Page 45 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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read media texts (conceptualized in terms of decoding structures, interpretive
communities, patterns of involvement, and so on), how are we to make sense of those
interpretive strategies? The task of the cultural studies researcher, I would suggest, is to
develop strategic interpretations of them, different not only in form and content but also
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in scope and intent from those offered in more ‘mainstream’ accounts. I will return to
this central issue of interpretation below.

BEYOND METHODOLOGY

A troubling aspect about the idea of (and desire for) convergence, then, is that it tends to
be conceptualized as an exclusively ‘scientific’ enterprise. Echoing the tenets of
positivism, its aim seems to be the gradual accumulation of scientifically confirmed
‘findings’. It is propelled by the hope that by seeking a shared agreement on what is
relevant to study and by developing shared methodological skills, the final scientific
account of ‘the audience’ can eventually be achieved. In this framework, audience
research is defined as a specialized niche within an academic discipline (e.g. ‘mass
communication’), in which it is assumed that ‘the audience’ is a proper object of study
whose characteristics can be ever more accurately observed, described, categorized,
systematized and explained until the whole picture is ‘filled in’. In other words, this
scientific project implicitly claims in principle (if not in practice) to be able to produce
total knowledge, to reveal the full and objective ‘truth’ about ‘the audience’. The
audience here is imagined as, and turned into, an object with researchable attributes and
features (be it described in terms of preferences, uses, effects, decodings, interpretive
strategies, or whatever) that can be definitively known—if only researchers of different
breeding would stop quarrelling with each other and unite to work harmoniously together
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to accomplish the task.
From such a point of view, the question of methodology becomes a central issue. After
all, rigour of method has traditionally been seen as the guarantee par excellence for the
‘scientific’ status of knowledge. In positivist social science, the hypothetico-deductive
testing of theory through empirical research, quantitative in form, is cherished as the
cornerstone of the production of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Theory that is not empirically
tested or that is too complex to be moulded into empirically testable hypotheses has to be
dismissed as ‘unscientific’. These assumptions, which are more or less central to the
dominant version of the uses and gratifications approach as it was established in the
1970s, are now contested by a growing number of researchers who claim that reality
cannot be grasped and explained through quantitative methods alone. Stronger still, they
forcefully assert that to capture the multidimensionality and complexity of audience
activity the use of qualitative methods—and thus a move towards the ‘ethnographic’—is
desperately called for (cf. Lull 1986; Jensen 1987; Lindlof and Meyer 1987).
From a ‘scientific’ point of view, it is this methodological challenge that forms the
condition of possibility of the perceived convergence. However, although I think that the
struggle for legitimization of qualitative research is a very important one, I do believe
that it is not the central point for critical cultural studies. This is the case because, as the
struggle is defined as a matter of methodology, its relevance is confined to the
development of audience research as an academic enterprise. Of course, this development