Page 18 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 9
Third World cable, satellite and video cassette recorders have begun to destabilize and
decentralize the institutional and technological arrangements of TV provision which had
been in place for decades. In short, scarcity has been replaced by abundance, state control
by commercial initiative. These are signs of the irrevocable postmodernization of
television, which has corroborated a radically altered landscape for television audiences.
In industry and advertising circles there is talk of the diversification, fragmentation and
demassification of the audience. They have become acutely aware that audiences are not
gullible consumers who passively absorb anything they’re served, but must be
continuously ‘targeted’ and fought for, grabbed, seduced. This shift in institutional
awareness throughout the rapidly globalizing media industries, which intensified during
the 1980s, signifies the emergence of the spectre of the ‘active audience’ at the very heart
of corporate concerns. It is common industry wisdom that it is never possible to predict
the success or failure of a particular film or programme, despite all sorts of safety valves
such as formulaic production, use of stars and celebrities, and market research. Here the
‘activeness’ of the audience is associated rather frantically with its imputed fickleness,
recalcitrance and unpredictability. And with the anticipated expansion and
transnationalization of the communications industries under global capitalism, the battle
for audiences throughout the world will only heat up further as new ‘frontiers’—e.g.
China—are being opened up.
So the ‘active audience’ is not just a scholastic academic invention, populist, liberal
pluralist or otherwise, but a mythical discursive figure quintessentially attached to the
postmodernization of the capitalist cultural industries. In political economic terms, the
shift involves a transition from Fordist to post-Fordist consumption, where audience
markets are increasingly thought of in terms of ‘niches’, made up of flexible tastes and
preferences, rather than in terms of fixed demographics. With increasing competition,
shows are no longer churned out to an anonymous mass audience, but tailored for
specific, hard-to-get audiences. The ‘active audience’, then, is both an expression and a
consequence of what Lash and Urry (1987; 1994) have called disorganized capitalism,
where the instabilities of the free market economy are built into the production system
itself, which has now embraced notions of flexibility, mobility and flow.
The emphasis on audiences as active meaning makers in the new audience studies is
indeed congruent with this modification in industry perspective—and some would argue
that this is exactly why it is theoretically and politically suspect—but to leave it at this
observation would overlook what I see as the more complex, critical significance of the
notion of the ‘active audience’. Let me explain how the figure of the ‘active audience’
can be used productively to illuminate the way in which contradiction, inconsistency and
incoherence pervade contemporary, postmodern culture.
The rapid take-up of video recorders since the late 1970s is a case in point. The
popularity of the video recorder represents a key instance of a symbolic opting out of the
centralized transmission structure of the broadcasting framework. It also effected a major
disturbance of the modern arrangement of television where the distribution and
scheduling of programmes was monopolized by a limited number of powerful central
providers. Significantly, the VCR was (and is) especially popular among groups who
have traditionally been poorly served by centralist, modernist television (such as migrant
groups) or is used to watch material generally excluded from the official imaginary of
‘normal’ social order (such as hardcore porn). What we have here is a clear manifestation