Page 17 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 8
audience’ is an unnecessarily narrow one, too preoccupied with finding a ‘correct’ critical
position about popular television—a position which, depending on your standpoint,
would be either optimistic or pessimistic. Such priority given to the need for ‘legislative’
political judgement—which, incidentally, mirrors a dominant tendency in debates pro and
contra postmodernism—is itself, as Bauman (1987) has pointed out, a particularly
modernist intellectual preoccupation which obscures rather than illuminates what is at
stake in the ‘cultural turn’ in audience studies. Far from just advocating the optimistic
and self-congratulatory liberal mirage of consumer freedom and sovereignty, I want to
suggest that the new figure of the ‘active audience’ within cultural studies can be taken as
a marker of the very transition from the modern to the postmodern I have been talking
about here. In other words, I want to see the discursive emergence of the ‘active
audience’ as a sign of heightened cultural contradiction in contemporary society.
Of course, the idea that audiences are ‘active’ in their encounters and engagements
with the media is in itself a rather banal observation (Morris 1988a). But it becomes more
theoretically substantial if we understand it precisely in the context of the
postmodernization of television and of culture and society more generally. Jim McGuigan
observes:

Active audience research and the meaning of television in everyday life
took a certain priority during the 1980s. Such research was rarely linked
to the complex economic determinations, technological and policy
changes occurring around television nationally and internationally.
(McGuigan 1992:128)

Similarly, John Corner remarks that ‘so much conceptual effort has been centered on
audiences’ interpretative activity that even the preliminary theorization of [media power]
has become awkward’ (1991:267). McGuigan’s and Corner’s comments do ring true—
there has indeed not been much attention paid to the relation between the cultural and the
economic in most audience studies, new or otherwise, although the same can be said
about most work in the political economy of the media (Golding and Murdock 1991). But
I want to suggest that if we shift the perspective somewhat, if we take the ‘active
audience’ not just as an empirical phenomenon but as the sign for a particular new
problematic, then the apparent gap between the cultural and economic—or that between
emphasis on interpretation and emphasis on effects—ceases to be so great. I want to go
beyond the view that attention to the ‘active audience’ is necessarily antagonistic to a
consideration of media power. Far from it. The ‘active audience’, I suggest, can be taken
as a condensed image of the ‘disorder of things’ in a postmodernized world—a world
which has seriously destabilized the functionalist connection between television and
modernity. This doesn’t mean an end to television’s power, but a reconfiguration of it in
postmodern terms.
There have indeed been rapid alterations surrounding the place and operation of
television itself during the last twenty years or so. We know the symptoms: national
public broadcast TV hegemony (in Europe) was undermined by increasing
commercialization and internationalization; the sweeping reach of network TV (in the
United States) was eroded by the advent of dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller, more
specialized and localized channels; not only in the industrialized world but also in the