Living Room Wars
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Living Room Wars

Rethinking Media Audiences

Ien Ang

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eBook - ePub

Living Room Wars

Rethinking Media Audiences

Ien Ang

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About This Book

Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on television audiences, and, in response to recent criticisms of cultural studies, argues that it is possible to study audience pleasures and popular television in a way that is not naively populist. Ang examines how the makers and marketers of television attempt to mould their audience and looks at the often unexpected ways in which the viewers actively engage with the programmes they watch.
Living Room Wars highlights the inherent contradictions of a `politics of pleasure' of television consumption: Ang moves beyond the trditional forcus on textual meanings to explore the structural and historical representations fo television audiences as an integral part of modern culture. Her wide-ranging and illuminating discussion takes in the battle between television and its audiences; the politics of empirical audience research; new technologies and the tactics of television consumption; ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies; television fiction and women's fantasy; feminist desire and female pleasure in media consumption, and the transnational media system.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2006
ISBN
9781134796847
Topic
Art
Edition
1
Part I
RETHINKING AUDIENCES

1
The battle between television and its audiences

Recently, television studies has been confronted with the difficulty of reconciling two theoretical approaches, the histories of which have largely been unfolding independently from or in opposition to each other: the ‘sociological’ and the ‘semiological’ approach. Whereas the sociological approach (embodied in such diverse research trends as the political economy of the media and the uses and gratifications paradigm) has traditionally been dominant in mass communications theory, a semiological point of view has gained popularity during the last two decades or so, as a result of the limitations felt in the preoccupations of the ‘sociologists’. In summary, these limitations concern the neglect of the specificity of television as a system of representation, and an over-simplistic idea of communication as the transmission of transparent messages from and to fully autonomous subjects.
Instead, semiological approaches have put forward the conception of media products as texts. The analysis of the construction of meanings in and through televisual discourses is stressed, as are questions relating to the modes of address presented in televisual texts, influencing the way the receiver (‘reader’) is positioned in relation to those texts. Thus, the semiological approach has attempted to overcome any notion of conscious institutional or commercial manipulation, on the one hand, and of free audience choice, on the other.
However, discontent with this relatively new theoretical point of view has also been voiced. The nearly exclusive attention to textual structures is seen to have created new blind spots: the established semiological approach tends to ignore the social, political and ideological conditions under which meaning production and consumption take place. As a way out, more and more researchers insist nowadays on the necessity of combining sociological and semiological insights. As Carl Gardner and Julie Sheppard have recently put it:
analysis of any mass medium has to recognise its complex dual nature— both an economic and industrial system, a means of production, increasingly turning out standardised commodities and at the same time a system of representation, producing meanings with a certain autonomy which are necessarily multivalent and unpredictable.
(Gardner and Sheppard 1984:38)
This new credo in television studies has usually been translated into a formulation of the so-called text/context problematic. It is stressed that an analysis of a text must be combined with an analysis of its social conditions of existence. One important dimension of this text/context problematic refers to the delicate relationship of texts and viewers, theorized by Stuart Hall (1980a) and others in the so-called encoding/decoding model. One of the goals of this model was to undermine the implicit assumptions of many sophisticated, semiologically based analyses, according to which the subject/ viewer of a text coincides with the subject position constructed in the text. For instance, David Morley (1980a, also 1981) has attempted to develop an ‘ethnography of viewing’, by sorting out the different readings or decodings made by different groups of viewers (defined according to socio-cultural criteria) in relation to a specific set of texts. Working within a similar theoretical model, Charlotte Brunsdon has adopted a different strategy to tackle the same problematic: her concern is how female viewers are capable of reading and enjoying soap operas, a capability which she locates in the specific cultural competences women have, that is, their familiarity with the narrative structure of the soap opera genre, their knowledge of soap opera characters and their sensitivity to codes of conduct of personal life and interpersonal relationships. In other words, instead of emphasizing the differences between readings or decodings, Brunsdon (1981) has tried to account for the specificity of the confrontation between one type of texts (soap operas) and one category of viewers (women).
Both theoretically and politically, this new problematic constructs a more dynamic conception of the relation between texts and viewers. It acknowledges the fact that factors other than textual ones play a part in the way viewers make sense of a text. Thus it places the text/viewer encounter within a firm socio-cultural context. It conceives of viewers as more than just passive receivers of already fixed ‘messages’ or mere textual constructions, opening up the possibility of thinking about television viewing as an area of cultural struggle. However, the model has limitations. Apart from various problems having to do with, for example, an adequate theorization of the concept of decoding (see Wren-Lewis 1983), the encoding/decoding model can be said to have a quite narrow view of the role of the audience: its effectivity is limited to negotiations open to viewers within the given range of significations made possible by a text or genre of texts. Moreover, this model’s very conception of the audience tends to be a limited one. Within this theoretical model, the sole problem is the way in which texts are received/ decoded in specific sociocultural contexts, failing to take into account that decodings are embedded in a more general practice of television viewing as such. It then becomes possible to question the relevance of the concept of decoding, with its connotations of analytical reasoning, for describing the viewer’s activity of making sense of a text, as watching television is usually experienced as a ‘natural’ practice, firmly set within the routines of everyday life (see, e.g., Dahlgren 1983). It goes without saying that a practice which is felt to be ‘natural’ structurally is not natural at all. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the ‘naturalness’ of the experience of watching television has an effect on the ways in which individual texts are received and dealt with.
What is at stake here is the way in which television audiences relate to watching television as a cultural practice. What does that practice mean and how are those meanings produced? One cannot deal with this question without an analysis of the way in which televisual discourse as a complex whole of representations is organized and structured, as it is through this discourse that a relationship between television and its audiences is mediated and constructed. In other words, here too an articulation of the ‘semiological’ and the ‘sociological’ perspectives will be necessary.
In this chapter I would like to propose that different conceptions of the social meaning of watching television as a cultural practice are at play, and that these differences are related to the structuring of televisual discourse, with its heterogeneity of representations and modes of address. In doing this, I would like to stress the specific position of popular audiences as an effective category in organizing the ‘television apparatus’. First, I shall try to show that televisual discourse constructs a variety of types of involvement for viewers; in the second part, I shall illustrate how this heterogeneity of positionings has functioned socially and culturally in the history of Dutch television. However, much of what I am to say will not be more than (theoretically informed) speculation, which will need further refinement.

THE TELEVISION INSTITUTION AND HETEROGENEITY OF ADDRESS

An institutional approach will serve as a starting point. I use the term ‘institutional’ in its comprehensive meaning, as applied, for example, by Christian Metz in relation to cinema: ‘The cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry [
] it is also the mental machinery [
] which spectators “accustomed to cinema” have internalised historically and which has adapted them to the consumption of films’ (1975:18–19). Although this formulation remains caught within the well-known semiological framework in so far as the position of the spectator/audience is only dealt with as a discursive/institutional effect, such a starting point has the advantage that it analyses cinema-as-such as a distinctive system of representation, to which people are ‘drawn’ in peculiar ways. An analogous argument may be applied to television. It enables us to move away from the isolated text towards an analysis of the ways in which television-as-such, as a discursive system, addresses and ‘interpellates’ people as potential viewers.
More precisely, an institutional approach opens up the possibility of reflecting on how the contextual is already structurally implied in the textual. That is to say, the structures within which televisual discourse is produced necessarily create an environment within which a certain type of consumer activity is assumed and ‘propagated’. Thus, the production of texts and the organization of a general context of consumption are closely interlinked. Again, Metz has given an imaginative description of the problem concerned (although I will not follow his psychoanalytic colouring of the picture here). Thus he writes about the task set to the cinematic institution:
In a social system in which the spectator is not forced physically to go to the cinema but in which it is still important that he should go so that the money he pays for his admission makes it possible to shoot other films and thus ensures the auto-reproduction of the institution—and it is the specific characteristic of every true institution that it takes charge of the mechanisms of its own perpetuation—there is no other solution than to set up arrangements whose aim and effect is to give the spectator the ‘spontaneous’ desire to visit the cinema and pay for his ticket.
(Metz 1975:19)
Applied to television, then, the question can be formulated as follows: how does television as an institution succeed in making people buy TV sets and in making the idea of watching television seem attractive? Which strategies has it developed to persuade people to become members of the TV audience? It might be useful here to bear in mind that television has tended to be very successful in completing this ‘mission’, in making its existence and presence as a cultural form so taken for granted. Television, after all, has in all industrial societies become an institution which is central to both the public and private spheres. From an institutional point of view, analogous to that outlined by Metz, it is the ‘arrangements’ (both ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ the viewer) set up by the television institution through which a desire to watch television is roused and sustained which must have been essential to this success. If the arrangements constructed by the cinematic institution are based on legitimized voyeurism, as Metz and many other film theorists have put forward, can we find an analogous construction in relation to television?
However, to avoid a determinist stance, we can only accept Metz’s formulation of the problem in a qualified form. The setting-up of specific arrangements, the social channelling of desire, does not take place within a cultural void. These arrangements can only get rooted when they can be fitted into existing cultural patterns and ways of life. They cannot be imposed in an authoritarian manner, as the above quotation of Metz might wrongly suggest. In other words, it is not enough that the cinematic or televisual institutions set up (psycho-institutional) arrangements which construct and offer a position of involvement for the spectator/viewer, it is also necessary that the spectator/viewer, given her or his cultural dispositions, considers such modes of involvement to be not only sensible and acceptable, but also attractive and pleasurable. The question to be asked is then twofold. First, which are the arrangements constructed by the television institution for attracting viewers? And second, in which ways do the modes of involvement inscribed in televisual discourse relate to the audience’s cultural orientations towards watching television?
In his book Visible Fictions John Ellis has developed a consistent view of the specificity of televisual address. In a certain sense, Ellis has relied on the institutional approach outlined above as a guideline for his book, which he presents as ‘an attempt to sketch out cinema and broadcast TV as social forms, particular forms of organization of meaning for particular forms of spectator attention’ (1982:20). He argues that ‘broadcast TV has developed distinctive aesthetic forms to suit the circumstances within which it is used’ (ibid.: 111). Central to his argument is the idea that television adapts the material it presents to the situation within which television viewing is normally assumed to take place: in the private homes of isolated nuclear families. This everyday domestic setting makes it very difficult for television to make its presence more than merely casually noticed and to hold the audience’s attention—as a matter of fact, the private home does not seem to be a very favourable context for a concentrated spectatorial activity, as the cinema is. It is to ensure that the viewer will keep on watching, says Ellis, that television has developed distinctive discursive forms:
TV draws the interest of its viewers through its own operations of broadcasting. The viewer is cast as someone who has the TV switched on, but is giving it very little attention: a casual viewer relaxing at home in the midst of the family group. Attention has to be solicited and grasped segment by segment. Hence both the amount of self-promotion that each broadcast TV channel does for itself, the amount of direct address that occurs, and the centrality given to sound in TV broadcasting. Sound draws the attention of the look when it has wandered away.
(Ellis 1982:162)
Ellis’s position is interesting here as he treats the aesthetic modes developed by television not as neutral or arbitrary forms, but as rhetorical strategies to attract viewers. One could say that every rhetorical strategy is based upon assumptions about the best way to reach the target group. Thus, Ellis suggests that television recruits the interest of its viewers by creating a complicity of viewing: through its discursive organization television is able to pose itself as an institutional eye which looks to the world on behalf of the viewers. It is especially through the device of direct address (i.e. presenters, newscasters, talk-show hosts, and so on, apparently speaking directly to the viewer at home, thereby creating an illusion of immediate presence) that television explicitly invites viewers to join it in its looking at the world. According to Ellis, television not only assumes that it has certain kinds of viewers, it also attempts to bind these viewers by pretending to speak for them and look for them. (In this respect, one of the favourite promotion slogans used by TROS, one of the most popular/populist Dutch broadcasting organizations, is instructive: ‘TROS is there for you!’ The other side of the coin, namely that ‘you are there for TROS!’, is very sensibly suppressed.)
It is on the basis of this generalized view of the rhetoric of television that Ellis puts forward his thesis about the place of the TV viewer in relation to televisual discourse. He stresses that the position offered to the TV viewer is not the voyeuristic position, as is the case with the cinema spectator. Instead, the TV viewer is invited/summoned to delegate her/his look to TV itself: to trust in television ‘as a safe means of scanning the world outside’ (Ellis 1982:170). And, by presenting ‘the world’ in a specific way, that is, as an endless flow of events and things which have no connection to one another (just as every news item is separate from the next one; each one of them is written down on a separate sheet of paper), the TV viewer is placed in a very specific ideological relation to that world: according to Ellis, the formal strategies of televisual discourse give rise to the ideological positioning of the TV viewer as a ‘normal citizen’. Ellis typifies this position as follows:
The viewer-as-citizen is uninvolved in the events portrayed. [
] Citizenship recognises problems outside the self, outside the immediate realm of responsibility and power of the individual citizen. [
] Citizenship therefore constitutes the viewer as someone powerless to do anything about the events portrayed other than sympathise or become angry. The whole domestic arrangement of broadcast TV and the aesthetic forms it has evolved to come to terms with this domestic arrangement provides broadcast TV with the capability to do this and no more. The citizenship that it provides as the position for its viewers is a position of impotence: TV viewers are able to see ‘life’s parade at their fingertips’, but at the cost of exempting themselves from that parade for the duration of their TV viewing.
(Ellis 1982:169–70)
It is doubtful whether this account of the subject position implied in the practice of watching television is a satisfactory one. This doubt becomes stronger when we take into consideration that, in so far as Ellis is concerned with the rhetorical strategies of televisual discourse, it will be necessary to explain that the position proposed to the viewer must somehow be attractive to her/him. In this sense, it seems to be a particular weakness in Ellis’s account that the position of ‘normal citizenship’ as he defines it tends to be so contradictory. On the one hand, it is a position of entering the world, a position of knowledge (of being informed), but on the other hand it is at the same time a position of withdrawal from the world, a position of ‘sceptical non-involvement’. It seems hard to imagine how and for whom such a contradictory position can be a position of pleasure, and thus a positioning which can explain why people like watching television so much. It will be more adequate, then, to state that the position of ‘normal citizen’ only exists in a formal sense, abstracted from concrete encounters between viewers and televisual discourse. Real viewers will never take up the position of ‘normal citizen’: if they find it pleasurable to be informed, they will be involved somehow in the representations offered (for both feelings of sympathy and anger are forms of involvement); if they really are uninvolved they won’t be interested in being informed in the first place and probably won’t watch at all, or won’t watch attentively. However, as Ellis’s theoretical framework remains within the problematic of semiologically informed discourse theory, in which viewer practices only appear from the point of view of textual effectivity, he doesn’t pay attention to the readability or rather acceptability of televisual discourse from the point of view of the viewers themselves.
But there is another, related problem which is relevant here. Ellis continually speaks about broadcast TV in general and tends to give a generalized account of televisual discourse which is consciously abstracted from the specificities of different programme categories, modes of representation and types of (direct) address (indeed, his preoccupation seems to be with what unifies televisual discourse into one ‘specific signifying practice’) (see Heath and Skirrow 1977). As a result, it becomes difficult to theorize the possibility that television constructs more than one position for the viewer. For example, it is characteristic that Ellis’s elaboration of the formal and ideological structuring of televisual discourse is mainly based on a more or less implicit reference to news and current affairs programmes. That these parts of television programming are indeed built on the discursive elements stressed by Ellis seems convincing enough: not only is there the familiar, though ‘objective’ direct address of the newscaster, but there is also the mosaic-like, ever-continuing compilation of relatively autonomous, short segments about the world’s events—a structure based on an implicit appeal to a viewer’s self-conception...

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