Page 123 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 114
often taken-for-granted conflation between the logic of the commercial and the pleasure
of the popular. I wanted to open up the possibility of a less deterministic thinking about
these issues: a political stance against the increasing commercialization of broadcasting at
the level of policy should not, as so often happens, preclude the recognition, at a cultural
level, of the real enjoyment people take in commercially produced media material—a
recognition that is sustained by making understandable the textual and socio-cultural
parameters of that pleasure. In other words, I imagined my work to be, among many other
things, a form of cultural critique that aimed at unsettling the prevailing and, in my view,
counterproductive views on popular television and its audiences. (The original version of
the book was published in Dutch in 1982, when the controversy about Dallas in the
Netherlands was at its height.)
Of course, the way the book was received (and, as a result, its discursive effectivity)
was beyond my control, and is something about which I can say very little here. What I
think is important to emphasize, however, is that while the book came to be read as an
exercise in what is now commonly called ‘reception analysis’ (see, e.g., Jensen and
Rosengren 1990), the ideological and cultural climate in which the book was written
played a decisive role in shaping the arguments and interpretations put forward in it. By
1990, a reception analysis of Dallas would have been inspired by very different political
and socio-cultural problematics. For example, the very success of Dallas has dramatically
challenged European programming policies, to the point that it has become an accepted
model for European productions of television drama, where Europeanized ‘imitations’ of
Dallas—such as the French Chateauvallon and the German Schwarzwaldklinik—have
become a regular provision (Silj 1988). I would suspect that this would have significantly
altered the appeal of American mass television to European audiences.
It may seem immodest to propose my own work to illustrate the need for cultural
studies to pursue a practice of analytical and theoretical ‘conjuncturalism’—that is, the
need to try ‘writing at just the right moment in just the right way’ (Rorty 1989:174). The
justification for it, however, is the fact that reception analysis (i.e. the study of audience
interpretations and uses of media texts and technologies) has been one of the most
prominent developments in recent communication studies, including cultural studies. To
put it in more general terms, reception analysis has intensified our interest in the ways in
which people actively and creatively make their own meanings and create their own
culture, rather than passively absorb pregiven meanings imposed upon them. As a result,
the question of audience has acquired a central place in cultural studies. The thrust of the
interest has been ethnographic: while most reception studies were limited to analysing the
specifics of certain text/audience encounters, the methods used were qualitative (depth-
interviewing and/or participant observation), and the emphasis has overwhelmingly been
on the detailed description of how audiences negotiate with media texts and technologies.
Although, from an anthropological point of view, the ethnographic method has only been
applied in a limited way in these studies (Hannerz 1992; Spitulnik 1993), reception
analyses are an important step in the development of a more full-fledged ethnographic
understanding of media consumption.
Numerous concrete studies have been carried out inspired by this trend. Australian
critic Meaghan Morris even goes so far as having the impression that ‘thousands of
versions of the same article about pleasure, resistance, and the politics of consumption
are being run off under different names with minor variation’ (1988a:20). She goes on to