Page 153 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes

Introduction
1 The Couch Potato World Headquarters can be reached at PO Box 249, Dixon, CA 95620,
USA.
2 See, for the most elaborate theoretical exploration of the clashes between the institutional and
the everyday, De Certeau (1984); also Silverstone (1989).
3 Foucault’s work is wide-ranging and complex, and interpretations and critiques of his work
abound. Personally, I have been particularly convinced by the perspective developed in
Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982). In this book, the authors argue that Foucault’s distinctive
contribution has been the elaboration of a precise theoretical and methodological approach
for the study for contemporary forms of social power, called ‘interpretive analytics’. Herein,
a pragmatically oriented, historical interpretation of the coherence of the concrete practices
within society is proposed which avoids both objectivist, totalizing analysis (as in
structuralism) and the subjectivist search for deep, intrinsic meaning (as in hermeneutics).
4 In general, a discourse refers to a regulated and systematic set of statements. Foucault more
specifically analyses discourse in the context of the institutionalized social practices within
which statements are made. Discourse obeys specific rules of operation that provide the
space—the concepts, metaphors, analogies, rhetorical figures and so on—for making
concrete statements within the boundaries of the sayable. For a further theoretical
exploration of the poststructuralist concept of ‘discourse’ underlying Foucault’s theorizing,
see MacDonell (1986). For other overviews of the broad field of discourse analysis, see Van
Dijk (1985); Potter and Wetherell (1987).
5 Lazarsfeld meaningfully called himself a ‘managerial scholar’. His success was forcefully
propelled by the emergence of positivist social science on the academic scene. For a
painstaking historical study of the gradual institutional legitimization of positivist
communication research, see Rowland (1983).
6 These characteristics are typically conceptualized in social psychological terms, i.e. in terms
of both independent and dependent ‘person’ and ‘activity’ variables (cf. ‘attitudes’ and
‘behaviour’, ‘persuasion’, ‘selectivity’, ‘choice’, and so on). See Katz (1987), who defends
the Lazarsfeld legacy by stating that its critics pay too little attention to what Lazarsfeld said
rather to what he actually did, but never grapples with the fundamental psychologism that
pervades and limits the scope of the legacy, no matter how sophisticated its spin-offs.
7 As a matter of pure coincidence, another edited book using the very same title as Barwise and
Ehrenberg’s (1988) was published in the very same year, namely Drummond and Paterson
(1988). This book however does not treat the television audience as a unified object of
research. The perspectives offered are more multivocal, critical, and open-ended. The
coincidence does indicate that questions of audience remain continuingly central in studies
of television communication.
8 Feyes suggests that some more recent, more sociologically-based mainstream models of
media effects—i.e. those of agenda setting, spiral of silence, the knowledge gap and media
dependency—provide some relevant notions that can ‘bring the audience back into critical
communications research’ (1984:230).
9 I will have more to say about this in the Conclusions.
10 I have commented on some aspects of this trend in Ang (1989).