Page 151 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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(e.g. ethnic minorities, women, the elderly and so on) one risks objectifying those
categories and their presumed needs and preferences, and seeing ‘diversity’ as a static
prescript rather than a dynamic and flexible cultural principle which, as Murdock
(1990:81–2) has put forward, aspires to ‘engage with the greatest possible range of
contemporary experience’ and ‘offer the broadest possible range of viewpoints on these
experiences and the greatest possible array of arguments and contexts within which they
can be interpreted and evaluated’. In short, in a programming policy that takes seriously
the dynamic complexity of television audiencehood the principle of ‘diversity’, like that
of ‘quality’, cannot be institutionally predetermined, but should imply a constant and
ongoing responsiveness towards and engagement with what is going on at all levels of the
larger culture.
From such a perspective, we can only suspend judgement about the most desirable
institutional arrangement of television provision in the 1990s and beyond: there is no
guarantee that more commercial offerings would necessarily lead to lower quality and
less diversity, and that a defence of public service broadcasting based upon established
footings would necessarily be the best way to promote these values. Such relativist
pragmatism may sound unsatisfactory to those who want unambiguous, once-and-for-all
pros and cons. Against this I would argue that ethnographic understanding can be useful
precisely because it can be potentially disturbing for the existing institutions, by keeping
them from being too arrogant and self-assured about themselves, too self-contained in
their cultural policies. More positively, I would suggest that the stance of relativist
pragmatism endorsed by ethnography is the only way to create a democratic element in
the organization of our television culture, in the sense of enlarging people’s opportunity
to deliberate and choose, in endlessly varied ways, for what they consider the ‘best’
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television. Against this background, institutional solutions for the regulation of the
changing television landscape, especially in Europe, should be sought not in establishing
fixed, formalist definitions of quality and diversity, but in securing more flexible
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conditions in which a plurality of qualities can find their expression. The further
political task would then be the construction of institutional arrangements that can meet
these conditions.
But this is not the end of the story. What ethnographic understanding of the social
world of actual audiences also enables is a critique of facile nominalist notions of ‘the
consumer’, ‘the market’ and ‘what the audience wants’ that seem to have been so
pervasively embraced by television institutions of all kinds. The ascendancy of these
notions in public service institutional settings has been accompanied by a waning of
normative discourse on what ‘serving the public’ should be about, and the adoption of
purely empiricist forms of ‘feedback’. However, the streamlined information delivering
this ‘feedback’ ignores and obscures the fact that actual audiences are never merely a
collection of consumers who happily choose to watch ‘what they want’. Indeed,
ethnographic knowledge can provide us with much more profound ‘feedback’ because it
can uncover the plural and potentially contradictory meanings hidden behind the catch-all
measure of ‘what the audience wants’. It can help us to resist succumbing to all too
triumphant allegations that commercial success means the victory of the sovereign
consumer, for what is discursively equated with ‘what the audience wants’ through
ratings discourse is nothing more than an indication of what actual audiences have come
to accept in the various, everyday situations in which they watch television. It says