Page 44 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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The limits of discursive control

We can now return to the institutional predicament as outlined by Metz at the beginning
of Chapter 1: the fact that there is no way for mass media institutions to secure the
conditions of their own reproduction by exerting direct control over their audiences. In
this situation, says Metz, the conquest of audiences can only be endeavoured by instilling
a ‘spontaneous’ desire in people to be audience members. The principal way to do this, of
course, is trying to convince people of the attractiveness or usefulness of the medium and
its programming. Thus, eventually it is through the rhetorical assumptions of the
programmes transmitted—their genres, their style, their subject matter, their place in the
overall schedule—that actual audiences are affected by institutional control. This is
applicable to both commercial and public service television institutions. As Williams
(1976:133) has noted, ‘the control claimed as…a matter of principle by [public service]
paternalists, is often achieved as a matter of practice in the operation of the commercial
system’. For instance, commercial television programming is generally characterized by a
regular and predictable flow of entertainment programmes, so as to secure the prolonged
attention of the taxonomized audience member/ consumer, while public service television
puts a distinctive emphasis on programmatic comprehensiveness (i.e. a varied range of
informative, educational, high cultural and entertainment programmes) so as to offer the
taxonomized audience member/citizen a responsible, meaningful TV diet.
To a certain extent then programming of TV channels implies a programming of
television viewers as well. A clear indication of this is evinced in the sense of alienation
that European viewers usually experience when first confronted with American
television. The late British cultural theorist Raymond Williams recalled the experience
thus:

One night in Miami, still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began
watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much
greater frequency of commercial ‘breaks’ [than on British commercial
television]. Yet this was a minor problem compared to what eventually
happened. Two other films, which were due to be shown on the same
channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San
Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an
extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal
commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric
monster who laid waste New York…. I can still not be sure what I took
from that whole flow. I believe I registered some incidents as happening
in the wrong film, and some characters in the commercials involved in the