Page 29 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 20
Ellis’s position is interesting here as he treats the aesthetic modes developed by television
not as neutral or arbitrary forms, but as rhetorical strategies to attract viewers. One could
say that every rhetorical strategy is based upon assumptions about the best way to reach
the target group. Thus, Ellis suggests that television recruits the interest of its viewers by
creating a complicity of viewing: through its discursive organization television is able to
pose itself as an institutional eye which looks to the world on behalf of the viewers. It is
especially through the device of direct address (i.e. presenters, newscasters, talk-show
hosts, and so on, apparently speaking directly to the viewer at home, thereby creating an
illusion of immediate presence) that television explicitly invites viewers to join it in its
looking at the world. According to Ellis, television not only assumes that it has certain
kinds of viewers, it also attempts to bind these viewers by pretending to speak for them
and look for them. (In this respect, one of the favourite promotion slogans used by TROS,
one of the most popular/populist Dutch broadcasting organizations, is instructive: ‘TROS
is there for you!’ The other side of the coin, namely that ‘you are there for TROS!’, is
very sensibly suppressed.)
It is on the basis of this generalized view of the rhetoric of television that Ellis puts
forward his thesis about the place of the TV viewer in relation to televisual discourse. He
stresses that the position offered to the TV viewer is not the voyeuristic position, as is the
case with the cinema spectator. Instead, the TV viewer is invited/summoned to delegate
her/his look to TV itself: to trust in television ‘as a safe means of scanning the world
outside’ (Ellis 1982:170). And, by presenting ‘the world’ in a specific way, that is, as an
endless flow of events and things which have no connection to one another (just as every
news item is separate from the next one; each one of them is written down on a separate
sheet of paper), the TV viewer is placed in a very specific ideological relation to that
world: according to Ellis, the formal strategies of televisual discourse give rise to the
ideological positioning of the TV viewer as a ‘normal citizen’. Ellis typifies this position
as follows:

The viewer-as-citizen is uninvolved in the events portrayed. […]
Citizenship recognises problems outside the self, outside the immediate
realm of responsibility and power of the individual citizen. […]
Citizenship therefore constitutes the viewer as someone powerless to do
anything about the events portrayed other than sympathise or become
angry. The whole domestic arrangement of broadcast TV and the aesthetic
forms it has evolved to come to terms with this domestic arrangement
provides broadcast TV with the capability to do this and no more. The
citizenship that it provides as the position for its viewers is a position of
impotence: TV viewers are able to see ‘life’s parade at their fingertips’,
but at the cost of exempting themselves from that parade for the duration
of their TV viewing.
(Ellis 1982:169–70)

It is doubtful whether this account of the subject position implied in the practice of
watching television is a satisfactory one. This doubt becomes stronger when we take into
consideration that, in so far as Ellis is concerned with the rhetorical strategies of
televisual discourse, it will be necessary to explain that the position proposed to the