Page 26 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The battle between television and its audiences 17
Morley (1980a, also 1981) has attempted to develop an ‘ethnography of viewing’, by
sorting out the different readings or decodings made by different groups of viewers
(defined according to socio-cultural criteria) in relation to a specific set of texts. Working
within a similar theoretical model, Charlotte Brunsdon has adopted a different strategy to
tackle the same problematic: her concern is how female viewers are capable of reading
and enjoying soap operas, a capability which she locates in the specific cultural
competences women have, that is, their familiarity with the narrative structure of the soap
opera genre, their knowledge of soap opera characters and their sensitivity to codes of
conduct of personal life and interpersonal relationships. In other words, instead of
emphasizing the differences between readings or decodings, Brunsdon (1981) has tried to
account for the specificity of the confrontation between one type of texts (soap operas)
and one category of viewers (women).
Both theoretically and politically, this new problematic constructs a more dynamic
conception of the relation between texts and viewers. It acknowledges the fact that factors
other than textual ones play a part in the way viewers make sense of a text. Thus it places
the text/viewer encounter within a firm socio-cultural context. It conceives of viewers as
more than just passive receivers of already fixed ‘messages’ or mere textual
constructions, opening up the possibility of thinking about television viewing as an area
of cultural struggle. However, the model has limitations. Apart from various problems
having to do with, for example, an adequate theorization of the concept of decoding (see
Wren-Lewis 1983), the encoding/decoding model can be said to have a quite narrow view
of the role of the audience: its effectivity is limited to negotiations open to viewers within
the given range of significations made possible by a text or genre of texts. Moreover, this
model’s very conception of the audience tends to be a limited one. Within this theoretical
model, the sole problem is the way in which texts are received/ decoded in specific socio-
cultural contexts, failing to take into account that decodings are embedded in a more
general practice of television viewing as such. It then becomes possible to question the
relevance of the concept of decoding, with its connotations of analytical reasoning, for
describing the viewer’s activity of making sense of a text, as watching television is
usually experienced as a ‘natural’ practice, firmly set within the routines of everyday life
(see, e.g., Dahlgren 1983). It goes without saying that a practice which is felt to be
‘natural’ structurally is not natural at all. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the
‘naturalness’ of the experience of watching television has an effect on the ways in which
individual texts are received and dealt with.
What is at stake here is the way in which television audiences relate to watching
television as a cultural practice. What does that practice mean and how are those
meanings produced? One cannot deal with this question without an analysis of the way in
which televisual discourse as a complex whole of representations is organized and
structured, as it is through this discourse that a relationship between television and its
audiences is mediated and constructed. In other words, here too an articulation of the
‘semiological’ and the ‘sociological’ perspectives will be necessary.
In this chapter I would like to propose that different conceptions of the social meaning
of watching television as a cultural practice are at play, and that these differences are
related to the structuring of televisual discourse, with its heterogeneity of representations
and modes of address. In doing this, I would like to stress the specific position of popular
audiences as an effective category in organizing the ‘television apparatus’. First, I shall