Page 116 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Gender and/in media consumption 107
ongoing flow of everyday life. But in our media-saturated world media audiences can no
longer be conceived as neatly demarcated categories of people, collectively set in relation
to a single set of isolated texts and messages, each carrying a finite number of subject
positions. This insight can only lead to a more radical ‘anthropologization’ of the study of
media consumption, in which the text is radically decentred and the everyday contexts in
which reception, consumption and use take place are more emphatically foregrounded
(e.g. Radway 1988; Moores 1993; Drotner 1994; Silverstone 1994; Hermes 1995).
To do justice to such a perspective, then, we need to go beyond the boundaries of
reception analysis and develop new forms of ‘consumption analysis’. In everyday life,
media consumption cannot be equated with distinct and insulated activities such as
‘watching television’, ‘reading a book’, ‘listening to a record’, and so on. Since people
living in (post) modern societies are surrounded by an ever-present and ever-evolving
media-environment, they are always-already audiences of an abundance of media
provisions, by choice or by force. Thus, media consumption should be conceptualized as
an ever-proliferating set of heterogeneous and dispersed, intersecting and contradicting
cultural practices, involving an indefinite number of multiply positioned subjects:
‘[E]veryone is constantly exposed to a variety of media and forms, and participates in a
range of events and activities’ (Grossberg 1988a:20–1).
Hermann Bausinger (1984) has summed up a list of phenomenological considerations
which illuminates the enormous complexity of the field opened up here, although the list
is also helpful in beginning to map the terrain. To understand day-to-day media use in
contemporary society, Bausinger states, it is necessary to take the whole ‘ensemble’ of
intersecting and overlapping media provisions into consideration. Audiences piece
together the contents of radio, television, newspapers, and so on. As a rule, media texts
and messages are not used completely or with full concentration. We read parts of sports
reviews, skim through magazines and zap from channel to channel when we don’t like
what’s on TV. Furthermore, media use, being an integral part of the routines and rituals
of everyday life, is constantly interrelated with other activities such as talking, eating or
doing housework. In other words, ‘mass’ communication and ‘interpersonal’
communication cannot be separated. Finally, according to Bausinger, media use is not a
private, individual process, but a collective, social process. Even when reading the
newspaper one is often not truly alone, but interacting with family, friends or colleagues.
In short, comprised within the deceptively simple term ‘media consumption’ is an
extremely multifarious and differentiated conglomerate of activities and experiences.
Against this background, we need to perform an even further particularization in our
research and interpretive endeavour. Since media consumption takes place in the ‘the
complex and contradictory terrain, the multi-dimensional context, within which people
live out their everyday lives’ (Grossberg 1988a:25), no two women (or men) will have
exactly the same experiences in ‘the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of cultural circulation and
consumption’ (Radway 1988:361), although of course specific overlapping interests and
commonalities in past and present circumstances are not ruled out. In such a context, we
must accept contingency as posing the utter limit for our understanding, and historical
and local specificity as the only ground on which continuities and discontinuities in the
ongoing but unpredictable articulation of gender in media consumption can be traced. In
other words, such continuities and discontinuities only emerge post facto. Within this
horizon, ethnography’s task would be the production of accounts that make these