Page 22 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 10
Let me not be misunderstood: I do not want to deny that these studies can deliver
some useful knowledge, although that usefulness usually goes unreflected and is too
easily taken for granted. What I do want to emphasize here is how the institutional point
of view can be felt in the very grain of audience research that is presented as independent
scholarship. Not only do such studies ignore the socio-cultural and institutional contexts
in which audiences are constituted; more importantly, they establish a kind of knowledge
that sheds light on ‘television audience’ from an exterior, objectifying perspective, just as
the television institutions do. Such a perspective can only slight the insiders’ dimensions
of television audiencehood, as it were: the complex and contradictory ways in which
television becomes meaningful in people’s everyday lives.
Of course, there has always been criticism against mainstream mass communication
research, particularly from those who have rejected its positivist, behaviourist and
empiricist footing. Critical communications scholars, mostly inspired by Marxist or neo-
Marxist analytical perspectives, have often consciously opposed the unwitting adoption
of the institutional point of view; instead, they have mostly dedicated themselves to
examine the broad historical and political context in which media institutions operate,
and to deconstruct their role as mediators of economic and ideological power (for
overviews, see e.g. Gurevitch et al. 1982; Grossberg 1984). However, this preoccupation
with large-scale structural issues has led to a downplaying or even ignoring of the
importance of understanding media from the audience’s perspective, so much so that,
according to Fred Feyes (1984), the critical tradition in communication studies tends to
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suffer from ‘the problem of the disappearing audience’. Ironically, then, along very
different lines critical communication studies has contributed to the invisibility of the
dynamic complexities of television audiencehood which ultimately characterizes
knowledge produced from the institutional point of view.
Admittedly, this is a very schematic sketch of the state of the art in academic
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knowledge on television audiencehood. Moreover, the field of communication studies
has in recent years seen a growing number of initiatives, from both ‘mainstream’ and
‘critical’ sides, to develop new approaches to the study of the television audience. Often
methodologically unconventional (qualitative rather than quantitative) and theoretically
fresh (emphasizing the social and cultural engagements of audiences with the medium
rather than the traditional interest in effects and effectiveness), these new studies have
paid attention to such diverse topics as the ways in which people make sense of news and
documentary programmes, the culturally-specific pleasures which underlie the popularity
of television genres such as the soap opera, and the social uses of television in the
structuring of family life (e.g. Morley 1980a; 1986; Lull 1980; 1988a; Ang 1985a; Jensen
1986; Liebes and Katz 1986; Gray 1987; Lindlof 1987; Seiter et al. 1989). So far, there
has been little coherence in these dispersed research initiatives. What does seem to
emerge, however, is a growing awareness of the necessity to develop forms of knowledge
about television audiencehood that move away from those informed by the institutional
point of view.
This book does not straightforwardly address this emerging trend in academic
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audience studies. In deconstructing the institutional point of view, however, I hope to
contribute to the trend by providing it with a clearer vision of the ways of thinking which
the institutional point of view entails, and which we need to settle accounts with, both
politically and epistemologically, in order to avoid reproducing them unawares.