Page 42 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

On the politics of empirical audience research 33
readers which they, in their narrow functionalist interest in the multiple relationships
between audience ‘needs’ and media ‘uses’, had previously all but ignored. As Jay
Blumler, Michael Gurevitch and Elihu Katz admit:

Gratifications researchers, in their paradigmatic personae, have lost sight
of what the media are purveying, in part because of an over-commitment
to the endless freedom of the audience to reinvent the text, in part because
of a too rapid leap to mega-functions, such as surveillance or self-identity.
(Blumler et al. 1985:272)

On top of this conceptual rapprochement, they have also expressed their delight in
noticing a methodological ‘concession’ among ‘critical’ scholars: at last, so they exclaim,
some ‘critical’ scholars have dropped their suspicion of doing empirical research. In a
benevolent, rather fatherly tone, Blumler, Gurevitch and Katz, three senior ambassadors
of the uses and gratifications approach, have thus proclaimed a gesture of ‘reaching out’
to the other ‘camp’ (1985:275). Therefore the prospect is evoked of a merger of the two
approaches, to the point that they may ultimately fuse into a happy common project in
which the perceived hostility between the two ‘camps’ will have been unmasked as
academic ‘pseudo-conflicts’. As one leading gratifications researcher, Karl Erik
Rosengren, optimistically predicts: ‘To the extent that the same problematics are
empirically studied by members of various schools, the present sharp differences of
opinion will gradually diminish and be replaced by a growing convergence of
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perspectives’ (1983:203).
However, to interpret these recent developments in audience studies in terms of such a
convergence is to simplify and even misconceive what is at stake in the ‘ethnographic
turn’ within cultural studies. For one thing, I would argue that cultural studies and uses
and gratifications research only superficially share ‘the same problematics’, as Rosengren
would have it. Also, what separates a ‘critical’ from a ‘mainstream’ perspective is more
than merely some ‘differences of opinion’, sharp or otherwise. Rather, it concerns
fundamental differences not only in epistemological but also in theoretical and political
attitudes towards the aim and status of doing empirical work in the first place.
The academic idealization of joining forces in pursuit of a supposedly common goal as
if it were a neutral, scientific project is a particularly depoliticizing strategy, because it
tends to neutralize all antagonism and disagreement in favour of a forced consensus. If I
am cautious and a little wary about this euphoria around the prospect of academic
convergence, it is not my intention to impose a rigid and absolute, eternal dichotomy
between ‘critical’ and ‘mainstream’ research. Nor would I want to assert that Morley’s
project is entirely ‘critical’ and the uses and gratifications approach completely
‘mainstream’. As I have noted before, the relationship between ‘critical’ and
‘mainstream’ is not a fixed one; it does not concern two mutually exclusive, antagonistic
sets of knowledge, as some observers would imply by talking in terms of ‘schools’,
‘paradigms’ or even ‘camps’. In fact, many assumptions and ideas do not, in themselves,
intrinsically belong to one or the other perspective. For example, the basic assumption
that the audience is ‘active’ (rather than passive) and that watching television is a social
(rather than an individual) practice is currently accepted in both perspectives. There is
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nothing spectacular about that. What matters is how this idea of ‘activeness’ is