Page 8 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Acknowledgements

This book feels like the end of an era for me: the finishing touch of some ten years work
in the field of audience studies. Most essays collected in this book are slightly revised and
updated versions of previously published material. I would like to thank the following
publishers and journals for the kind permission they gave to reprint this material here:

• Chapter 1 was first published under the title ‘The Battle between Television and Its
Audiences: The Politics of Watching Television’, in Philip Drummond and Richard
Paterson (eds), Television in Transition, British Film Institute, London, 1985.
• Chapter 2 was first published as ‘Wanted: Audiences. On the Politics of Empirical
Audience Studies’, in Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner and Eva Maria
Warth (eds), Remote Control: Television Audiences and Cultural Power, Routledge,
London, 1989.
• Chapter 3 was first published as ‘Living Room Wars: New Technologies, Audience
Measurement, and the Tactics of Television Consumption’, in Roger Silverstone and
Eric Hirch (eds), Consuming Technologies, Routledge, London, 1992.
• Chapter 4 was first presented as a paper at the conference ‘Towards a Comprehensive
Theory of the Audience?’, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in
1990, and will be published in James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg and Ellen Wartella
(eds), The Audience and Its Landscape, Westview Press, Boulder, Co. I thank James
Hay for permission to publish this essay in this collection.
• Chapter 5 was first published in Mary-Ellen Brown (ed.), Television and Women’s
Culture, Currency Press, Sydney, 1990.
• Chapter 6 was first published in Camera Obscura, no. 16, January 1988. I thank Indiana
University Press for permission to reprint.
• Chapter 7 was first published in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (eds), Mass
Media and Society, Edward Arnold, London, 1991. I thank Edward Arnold and my co-
author Joke Hermes for agreeing to have this essay included in this collection.
• Chapter 8 was first published under the title ‘Culture and Communication: Towards an
Ethnographic Critique of Media Consumption in the Transnational Media Age’, in the
European Journal of Communication, vol. 5, no. 2–3, June 1990. I thank Sage
Publications for granting me permission to republish.
• Chapter 9 is a much expanded version of an article first published under the same title
in Media Information Australia, no. 62, November 1991.
• Chapter 10 was first published in David Crowley and David Mitchell (eds),
Communication Theory Today, Polity Press, Oxford, 1994.

This work has evolved over a long period of time, during which many people have given
me support and help. Without naming them, I want to thank them all. I wish, however, to
express my special gratitude to Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley for their