Page 12 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 3
their point of exhaustion. Why? Because television itself has undergone massive
postmodernization—manifested in a complex range of developments such as
pluralization, diversification, commercialization, commodification, internationalization,
decentralization—throwing established paradigms of understanding how it operates in
culture and society into disarray. This transformation of television points to the central
‘mover’ of postmodern culture: an increasingly global, transnational, postindustrial, post-
Fordist capitalism, with its voracious appetite to turn ‘culture’ into an endlessly
multiplying occasion for capital accumulation. This has resulted in a seemingly
unstoppable ballooning of the volume and reach of television and other media culture in
the last few decades, which can therefore no longer be conceived as an easily
researchable, contained and containable reality. The ‘dominant paradigm’ of mass
communication research, firmly locating itself in modernist social science, has become
obsolete because its scholarly apparatus was not able to grasp the new questions and
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issues which emerged out of the ‘mess’ created by the postmodernization of television.
This ‘crisis’ of the dominant paradigm, addressed in some of the essays in this book, was
significantly paralleled by the simultaneous growth since the mid-1970s of what we now
know as ‘cultural studies’, a mode of intellectual work which readily addresses the
elusiveness of the postmodern in its ongoing commitment to interdisciplinarity and
openness of theorizing (Hall 1986b). Since the early 1980s, it is within the emerging
discourses of cultural studies that new ways of understanding audiences, not only of
television but also of other media, have been most productively developed.
What the essays in this book perhaps most pertinently unfold—what they
‘represent’—is the gradual, uneven and not always easy carving out of some interpretive
frameworks for such an understanding, which I by no means want to present as in any
way definitive or complete (indeed, this would run against the postmodern spirit itself).
They explore the implications of what I believe are not only the central theoretical
assumptions of cultural studies, but also a key historical feature of postmodern culture
itself: that the cultural pervades everyday life and that cultural meanings are not only
constructed, but also subject to constant contestation.
Once we move from a modernist to a postmodern understanding, from a disciplinary
discourse to a cultural studies one, the very status of ‘media audiences’ as a discursive
category changes. ‘The audience’ no longer represents simply an ‘object of study’, a
reality ‘out there’ constitutive of and reserved for the discipline which claims ownership
of it, but has to be defined first and foremost as a discursive trope signifying the
constantly shifting and radically heterogeneous ways in which meaning is constructed
and contested in multiple everyday contexts of media use and consumption. As I have put
it elsewhere, any representation of the social world of television audiences can only be
conceived as:

a provisional shorthand for the infinite, contradictory, dispersed and
dynamic practices and experiences of television audiencehood enacted by
people in their everyday lives—practices and experiences that are
conventionally conceived as ‘watching’, ‘using’, ‘receiving’,
‘consuming’, ‘decoding’, and so on, although these terms too are already
abstractions from the complexity and the dynamism of the social, cultural,