Page 67 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 58
shattering of the possibility of studying the television audience as a stable and meaningful
psychological or sociological category.
First of all, the mundane fact that television is generally consumed at home (and not in
a laboratory or a classroom) calls for the by no means new but still sobering observation
that ‘the use of television cannot be separated from everything else that is going on
around it’ (Morley and Silverstone 1990:35). That is, the activity so often simplistically
described as ‘watching TV’ only takes shape within the broader contextual horizon of a
heterogeneous and indefinite range of domestic practices. As a result, the very notion of
‘watching TV’ undergoes a dispersal: what the activity is, what it entails and what it
means cannot be predetermined, but depends on the influence of a plurality of interacting
contexts. ‘Watching TV’ is no more than a shorthand label for a wide variety of
multidimensional behaviours and experiences implicated in the practice of television
consumption. If this is the case, however, it becomes difficult to demarcate when we are
and when we are not part of the television audience. In a sense we are, as citizens living
in television-saturated modern societies, always inevitably incorporated in that category,
even when we personally don’t actually watch it very often. For example, even when we
have never seen Dallas or Murphy Brown or have missed Saddam Hussein’s television
performance, we can hardly avoid being implicated in such television events through
their general diffusion in the intricate networks of day-to-day social discourse.
Considering television as a technology—rather than merely as a set of distinct
messages or texts—only enhances the dispersal of ‘television audience’ as a coherent
category. The emphasis on television as technology enlarges the scope of what is
generally known as the premise of the ‘active’ audience. As a communications
technology, television has what Morley and Silverstone call a double articulation: since it
is both a set of hardware objects (i.e. the TV set and connected technological items such
as the VCR, the video camera, the computer, the remote control device, the satellite dish,
the telephone, and so on) and a vehicle for symbolic material, television creates an
enormous open space for the ways in which it becomes integrated in the domestic flow of
everyday life. This leads to a rather dizzying accumulation of the audience’s meaning-
producing capacity. As Silverstone has put it:

Television is potentially meaningful and therefore open to the constructive
work of the consumer-viewer, both in terms of how it is used, or placed,
in the household—in what rooms, where, associated with what other
furniture or machines, the subject of what kinds of discourses inside and
outside the home and in terms of how the meanings it makes available
through the content of its programmes are in turn worked with by
individuals and household groups who receive them.
(Silverstone 1990:179)

Here, the scope of reception theory (which posits the indeterminacy of the meaning of the
text outside of concrete viewer readings of it) is extended by applying the metaphor of
textuality to the realm of technologies as well: technologies too, hardware, material
objects, only take on meaning in and through their consumers’ ‘readings’ and uses of
them. Television consumption, in short, is a meaning-producing cultural practice at two
interdependent levels. Looking at television as a domestic technology implies for Morley