supposed to fulfil, i.e. ‘information’, ‘entertainment’ ‘drama’,
‘education’ and so on. However, such formal diversity easily overlooks the fact that from
the standpoint of actual audiences, these functions often overlap: a popular drama series
for example can in some situations, for some people, be more ‘informative’ or
‘educative’ than a news or current affairs programme. A formal conceptualization of
diversity, in other words, can easily be out of touch with the concrete experiences of
those who watch the programmes. Such formalism can be softened by a second, more
sociological definition of the ideal of diversity, namely in terms of the responsibility of
providing programmes aimed at a variety of ‘target groups’, including those minority
groups that are not of interest for advertisers and are thus not well served in a commercial
system. This is a laudable idea, but precisely by equating the concept of diversity with a
more or less fixed range of sociologically observable categories within the population