Living Room Wars: Rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world

193 Pages·2011·4.78 MB·English

by  Ien Ang

LIVING ROOM WARS
Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang’s recent writings on media audiences to ask
what it means to live in a world saturated by media. What does our media audiencehood
say about our everyday lives and social relations, and how does it illuminate the
condition of contemporary culture?
Ang suggests that we cannot understand media audiences without deconstructing the
category of ‘audience’ itself as an institutional and discursive construct. Her accessible
style throws light on some of the complexities of media consumption in a postmodern
world, including those related to gender politics and the globalization of culture.
Living Room Wars points to the inherently contradictory nature of the media’s role in
shaping our identities, fantasies and pleasures, imbricated as they are in the exigencies of
capitalist consumption and the institutions of the modern nation-state. Living Room Wars
presents an indispensable tool for bridging audience studies, media studies and the larger
concerns of cultural studies.
Ien Ang is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean,
Australia. She is the author of Watching Dallas (1985) and Desperately Seeking the
Audience (1991).
LIVING ROOM WARS

Rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world

Ien Ang

London and New York
First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York,
NY 10001
© 1996 Ien Ang
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available
from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-203-12943-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17628-6 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-12800-5 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-12801-3 (pbk)
Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: media audiences, postmodernity and cultural contradiction 1

Part I Rethinking audiences

1 THE BATTLE BETWEEN TELEVISION AND ITS AUDIENCES 16

2 ON THE POLITICS OF EMPIRICAL AUDIENCE RESEARCH 29

3 NEW TECHNOLOGIES, AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT AND THE 45

TACTICS OF TELEVISION CONSUMPTION
4 ETHNOGRAPHY AND RADICAL CONTEXTUALISM IN AUDIENCE 56

STUDIES

Part II Gendered audiences

5 MELODRAMATIC IDENTIFICATIONS: TELEVISION FICTION AND 72

WOMEN’S FANTASY
6 FEMINIST DESIRE AND FEMALE PLEASURE: ON JANICE 83

RADWAY’S READING THE ROMANCE
7 GENDER AND/IN MEDIA CONSUMPTION 92

(with Joke Hermes)

Part III Audiences and global culture

8 CULTURAL STUDIES, MEDIA RECEPTION AND THE 112

TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA SYSTEM
9 GLOBAL MEDIA/LOCAL MEANING 126

10 IN THE REALM OF UNCERTAINTY: THE GLOBAL VILLAGE AND 136

CAPITALIST POSTMODERNITY
Notes 152
References 159
Index 171
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
longstanding and continuous camaraderie and friendship, even now that I have moved to
the other side of the globe, from the ‘heart’ of Europe—Amsterdam—to the ‘end’ of the
world—Perth, Australia.
I would like to thank Murdoch University for offering me a Special Research Grant in
1993. My special thanks also to the School of Humanities at Murdoch for providing me
with an exceptionally stimulating academic environment and for the SHRAF grant, which
provided me with research assistance to finish this project. I thank Paula O’Brien for her
diligent work in preparing the manuscript. Within the Communication Studies
programme, I thank Irma Whitford and Alec McHoul for being such supportive and
appreciative programme chairs, Tom O’Regan for the long conversations on Australian
television and many other things, Dona Kolar-Panov for being the best tutor a course
coordinator could hope for, and Merrylyn Braden for the warm secretarial assistance. For
the all-important comprehensive feminine life-support, both intellectual and emotional, I
thank Zoë Sofoulis, Krishna Sen and, especially, Mitzi Goldman. My final thanks go to
Jon Stratton, from whose insights I have learned more than is imaginable.
Fremantle, January 1995
Introduction: media audiences, postmodernity
and cultural contradiction
The essays collected in this book have been written in the course of a decade—a decade
which has been characterized by irrevocable and accelerated postmodernization in many
fields of social and cultural practice. Since the 1970s the discourse of postmodernity has
gradually but definitively taken hold of the Western world. These essays bear the mark of
this present mood and can be read as attempts to come to terms with some of its
theoretical and practical implications. They do this with respect to a rather humble site of
discursive knowledge: media audiences. In this Introduction, I will indicate how the
postmodern—as a historical trend and as a mode of knowing—has impacted on (our
understanding of) media audiences, especially television audiences. At the same time, I
will also suggest how a critical theoretical and analytical engagement with audiences—
which, as I have argued elsewhere (Ang 1991) and throughout the essays to follow,
necessarily involves a deconstruction of the very unity and solidity of ‘audience’ as an
object of analysis—can highlight and illuminate some of the consequences of what some
have called ‘the condition of postmodernity’ (Lyotard 1984; Harvey 1989; Jameson
1991).
In the course of the 1980s, the label ‘postmodern’ to describe the world became
virtually inescapable—that is, increasingly pertinent and widely accepted, a part of
popular commonsense. I remember occasions, earlier in the decade, when those annoyed
by the hype could still afford either to dismiss any talk about ‘postmodernism’ as a
passing fad, or to reject the very notion of the postmodern as a vacuous, meaningless
category. As the end of the century approaches this is clearly no longer possible: the
implications of the so-called postmodernization of the contemporary world—economic,
social, cultural—have become too insistent to ignore or refute, if still incompletely
understood in its diverse, complex and contradictory facets. Dick Hebdige (1988:182) has
noted that as the 1980s wore on ‘postmodern’ has clearly become a buzzword with an
enormous degree of semantic complexity and overload. But while many of us have by
now become rather blasé about anything having to do with postmodernism—and in some
respects rightly so—I still think it is necessary to continue to learn in much greater detail
and with much more nuance about postmodernity, or about what ‘living in a postmodern
world’ might mean; to go beyond the many sweeping generalizations and platitudes
enunciated about it. In my understanding, one of the most prominent features of living in
a postmodern world means living with a heightened sense of permanent and pervasive
cultural contradiction. But if this is so, how does this manifest itself in the concrete
texture of our daily lives? The essays in this volume can all be read as emanating from
this concern with the concrete, even ‘empirical’ level of the cultural contradictions of
postmodernity. From a variety of angles they attempt to clarify not only that
contemporary television audiencehood can best be understood as a range of social
experiences and practices shot through with cultural contradiction, but also that looking
at these experiences and practices provides us with an excellent inroad into what it