Page 152 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 140
nothing about the heterogeneous and contradictory interminglings of pleasures and
frustrations that television audiencehood brings with it.
The importance of ethnographic discourse, in short, lies in its capacity to go beyond
the impression of ‘false necessity’ (Unger 1987) as prompted by the abstracted
empiricism of taxonomized audience information. It promises to offer us vocabularies
that can rob television audiencehood of its static muteness, as it were.
We are living in turbulent times: the television industries and the governments that
support them are taking aggressive worldwide initiatives to turn people into ever more
comprehensive members of ‘television audience’. At the same time, television
audiencehood is becoming an ever more multifaceted, fragmented and diversified
repertoire of practices and experiences. In short, within the global structural frameworks
of television provisions that the institutions are in the business to impose upon us, actual
audiences are constantly negotiating to appropriate those provisions in ways amenable to
their concrete social worlds and historical situations. It is both the dynamic complexity
and the complex dynamics in the interface of this dialectic that ethnographic
understanding can put into discourse—a never-ending discourse that can enhance a truly
public and democratic conversation about the predicaments of our television culture.