Page 19 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 10
of the ‘active audience’, but of course this does not imply a conscious intentionality on
the part of VCR users to ‘resist’. It would make more sense to suggest that when given
the opportunity, people opted for ‘choice’: they wanted to decide for themselves what to
watch (and thus contributed to the successful emergence of the video shop), or at least
they wanted to be able to watch programmes at times convenient to them (using the ‘time
shift’ facility of the VCR). In other words, audiences simply retreated from the
integrative pull of modern television here. The VCR disrupted the modern entanglement
between centralized transmission and privatized reception because it displaced the locus
of control over the circulation of cultural texts to more local contexts. With the VCR,
then, we have witnessed the ‘active audience’ in action. This does not mean, however,
that audiences are moving out of the industry’s sphere of influence: rather, that their
relation to the industry is shifting from that of the more or less passive audience-mass to
that of the selective individual consumer.
‘Choice’ is now promoted as one of the main appeals of television to its audiences and
is presented as the ultimate realization of audience freedom. The proliferation of new
technologies—such as satellite TV, fibre-optic cable, interactive television and so on—
and the ever greater range of specialized programming for ever more specialized
audiences is creating an image world which seems to suggest that ‘there is something for
everyone’s taste’—a delirium of consumer sovereignty and unlimited choice. As Jody
Berland has observed: ‘In locating their “audiences” in an increasingly wider and more
diverse range of dispositions, locations, and contexts, contemporary cultural technologies
contribute to and seek to legitimate their own spatial and discursive expansion’
(1992:42). The discourse of choice is a core element of that legitimation. Seen this way,
the figure of the ‘active audience’ has nothing to do with ‘resistance’, but everything to
do with incorporation: the imperative of choice interpellates the audience as ‘active’!
What we have here is a contradiction which is built into the very formation of
postmodern culture. ‘Choice’ is now one of the prime discursive mechanisms through
which people are drawn into the seductions of consumption, but at the same time,
because ‘choice’ is by definition an openended, procedural mechanism—it can be
manipulated but not imposed—there can be no guarantee that people will make the
‘right’ choices, that is, the ones which sustain the reproduction of the ‘system’.
Uncertainty is thus inherently built into the ‘system’ of postmodern capitalism. On the
other hand, if consumers are seen positively as ‘making space’, ‘winning space’, etc., by
activating their own choice—as much of the ‘new audience studies’ have highlighted—
this can also be seen as their final cooption into the political economy of the cultural
industries. In other words, the ‘active audience’ is both subject and object of postmodern
consumer culture.
Mike Featherstone suggests quite rightly that ‘the much-talked-about cultural ferment
and disorder, often labelled postmodernism, may not be the result of a total absence of
controls, a genuine disorder, but merely point to a more deeply embedded integrative
principle’ (1991:20). This ‘more deeply embedded integrative principle’ might not be a
central(izing) mechanism which ensures something like a ‘common culture’, but a
decentralized, self-perpetuating mechanism which operates through an endless
proliferation of choice insistently put on offer by the market forces of an increasingly
global, disorganized capitalism.