Page 20 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 11
One observer estimates that as interactive television enters living rooms in some US
cities, consumers will have a choice of 7000 to 14,000 programmes a week. To help
consumers find what they want to watch, an interactive electronic programme guide is
being developed with which they can navigate through this enormous menu (Clancey
1993). By the end of 1995, there will be some 800 transponders available for satellite TV
transmission over the Eastern Asian region, deemed to be the most lucrative market for
global broadcasters today. In a region which is described by some commentators as ‘TV-
starved’, the prospect of increased choice is unsurprisingly and unthinkingly hailed as
‘progress’. But even here ‘[t]he million-dollar question is: how many [channels] are
enough?’ (Asiaweek 1994).
In postmodern culture the discourse of choice has expanded exponentially—it is a
discourse in which the rhetoric of the liberatory benefits of personal autonomy and
individual self-determination has become hegemonic. No longer tied to ‘tradition’ or the
restrictions of class, gender or race, subjects in the postmodern world are now impelled to
constantly reconstruct and reinvent themselves; in pursuit of happiness, life is defined as
the ability to make an ever-increasing number of choices. The concept of ‘life-style’
articulates this particularly postmodern predicament. Life-styles are the fluid and
changeable popular aesthetic formations of identity produced through self-reflexive
consumption and disembedded from stable social networks (Chancy 1994:208; Lash and
Urry 1994:142). But if such postmodern lifestyles suggest a liberation from social
necessity, don’t they also imply a compulsion to activeness, to self-reflexivity, to creative
self-construction? Seen this way, the ‘active audience’ represents a state of being
condemned to freedom of choice.
Far from being romanticized or celebrated, then, it is in this context that the practices
of active meaning making in the process of media consumption—as part of creating a
‘life-style’ for oneself—need to be understood. I want to suggest that the significance of
the new audience studies should not be sought in their deconstruction of the idea of the
‘passive audience’—that figure of an older, arguably modernist paradigm—but in their
exploration of how people live within an increasingly media-saturated culture, in which
they have to be active (as choosers and readers, pleasure seekers and interpreters) in order
to produce any meaning at all out of the overdose of images thrown before us.
Paradoxically, then, postmodern consumer culture requires people to be more
semiotically skilled, more sophisticated or educated in their meaning making abilities. As
Lash and Urry put it, it

is not that the inflation of images leads to an inability to attach meanings
or ‘signifieds’ to images, or even the triumph of spectacle over narrative.
It is instead that the speed at which we attach meanings to signifiers has
and will greatly increase.
(Lash and Urry 1994:55)

But Lash and Urry speak in the name of a too abstracted, generalized ‘we’. After all, for
whom does all this apply? And how do different people in different places, living in
different conditions and under different circumstances, with more or less semiotic skills
and familiarity with postmodern aesthetics, actually attach meanings to the images they
encounter, whether or not they are of their own choosing? I believe that that it is this