Page 162 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 153

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ON THE POLITICS OF EMPIRICAL AUDIENCE RESEARCH
1 It should be noted that the term ‘ethnography’ is somewhat misplaced in this context. Within
anthropology, ethnography refers to an in-depth field study of a culture and its inhabitants in
their natural location, which would require the researcher to spend a fair amount of time in
that location, allowing her/him to acquire a nuanced and comprehensive insight into the
dynamics of the social relationships in the culture under study, and enabling her/him to
produce a ‘thick description’ of it. Most qualitative studies of media audiences do not meet
these requirements. In Morley’s Nationwide study, for example, the informants were
extracted from their natural viewing environment and interviewed in groups that were put
together according to socio-economic criteria. In a looser sense, however, the use of the term
‘ethnographic’ can be justified here in so far as the approach is aimed at getting a thorough
insight into the ‘lived experience’ of media consumption. For a further discussion, see
chapter 4.
2 It should be stressed, however, that the ‘critical’ tradition is not a monolithic whole: there is
not one ‘critical theory’ with generally shared axioms, but many different, and often
conflicting, ‘critical perspectives’, e.g. political economy and cultural studies.
3 Thus, the dichotomization of ‘critical’ and ‘empirical’ schools in communication studies,
particularly in the United States, should be considered with some flexibility. See, e.g., the
famous ‘Ferment in the Field’ issue of the Journal of Communication (1983).
4 The direct theoretical inspiration of Morley’s research was the so-called encoding/decoding
model as launched by Stuart Hall, which presented a theoretical intervention against ‘Screen
theory’. See Hall (1980a, 1980b). Morley himself has elaborated on the ‘interdiscursive’
nature of encounters between text and subjects. See Morley (1980b).
5 See also Tamar Liebes (1986) and Kim Christian Schrøder (1987). Such an insistence upon
convergence is not new among ‘mainstream’ communication researchers. For example,
Jennifer Slack and Martin Allor have recalled how in the late 1930s Lazarsfeld hired Adorno
in the expectation that the latter’s critical theory could be used to ‘revitalize’ American
empiricist research by supplying it with ‘new research ideas’. The collaboration ended only
one year later because it proved to be impossible to translate Adorno’s critical analysis into
the methods and goals of Lazarsfeld’s project. Lazarsfeld has never given up the idea of a
convergence, however (Slack and Allor 1983:210).
6 Note, for instance, the striking similarities between the following two sentences, one from a
uses and gratifications source, the other from a cultural studies one: ‘There seems to be
growing support for that branch of communications research which asserts that television
viewing is an active and social process’ (Katz and Liebes 1985:187); ‘Television viewing,
the choices which shape it and the many social uses to which we put it, now turn out to be
irrevocably active and social process’ (Hall 1986a:8).
7 In stating this I do not want to suggest that cultural studies is a closed paradigm, nor that all
cultural studies scholars share one—say, Foucauldian—conception of power. For example,
the Birmingham version of cultural studies, with its distinctly Gramscian inflection, has been
criticized by Lawrence Grossberg for its lack of a theory of pleasure. An alternative,
postmodernist perspective on cultural studies is developed in Grossberg (1983).
8 Strategic interpretations, that is, interpretations that are ‘political’ in the sense that they are
aware of the fact that interpretations are always concrete interventions into an already
existing discursive field. They are therefore always partial in both senses of the word (i.e.
partisan and incomplete), and involved in making sense of the world in specific, power-laden
ways. See Mary Louise Pratt (1986).