Page 166 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 154
reproduce similar situations for their recurring television watching practices. Two comments
can be made on this. First, these (daily, weekly, and so on) practices are of course never
completely similar, (thick) descriptions of each individual situation will certainly reveal
subtle differences (the telephone rings, the mood is different, and so on); second, it is fair to
expect that when people’s living conditions change, they are likely to change their viewing
situations as well, thereby altering their ‘viewing habits’.
13 As I have pointed out in the Introduction, this change of perspective has already begun to be
explored in some recent developments in audience research, developments that are
characterized by a distinctively ethnographic interest in the social world of actual audiences,
in the contradictory practices and experiences of people living with television. Ethnography
has recently been conceptualized as more than just a research method, but as a practice of
inquiry and writing particularly suitable to do justice to the complex and dynamic character
of contemporary cultural life. See e.g. Clifford and Marcus (1986); Marcus and Fischer
(1986); Van Maanen (1988).
14 I base my endorsement of relativist pragmatism on the work of Richard Rorty (1989).
15 In this respect, both the commercial notion of consumer choice and the public service idea of
representational diversity are indispensible values. Richard Collins (1989a) has usefully
noted that while the old public service broadcasting order was based upon the idea of
‘internal’ diversity (that is, the provision of a range of programmes within a limited number
of channels run by institutions given the mandate to do so), the new television landscape
opens up the possibility of extending ‘external’ diversity (in which a plurality of channels
provides strongly ‘branded’, single type programming). While there is no definitive answer
to the question of the respective benefits and losses of both types of regulating of diversity,
the new situation does offer more opportunity of choice and this improvement should not be
underestimated, certainly not in the age of postmodernity, with its orientation toward
increasing individual freedom and cultural pluralism (D.Harvey 1989). As Collins
(1989a:13) has pointed out in discussing these issues, quoting Brecht, ‘the good old things
are not always preferable to the bad new ones’.