Page 65 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

4
Ethnography and radical contextualism in
audience studies

Our curiosity about the audience is never innocent. Specific interests and orientations,
material and intellectual, generally shape the perspective from which we come to define
our object of study, and the kinds of knowledge—their form and content, their scope and
substance—we pursue. There is now clearly a sense of crisis in the study of media
audiences: the ambiguous title of a recent conference dedicated to this subject, ‘towards a
comprehensive theory of the audience?’, suggests an awareness of a confusing lack of
1
such ‘comprehensiveness’. The crisis is neither purely theoretical nor merely
methodological (as misleadingly suggested in the counterposing of quantitative and
qualitative methods); it is, rather, both deeply epistemological and thoroughly political.
The current popularity of cultural studies approaches to the audience has not only
produced considerable epistemological confusion over the status of the concept of the
‘audience’ as an analytical object, but has also reanimated the persistent critical
preoccupation with the political standing of scholarship: what does it mean to do
‘audience research’, and why do it in the first place?
In the past decade or more, the audience question has been especially acute in
television studies. This is not only because the television audience has since the 1950s
had the dubious privilege of being in the spotlight of attention from researchers, both
within the industry and within the academy; more generally, it has become prototypical
for the (real and imagined) ‘problem of the audience’ which has risen to prominence in
light of practical and theoretical concerns about the nexus of modernity, the media
industries and mass culture. More importantly, however, as I have already indicated in
the Introduction, television’s changing place in the late twentieth century has put our
conventional understandings of the television audience under severe pressure. I would
like to stress the notion of change here: we do live in a time of dramatic transformation of
television’s economic, institutional, technological and textual arrangements. The eclipse
of the national public service broadcasting systems in Western Europe, as well as the
worldwide ascendancy of a multiplicity of transnational, commercially organized satellite
channels, the proliferation of local and regional channels, and the ever more abundant
availability of VCRs and other television-related technologies, have obviously thrown
traditional models about television reception and consumption into disarray. This has
been exacerbated by television’s rising importance as a major actor in the enactment of
global politics (as we have recently seen in the Gulf War [Wark 1994]), as well as our
growing theoretical awareness about television’s specificity as a popular cultural form—
its eclectic but repetitive narratives, its socially heterogeneous yet textually imposing
modes of address, its stubborn always-thereness—which greatly challenge the validity of
traditional, literary models of audiencehood, in which the discrete text/reader relationship
forms the basic analytical focus. (If anything, viewing television today is often more like