Page 28 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The battle between television and its audiences 19
existence and presence as a cultural form so taken for granted. Television, after all, has in
all industrial societies become an institution which is central to both the public and
private spheres. From an institutional point of view, analogous to that outlined by Metz, it
is the ‘arrangements’ (both ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ the viewer) set up by the television
institution through which a desire to watch television is roused and sustained which must
have been essential to this success. If the arrangements constructed by the cinematic
institution are based on legitimized voyeurism, as Metz and many other film theorists
have put forward, can we find an analogous construction in relation to television?
However, to avoid a determinist stance, we can only accept Metz’s formulation of the
problem in a qualified form. The setting-up of specific arrangements, the social
channelling of desire, does not take place within a cultural void. These arrangements can
only get rooted when they can be fitted into existing cultural patterns and ways of life.
They cannot be imposed in an authoritarian manner, as the above quotation of Metz
might wrongly suggest. In other words, it is not enough that the cinematic or televisual
institutions set up (psycho-institutional) arrangements which construct and offer a
position of involvement for the spectator/viewer, it is also necessary that the
spectator/viewer, given her or his cultural dispositions, considers such modes of
involvement to be not only sensible and acceptable, but also attractive and pleasurable.
The question to be asked is then twofold. First, which are the arrangements constructed
by the television institution for attracting viewers? And second, in which ways do the
modes of involvement inscribed in televisual discourse relate to the audience’s cultural
orientations towards watching television?
In his book Visible Fictions John Ellis has developed a consistent view of the
specificity of televisual address. In a certain sense, Ellis has relied on the institutional
approach outlined above as a guideline for his book, which he presents as ‘an attempt to
sketch out cinema and broadcast TV as social forms, particular forms of organization of
meaning for particular forms of spectator attention’ (1982:20). He argues that ‘broadcast
TV has developed distinctive aesthetic forms to suit the circumstances within which it is
used’ (ibid.: 111). Central to his argument is the idea that television adapts the material it
presents to the situation within which television viewing is normally assumed to take
place: in the private homes of isolated nuclear families. This everyday domestic setting
makes it very difficult for television to make its presence more than merely casually
noticed and to hold the audience’s attention—as a matter of fact, the private home does
not seem to be a very favourable context for a concentrated spectatorial activity, as the
cinema is. It is to ensure that the viewer will keep on watching, says Ellis, that television
has developed distinctive discursive forms:

TV draws the interest of its viewers through its own operations of
broadcasting. The viewer is cast as someone who has the TV switched on,
but is giving it very little attention: a casual viewer relaxing at home in the
midst of the family group. Attention has to be solicited and grasped
segment by segment. Hence both the amount of self-promotion that each
broadcast TV channel does for itself, the amount of direct address that
occurs, and the centrality given to sound in TV broadcasting. Sound draws
the attention of the look when it has wandered away.
(Ellis 1982:162)