Page 49 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 40
text, is apparently a disembodied subject solely driven by a disinterested wish to
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contribute to ‘scientific progress’.
Morley’s academistic inclination tends to result in a lack of clarity about the critical
import and political relevance of his analyses. For example, the relevance of Family
Television as a project designed to investigate at the same time two different types of
questions regarding television consumption—questions of television use, on the one
hand, and questions of textual interpretation, on the other—is simply asserted by the
statement that these are ‘urgent questions about the television audience’ (Morley
1986:13). But why? What kind of urgency is being referred to here? Morley goes on to
say that it is the analysis of the domestic viewing context as such which is his main
interest, and that he wishes to identify the multiple meanings hidden behind the catch-all
phrase ‘watching television’. Indeed, central to Family Television’s discourse are, as Hall
remarks in his introduction to the book, the notions of variability, diversity and
difference:
We are all, in our heads, several different audiences at once, and can be
constituted as such by different programmes. We have the capacity to
deploy different levels and modes of attention, to mobilise different
competences in our viewing. At different times of the day, for different
family members, different patterns of viewing have different ‘saliences’.
Here the monolithic conceptions of the viewer, the audience or of
television itself have been displaced—one hopes forever—before the new
emphasis on difference and variation.
(Hall 1986a:10)

Yet when taken in an unqualified manner it is exactly this stress on difference that
essentially connects Morley’s project with the preoccupations of the gratificationists.
After all, it is their self-declared distinctive mission to get to grips with ‘the gamut of
audience experience’ (Blumler et al. 1985:271). For them too, the idea of plurality and
diversity is pre-eminently the guiding principle for research. A convergence of
perspectives after all?
Despite all the agreements that are certainly there, however, a closer look at the
ramifications of Morley’s undertaking reveals other concerns than merely the
characterization and categorizing of varieties within viewers’ readings and uses of
television. Ultimately, it is not difference as such that is of main interest in Morley’s
work. To be sure, differences are not just simple facts that emerge more or less
spontaneously from the empirical interview material; it is a matter of interpretation what
are established as significant differences—significant not in the formal, statistical sense
of that word, but in a culturally meaningful, interpretive sense. In cultural studies, then, it
is the meanings of differences that matter—something that can only be grasped,
interpretively, by looking at their contexts, social and cultural bases, and impacts. Thus,
rather than the classification of differences and varieties in all sorts of typologies, which
is a major preoccupation of a lot of uses and gratifications work, cultural studies would
be oriented towards more specific and conjunctural understandings of how and why
varieties in experience occur—a venture, to be sure, that is a closer approach to the
ethnographic spirit.