Page 129 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 120
towards the end of the century the communications industries, as part of the ever
expanding capitalist system, have been in a process of profound economic and
institutional restructuration and transformation, which can be characterized by
accelerated transnationalization and globalization. We can see this in the emergence of
truly global, decentred corporations in which diverse media products (film and television,
press and publishing, music and video) are being combined and integrated into
overarching communications empires such as Bertelsmann, Murdoch, Berlusconi and
Time Warner. This process is accompanied by an increased pressure towards the creation
of transnational markets and transnational distribution systems (made possible by new
communication technologies such as satellite and cable), transgressing established
boundaries and subverting existing territories—a process which, of course, has profound
political and cultural consequences (Morley and Robins 1989; Robins 1989; Appadurai
1990; Jacka 1992). The currency of such notions as ‘the information revolution’ and
‘postmodernity’ are indicative of the perceived pervasiveness of the changes, and in our
everyday lives we are direct witness of these changes through the turbulent
transformation of our media environment, in both technological (cable, satellite, video,
computer games) and institutional (new TV channels, dismantling of public service
broadcasting) terms.
These historical developments form, in very specific ways, the structural and global
configurations of hegemony within which contemporary practices of media reception and
consumption evolve. As we have seen, ethnographies of media audiences emphasize, and
tend to celebrate, the capability of audience groups to construct their own meanings and
thus their own local cultures and identities, even in the face of their virtually complete
dependence on the image flows distributed by the transnational culture industries.
However, this optimistic celebration of the local can easily be countered by a more
pessimistic scenario, pictured by Manuel Castells, who foresees ‘the coexistence both of
the monopoly of messages by the big networks and of the increasingly narrow codes of
local microcultures around their parochial cable TV’s’ (quoted in Robins 1989:151). In
other words, wouldn’t the vitality and creativity of audiences in creating their own
cultures merely amount to paltry manifestations of, in Castells’ words, ‘cultural tribalism’
within an electronic global village?
It would be ludicrous, I would argue, to try to find a definitive and unambiguous,
general theoretical answer to this question—as the theory of cultural imperialism has
attempted to do (Tomlinson 1991)—precisely because there is no way to know in
advance which strategies and tactics different peoples in the world will invent to
negotiate with the intrusions of global forces in their lives. For the moment, then, we can
only hope for provisional answers—answers informed by ethnographic sensitivity to how
structural changes become integrated in specific cultural forms and practices, under
specific historical circumstances. Only such a particularistic approach will allow us to
avoid premature closures in our understanding, and keep us alert to contextual
specificities and contradictions.
But an ethnographic perspective suitable for and sensitive to the peculiarities of our
contemporary cultural condition needs to move beyond the restrictive scope delimited by
the boundaries of the local, and develop an awareness for the pertinent asymmetries
between production/distribution and consumption, the general and the particular, the
global and the local. In other words, ethnography’s critical edge should not just reside in