Page 14 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 5
moment how our government will make use of this type of program to
maintain our economic stability. For example, if the farmers have just
harvested a surplus crop of potatoes, the chef in preparing the daily meal
can feature many potato dishes. On the other hand, if there was a shortage
of any commodity on the market the chef can arrange to work around that
commodity over the economic elements of the country.
(Marlowe 1946:15)

This cosy functionalist fantasy exemplifies how the articulation of ‘centralised
transmission and privatised reception’ (Williams 1974:30) embodied by broadcast
television operated as a modernist cultural technology par excellence. It served to contain
the centrifugal tendencies of spatial dispersion and social privatization which went along
with the suburbanization of modern life because it could, so it was assumed, cement the
isolated households together in a symbolic ‘imagined community’ of the nation
(Anderson 1983). In this sense, high modernity depended upon, and was sustained by, the
transformation of populations into regular and dedicated television audiences (see, e.g.,
Spigel 1992; Silverstone 1994). The dependable existence of such a television audience
can be seen as a founding myth of suburbanized, nationalized modernity. Here we have
the political significance of the television audience in modern culture—as a rhetorical
figure if not a social reality.
For in social reality, television audiences—as historical constructs of populations in
general—have always behaved in less than perfect ways; perfect, that is, in the modern
sense of orderly, responsible, willing. They watch the ‘wrong’ programmes, or they
watch ‘too much’, or they watch for the wrong reasons, or, indeed, they just don’t get the
‘correct’ things out of what they watch. Scholarly interest in television audiences has
generally been consistent with such perceptions of ‘imperfect’ audience behaviour. Mass
communication research, to a large extent a subdiscipline of American functionalist
sociology, has been fuelled by a neverending concern with television’s ‘effects’ and
‘uses’—a concern which betrays an implicit ideological connivance with the modernist
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framework. After all, what theoretically undergirds this type of investigation is a
perspective where audience behaviour or activity is problematized in the light of their
potential conformation to, or disruption of, ‘normal’ social processes and ordered social
structure. The persistent worry about the ‘dysfunctional’ effects of television on
‘vulnerable’ sections of the audience is indicative of this. For example, in the voluminous
study Television and Human Behavior (Comstock et al. 1978), one of the largest
empirical surveys on this topic ever done in the United States, four such ‘vulnerable’
groups have been singled out for special research attention: women, blacks, the poor and
the elderly. Comstock et al. legitimize this special focus with the liberal argument that
‘[t]hese groups are heavy viewers and the object of concern over whether society is
fulfilling its responsibilities and obligations to them’ (ibid.: 289). It would be more to the
point to say that the very focus on these groups articulates their construction as deviant
from the (white male middleclass) norm which forms the implicit and explicit cultural
core of American social modernity. The frequently resurging moral panic over televised
violence—a panic all too often accompanied by the purposeful ambition among
researchers to find scientifically supported ‘solutions’ to the problem—is another
example of the intellectual bias towards ‘rational control’ in the ‘dominant paradigm’. In