Page 38 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 26
target group by others’. But in a similar vein we can state that when people watch
television, they do not spontaneously conceive of themselves as members of an
institutionally-defined public. To put it differently, if it is true that consumers must be
made rather than found in order to create a market, so too are the citizens that form a
public not naturally there, but must be produced and invented, made and made up, by the
institution itself.
Both commercial and public service institutions then cannot, with their specific goals
and interests in mind, stop struggling to conquer the audience, no matter whether
audience members are identified as consumers or citizens. This brings me back to the
more general discursive mechanisms of knowledge produced from the institutional point
of view, based as it is upon the positing of a clearcut subject/object opposition and the
construction of ‘television audience’ as a unitary, objectified category. We will now take
a closer look at the assumptions and consequences, both epistemological and ontological,
of this construction.