Page 43 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World
P. 43
Television audience as taxonomic collective 31
Conceiving television audience as a taxonomic collective of amenable audience
members, then, leads to ascribing stability to the category of ‘television audience’ by
purging from it the unpredictable, the capricious, and the erratic that characterizes the
social world of actual audiences (Ellis’s ‘viewers’). The resulting discursive solidity of
the category is a precondition for television institutions in order to pursue their ambition
to conquer ‘it’. But how effective is the control so implemented?
