Page 13 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 4
psychological, political and historical activities that are involved in
people’s engagements with television.
(Ang 1991:14)

To put it differently, as far as I am concerned, studying media audiences is not interesting
or meaningful in its own right, but becomes so only when it points towards a broader
critical understanding of the peculiarities of contemporary culture. Not only is it
important to remember that audience-related practices only acquire significance, and can
only be meaningfully comprehended, when they are articulated with other, non-audience
practices (after all, people are not always acting out their membership of a variety of
media audiences). What we also need to take into account is the very historical
distinctiveness of living in a world where the presence of mass media—and therefore of
media audiences—has become naturalized. We should resist what mass media research
has generally done, that is, in Todd Gitlin’s words, ‘[certify] as normal precisely what it
might have been investigating as problematic, namely the vast reach and scope of the
instruments of mass broadcasting, especially television’ (1978:206). Gitlin continues by
pointing to the ‘the significance of the fact that mass broadcasting exists in the first place,
in a corporate housing and under a certain degree of State regulation’ (ibid.). Gitlin here
obviously refers to the close connection between mass broadcasting and the emergence
and maturation of social modernity. And while Gitlin tends to argue against any emphasis
on audience research as a result of its, in his view, inevitable collusion with the
‘dominant paradigm’, I believe that we cannot do without some, non-reductionist, non-
fetishizing, perspective on the ‘audience’ if we are to come to grips with life in ‘the
postmodern condition’.
Broadcast television has been one of the most powerful media of modernity. As a
medium of mass communication, it was generally put into motion in the social realm
throughout the core of the Western world at the apex of social modernity, the 1950s and
1960s, a time when confidence in the possibility and superiority of a modernity based on
infinite economic growth and ‘Western’ values (e.g. individual freedom, democracy and
affluence for all) was riding high. These modern societies thought of themselves in self-
contained, national terms, each capable of maintaining order and harmony through the
consent of the vast majority of the population. This was a modernity ideally built out of a
nationally coherent, if not culturally homogeneous citizenry, whose private lives were
organized within nuclear families living in comfortable, suburban middle-class homes.
Television, typically institutionalized in the centralized mode of broadcasting (Williams
1974; Ellis 1982), was thought to play a central role in the orchestration of the millions of
these individual families into the national imaginary, the rhythms and rituals of the life of
the nation. In 1946, an American TV producer could enthuse about the integrative power
of the then very new medium this way:

Picture a program each afternoon with a chef inviting the house-frau to
cook the evening meal along with him. Right then in the television studio
and in millions of homes across the country, step by step, an entire meal is
prepared for evening’s consumption. All over the country millions of
husbands will come home to identical dinners prescribed by this chef. All
this may seem a little patterned and regimented, but just think for a