Page 77 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 68
broadcasters’ real and symbolic distance towards their audiences, a distance that tends to
be intensified not closed by the now common use of quantitative market research surveys
in these circles. In this policy context ethnographic understanding can be extremely
useful; for example, it could potentially improve programming for ethnic minorities, now
often suffering from lack of insight into the diverse and contradictory social experiences
of its ‘target audience’. In other words, only by an understanding of what it is like to live
as non-European migrants in Europe can professional broadcasters hope to develop
media provisions that these people find truly relevant. This is not to say that ethnography
can save public service broadcasting as an institution; what I do suggest, however, is that
ethnographic sensitivity to contextualized audience practices and experiences can
enhance media production practices whose aim is more than the singleminded pursuit of
profit (see Ang 1991: part III).
Of course, the construction of ‘positioned truths’ (or the politics of politics) in
audience studies does not always have to have such direct practical bearings. In a sense,
understanding audiences is of universal relevance today because increasingly the whole
world population has now become hooked up to all sorts of mass media, both local and
global. Media audiencehood has become an intrinsic part of our everyday reality.
However, even though we do indeed increasingly inhabit the same media-dominated
world, entire worlds of concrete practice and experience do remain alien to us, precisely
because we cannot be ‘everywhere’, neither literally nor symbolically. In ignoring this,
we would risk succumbing to sweeping generalizations which could only slight the scope
of difference and variation that still exist. The media are increasingly everywhere, but not
everywhere in the same way. I am referring here of course to the continuing concern over
issues of cultural imperialism and globalization, issues that are likely to become more not
less pronounced in the coming decades. Ethnography can help us locate and understand
the ‘gradual spectrum of mixed-up differences’ (Geertz 1988:148) which comes with the
progressive transnationalization of media audiencehood: what we study then is the
articulation of world capitalism with the situations of people living in particular
communities. As Abu-Lughold has remarked, ‘the effects of extra-local and long-term
processes are only manifested locally and specifically, produced in the actions of
individuals living particular lives, inscribed in their bodies and their words’ (1991:150).
Ethnography’s radical contextualism can in this respect usefully be pitted against the
generalizing sweeps of much work on the effects of media transnationalization, motivated
either by an improper romanticism of consumer freedoms, or by a paranoid fear of global
control. To construct more nuanced accounts, I would suggest that the prime contextual
factor to be highlighted here would be that of centre-periphery relationships, especially
important for North Americans and West Europeans who live and work in relative
comfort in the centres of what Ulf Hannerz calls the ‘global ecumene’ (1989). Hannerz is
right to point of that from the point of the view of the centres, the periphery often looks
lacking in creativity, activity and particularity. The essays in part III of this book address
these issues further.
It is in telling stories about ‘a diversity in motion, one of coexistence as well as
creative interaction between the transnational and the indigenous’ (Hannerz 1989:72) that
ethnography can, in Geertz’s words,