Page 21 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 9
colonized by the institutional point of view. This is also the case for large chunks of
academic mass communication theory and research, where ‘audience research’ has
traditionally been one of the most intensively explored areas—and since the 1950s, it is
the television audience that has most preoccupied academic researchers, especially in the
United States. But despite often-stated value-freeness and independence, this academic
knowledge has been deeply complicit with the institutional point of view, in the sense
that, in the words of Todd Gitlin (1978:225), ‘it poses questions from the vantage point of
the command-posts of institutions that seek to improve or rationalize their control over
social sectors in social functions’.
There were very concrete historical roots for this complicity, perhaps most obviously
embodied in the career of Paul Lazarsfeld, who is generally seen as the man who almost
single-handedly instituted American mass communication research in the 1930s.
Lazarsfeld, founder of the influential Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia
University, was an active proponent of the administrative use of social science. He
managed to acquire, through the building-up of direct corporate connections, both
funding resources and intellectual legitimacy from the media establishment, and was
particularly interested in questions having to do with the prediction of audience reactions
to particular media messages (including the issue of audience measurement) by using
sample surveys—an essentially marketing-oriented interest that decisively channelled the
work of entire generations of future researchers (Tunstall 1977; Gitlin 1978; Czitrom
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1982; Peters 1986). The result, as Gitlin has remarked, was that

the dominant sociology of mass communication has been unable to grasp
certain fundamental features of its subject. More than that: it has obscured
them, scanted them, at times denied them out of existence, and therefore it
has had the effect of justifying the existing system of mass media
ownership, control, and purpose.
(Gitlin 1978:205)

Most important to highlight in this context is not the ideological liabilities of mainstream
mass communication research, but the specific discursive scope that emerged from its
inability ‘to grasp certain fundamental features of its subject’. As I have said earlier, the
basic problem with the institutional point of view is that it leads us to treat ‘television
audience’ as a conceptually nonproblematic category, consisting of a definite, unknown
but knowable set of people. It is exactly this assumption that is inadvertently taken for
granted and reproduced in most branches of academic audience research. This is because
the research projects have consistently proceeded by implicitly singling out the
(television) audience as a separate domain, treating it as an aggregate of individuals
whose characteristics can then presumably be operationalized, examined, categorized and
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accumulated into an ever more complete picture. Some titles of works emanating
directly or indirectly from the Lazarsfeld tradition clearly suggest the ambitiousness with
which ‘television audience’ has been set out to be fully covered in empirical terms: The
People Look At Television (Steiner 1963); Television and the Public (Bower 1973);
Television and Human Behavior (Comstock et al. 1978); Television and its Audience
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(Barwise and Ehrenberg 1988).