Page 2 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

LIVING ROOM WARS

Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang’s recent writings on media audiences to ask
what it means to live in a world saturated by media. What does our media audiencehood
say about our everyday lives and social relations, and how does it illuminate the
condition of contemporary culture?
Ang suggests that we cannot understand media audiences without deconstructing the
category of ‘audience’ itself as an institutional and discursive construct. Her accessible
style throws light on some of the complexities of media consumption in a postmodern
world, including those related to gender politics and the globalization of culture.
Living Room Wars points to the inherently contradictory nature of the media’s role in
shaping our identities, fantasies and pleasures, imbricated as they are in the exigencies of
capitalist consumption and the institutions of the modern nation-state. Living Room Wars
presents an indispensable tool for bridging audience studies, media studies and the larger
concerns of cultural studies.
Ien Ang is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean,
Australia. She is the author of Watching Dallas (1985) and Desperately Seeking the
Audience (1991).