Page 161 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes

INTRODUCTION
1 For an exhaustive historical account of the ‘dominant paradigm’ and its collusion with the
requirements of the modern capitalist media industries in the United States, see Gitlin
(1978).
2 The emphasis on ‘uses’ (in ‘uses and gratifications research’) is often presented as
diametrically opposed to that on ‘effects’, but because they share the same functionalist
theoretical framework they can be seen as two sides of the same coin.
3 For an insightful discussion of the meaning of everyday ‘resistance’ as ‘weapons of the weak’
in a very different context, i.e. peasants in rural Third World areas, see J.C.Scott (1985).

1
THE BATTLE BETWEEN TELEVISION AND ITS AUDIENCES
1 It is impossible to describe in detail here the complex structure and development of Dutch
television. For an established but adequate overview in English see Herman Wigbold (1979).
See also Ang (1987).
2 In other words, what predominates here is a very folkish idea of audiences, which contradicts
the conception of the audience as an anonymous mass as usually implied in mass-media
systems.
3 Veronica is a controversial broadcasting organization which stemmed from a very popular
pirate radio transmitter, which introduced round-the-clock pop music to Dutch youth in the
1960s. In 1976 Veronica applied for TV transmission time and finally was allowed into the
legal broadcasting system, although it was not clear which religious or cultural ‘pillar’ it
represented. Being more aggressive and noisy than TROS, Veronica developed a very
distinctive popular mode of address, which was based on the slogan: ‘You are young and
you want things!’ and which is often deliberately truculent (‘Veronica fears nothing!’). In
terms of programming, this means a lot of pop music, spectacular films and ‘sex-’n’-
violence’. It was Veronica which, by the 1990s, brought about the final breakdown of the
Dutch public broadcasting system by deliberately stepping out of its ideological framework
and going fully commercial.
4 Of course, we should not overlook the conflicts and the unequal relations of power within the
family here, in which the father or husband is mostly in the dominant position. An analysis
of popular television and of constructions of the pleasurable in televisual discourse should
take into account the ways in which representations and modes of address assume positions
which are specific to gender, ethnicity, age, etc.