Page 68 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies 59
and Silverstone a look at the television audience as ‘multiply embedded in a consumer
culture in which technologies and messages are juxtaposed, both implicated in the
creation of meaning, in the creative possibilities of everyday life’ (1990:51).
It is precisely the idea of profound embeddedness of television consumption (and of
media consumption in general) in everyday life, and therefore its irreducible
heterogeneity and dynamic complexity, that has been a central emphasis within culturalist
audience studies, although the epistemological bearings of this emphasis, which amount
to a form of radical contextualism, are not always thoroughly understood.
Of course it is true that the recognition of diversity in audience activity has been a
major strand in the development of social-scientific audience research, ranging from uses
and gratifications research to reception analysis to observational work on television’s
social uses within the family. But many of these studies still seem to start out from a
conceptualization of television itself as a given phenomenon with fixed features and
intrinsic potentials, which can then be used or interpreted in different ways by different
audience groups. From a radical contextualist perspective, however, television’s
meanings for audiences—textual, technological, psychological, social—cannot be
decided upon outside of the multidimensional intersubjective networks in which the
object is inserted and made to mean in concrete contextual settings.
For example, many research projects have been set up on the basis of the
uninterrogated commonsense assumption that television is an ‘entertainment medium’,
implying that ‘entertainment’ is not only an institutional or textual category but also a
psychological need or preference, and that the two are more or less correlated in some
functional fashion. If we take up the stance of radical contextualism however, we must let
go of such an ahistorical assumption of pregiven fixity of what television is, in the
recognition that the meanings of television within the domestic realm only emerge within
contextualized audience practices. That is, the precise ‘entertainment function’ of
television can only be determined post facto: outside of specific articulations of
television-audience relationships we cannot meaningfully decide about ‘the entertainment
value’ of television. After all, the term ‘entertainment’ itself can encompass a whole
array of differential and shifting idiosyncratic meanings, depending upon the culturally
specific ways in which social subjects experience ‘entertaining’ in any particular situation
or setting. What is entertaining for some (say, horror movies) may not be entertaining for
others at all, and what we find entertaining under some circumstances (say, an episode of
a sitcom after a hard day’s work) may fail to entertain us at other times.
To put it more generally, both ‘television’ and ‘audience’ are fundamentally
indeterminate categories: it is impossible to list a priori which possible meanings and
characteristics each category acquires in any specific situation in which people engage in
television consumption. As a result of this contingency of meaning, the range of potential
variety in audience practices and experiences becomes exponentially multiplied,
indefinite if not infinite. Which meanings are concretely actualized, however, remains
undecided until we have caught the full, multicontextually determined situation in which
historical instances of television consumption take place. From this perspective, what the
audience researcher needs to do is to secure the ‘catch’.
As already discussed in chapter 2, this epistemological move towards radical
contextualism in cultural studies has been accompanied by a growing interest in
ethnography as a mode of empirical inquiry. Ethnographically oriented research is