Page 36 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The battle between television and its audiences 27
connection with and expressing popular structures of feeling’ (1983:76). What has made
debates about commercial television (or about public service television using the methods
of commercial thinking, as is increasingly the case in the Netherlands) so obscure is the
conflation of commercialism as an economic principle of production, which is utterly
capitalist, with commercialism as a cultural principle of producing goods for
consumption, which certainly has connections with the popular. The success of the
commercial logic lies in the fact that it takes the pleasure of consumption and
consumption for pleasure seriously, in the fact that it actively engages in the construction
of what is pleasurable, and the fact that it has used the pleasurable as a structuring
principle for addressing viewers.

CONCLUSION

Ellis’s basic proposition that television’s aesthetic forms can be explained by the
necessity to come to terms with the familial, domestic conditions within which television
is watched should now be given some nuance. After all, that domestic setting itself is not
given. When it comes to constructing the meaning of watching television, it is part of the
problem. It is this very domestic setting which was seen by some as an excellent
opportunity to integrate people’s personal lives into the official life of the nation; in short,
to continue to educate them even when they are at home. As one Dutch scholar wrote:

Exactly because television reaches man [sic] when he is on his own or is
to be found in the smallest social unit, the family, it is worth the trouble
[…] to use the medium to drive a wedge between the often collective
prejudices which impede a healthy development of the (national)
community.
(Schaafsma 1965:19–20)

However, because in our culture the home is often felt to be a ‘haven in a heartless
world’, watching television is mostly experienced and cherished as one of those activities
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in which one is one’s own master or mistress, and it is thus perfectly understandable why
so many viewers resist being made to use television as an extension of the classroom.
Thus, in a formal sense, it is correct to say that television’s rhetoric is aimed at holding
the viewer’s attention by modes of direct address, by dividing programmes into short
segments, by using sound to catch the gaze, and so on. But underlying these formal
discursive strategies are ideological principles which can be traced back to a continuing
struggle over the meaning of watching television as a cultural practice, a struggle which,
at least in the case of Dutch television, is constructed as a struggle between television-as-
education and television-as-pleasure. In televisual discourse, this struggle is expressed in
a continual attempt to secure heterogeneity by combining the two constructed options.
Thus, almost every news and current affairs programme is structured in such a way as to
find a compromise between the ‘educative’ and the ‘pleasurable’: the light popular tone,
the magazine format with ‘difficult’ items sandwiched between more ‘frivolous’ ones, the
populist stance from which events are represented, etc. However, these developments can
merely be seen as attempts to make a pedagogic ideology work in front of an ‘unwilling’