Page 70 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies 61
exhibiting increasing interest in qualitative and interpretive methods of gauging consumer
behaviour, in the conviction that more detailed and local knowledge is needed in order to
make their strategies to attract, reach and seduce the consumer more effective. In other
words, even within market research the tenets of radical contextualism can be heard ever
more frequently.
But this industry flirtation with the particular and the qualitative that is also
characteristic of the ethnographic moment in culturalist audience studies is intrinsically
contradictory. Despite its increasing interest in more detailed information about
consumers and audiences, market research must always stop short of fully embracing the
theoretical consequences of the consistent radical contextualism which underpins the
culturalist turn within academic communication theory and research. As I have pointed
out earlier, a radical contextualist perspective tends to lead to an unstoppable dispersal of
the notion of ‘audience’, to the point that it may become pointless to measure ‘it’ (which
is nevertheless an indispensable enterprise for an industry dependent for its functioning
on determining the value of the audience commodity). For example, the recognition of
the fact that the consumption and use of television is a multicontextually articulated,
indeterminate and overdetermined set of co-occurring, competing, mutually interfering
activities at once, makes equating ‘watching’ with ‘directing the face towards the screen’
a rather nonsensical operationalization indeed, never mind practically hazardous to
determine in spaces where viewers are free to move about. It is hard to see how the
quantity of the activity can ever be determined other than in an arbitrary, that is,
discursively constructed way, implied in the very method being in use. ‘Size’ of the
audience is a discursive construction rather than an objective fact, accomplished by
containing rather than recognizing irreducible difference and variation (see also Sepstrup
1986).
Since market research is supposed to deliver informational products that can serve as
the common symbolic currency for industry negotiations and decision-making, a too
detailed familiarity with the radically contextual ways in which people consume and use
media would only be counterproductive. It would not fit with the requirements of
prediction and control to be fulfilled by the research function within the industry. In other
words, if market research selectively derives certain methods and techniques from
ethnography, it certainly does not allow itself to adopt an ethnographic mode of
understanding, in the sense of striving toward clarifying what it means, or what it is like,
to live in a media-saturated world. It is towards the latter, I would argue, that we should
proceed if the assumptions of radical contextualism are to make a critical difference in
the way in which we comprehend and evaluate the quandaries of media audiencehood in
contemporary society.
However, this vastly complicates our task as researchers. Since the premise of radical
contextualism in principle involves the impossibility of determining any social or textual
meaning outside of the complex situation in which it is produced, it is difficult to imagine
where to begin and where to end the analysis. First of all, theoretically every situation is
uniquely characterized by an indefinite multiplicity of contexts that cannot be known in
advance. Furthermore, contexts are not mutually exclusive but interlocking and
interacting, superimposed upon one another as well as indefinitely proliferating in time
and space. A project that would strive to take into consideration the whole contextual
horizon in which heterogeneous instances of media consumption acquire particular shape,