Page 66 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies 57
browsing than reading a book.) It seems to me that the crisis in audience studies should
be understood in the context of this postmodern momentum of change.
It is often said, and often not without a sense of modernist nostalgia, that the television
audience is becoming increasingly fragmented, individualized, dispersed, no longer
addressable as a mass or as a single market, no longer comprehensible as a social entity,
collectively engaged and involved in a well-defined act of viewing. Indeed, television’s
proliferation has made it painfully clear that it does not make sense to speak about the
‘television audience’ as a neatly demarcated object of study. In my view, we should take
this historical realization as an opportunity to finally mark out the productive end of the
search for a ‘comprehensive theory of the audience’, which has often been the implicit
motif of the diverse paradigms of audience research within communication studies.
Acknowledging the inevitably partial (in the sense of unfinished and incomplete) nature
of our theorizing and research would arguably be a more enabling position from which to
come to grips with the dynamic complexity and complex dynamics of media
consumption practices. In addition, a recognition of this sense of inexorable,
epistemological partiality in the construction of knowledge would facilitate the
foregrounding of the other, political meaning of being partial: the social and political
importance of commitment and engagement in developing our understandings. I will
return to the articulation of this double partiality in audience studies further on.
Recent cultural studies approaches to audience research are directly faced with the
limits and limitations of comprehensiveness as an epistemological ideal. By these
approaches I mean, very broadly, the kind of empirical and interpretive work that starts
out from the recognition that media consumption is an ongoing set of popular cultural
practices, whose significances and effectivities only take shape in the ‘complex and
contradictory terrain, the multidimensional context, in which people live out their
everyday lives’ (Grossberg 1988a:25). But how to turn this insight, this abstract hunch,
into more concrete knowledge, more tangible understanding?
Most of us would agree that in order to do this we need to contextualize the media far
more radically than we have done so far: we should stop conceptualizing television,
radio, the press, and so on, in isolation, as a series of separable independent variables
having more or less clearcut correlations with another set of dependent, audience
variables. In the case of television, the consequences of this necessity of contextualization
has been most resolutely problematized in David Morley and Roger Silverstone’s
research project carried out when they were affiliated to the Centre for Research into
Innovation, Culture and Technology (CRICT) at Brunel University, London. It is not my
intention to discuss this work substantially; instead, I will use it as a starting point to
explore both the promises and the dilemmas, simultaneously epistemological and
political, of what I would call ‘radical contextualism’ in culturalist audience studies, and
the significance of ethnography in this respect.
In their inclusive, almost totalizing vision, Morley and Silverstone state that television
‘has to be seen as embedded within a technical and consumer culture that is both
domestic and national (and international), a culture that is at once private and public’
(1990:32). As a concrete starting point, Morley and Silverstone have decided to focus on
two contextual concerns: on the one hand, television’s place in the domestic context; on
the other hand, television’s status as a technology. However, when these contextual
concerns are pushed to their logical extremes, they inevitably lead to a fundamental