Page 17 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 5
developments, but for the public service institutions the crisis is more fundamental than
this: the very viability of organizing television as a noncommercial institution destined to
‘serve’ the public is under threat (Euromedia Research Group 1986; Garnham 1989;
Collins 1989b).
The changes are largely taking place over the heads of those in whose benefit all these
grand institutional endeavours are supposed to be enacted. The millions of ordinary
television viewers do not generally take any active part in determining the structural
frameworks of the television culture of which they are mobilized to partake. They remain
the invisible audience in whose name or on whose behalf the institutions put forward
their interests, claims, defences, policies, strategies. Thus, the defence of public service
broadcasting is often articulated in terms of some a priori notion of ‘the public interest’
that it pretends to represent. It is not the legitimacy of such a defence that is at stake here
(this is a political question that I do not want to address at this point); what I do want to
note is how the discourse of such a defence is typically based upon some invention of
‘the public’, that does not necessarily coincide with what actual audiences are interested
in. Similarly, the widely-held commercialist assertion that competition between channels
is beneficial because it leads to more freedom for the audience implies just as self-
interested a way of speaking in the name of the invisible audience. Of course,
competition does increase the number of channels from which viewers can choose
(although many opponents of commercial television claim that this does not represent a
genuine choice because more channels does not necessarily lead to more diversity and
better quality of programming [cf. Gitlin 1983; Blumler et al. 1986]), but to call this
opportunity to choose ‘freedom’—which is of course inherent to the ideological
discourse of capitalism—is to ignore the fact that specific institutional arrangements
engender powerful mechanisms that set limits to the way actual audiences can relate to
the medium. Audiences can never be completely free, because they are ultimately
subordinated to the image flows provided by the institutions.
This is not to say that audiences are totally defenceless in the face of the power of the
television institutions; far from it. But the ‘freedom’ they have (to choose between
programmes, to watch little or a lot, together or alone, with more or less attention, in
short, to use and consume television in ways that suit them) can only be seized within the
parameters of the system they had no choice but to accept. In this sense the television
audience is not only an invisible audience; it is also, literally, a silent majority.
Surprisingly seldom do television viewers represent and organize themselves as ‘we, the
audience’, and on the rare occasions when that happens, they are generally not taken very
seriously. The self-parodying couch potato movement in America is a perfect example of
this. Other spontaneous audience self-representations are often so volatile, such as when
fans express impromptu their collective enthusiasm for some television star or
programme (Ang 1985a; Lewis 1990), or are so limited and disorganized (as in letters to
TV companies and producers) that they are easily accommodated, belittled, or ignored.
More organized forms of audience self-representations that occasionally spring up (for
example, in pressure groups for ‘better’ television, less sex ‘n’ violence, more positive
images of blacks, women and gays, and so on) may have a bigger chance to be heard, but
they too generally only play a marginal role in the decisions made within the television
institutions (Turow 1982).