Watching Television Audiences: Cultural Theories and Methods 9781849663144

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Acknowledgements

The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to include copyright material: David Buckingham for extracts from Buckingham, D., Public secrets: 'EastEnders' and its audience (1987) and Buckingham, D. (ed), Reading audiences: young people and the media (1993); Polity Press for extracts from Hodge, R. and Tripp, D., Children and television: a semiotic approach (1986); Routledge Ltd for extracts from Ang, I., Living room wars: rethinking media audiences for a postmodem world (1996); Westview Press for extracts from Enlightened racism: the Cosby show, audiences, and the myth of the American dream by Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis. Copyright © 1992 by Westview Press, a division of Perseus Books L.L.C. Reprinted by permission of Westview Press, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.c.; and University of Pennsylvania Press for extracts from Beverley Hills, 90210: television, gender and identity by E. Graham McKinley. Copyright © 1997 E. Graham McKinley. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. Any rights not acknowledged here will be acknowledged in subsequent printings if notice is given to the publisher.

1 Introduction

Looking back over nearly thirty years of research and teaching in media studies, I am struck by how little of that time I spent on 'methodology'. The reasons are easy to spot. In particular, there has been a considerable and (in my view) justified suspicion of 'objective' empiricist methodologies which have been so profoundly critiqued by the armory of theories sweeping the fields of film and television studies since the late 1960s. Thus it is that I have prestigious colleagues in the UK who still say they are 'critics not researchers', and who nominate the social sciences as 'the enemy'. Thus, too, a recent colleague in Australia, with whom I was designing an 'Audience and Reception' postgraduate module, questioned the need to teach methodology at all. This was a question that the School of Communication staff teaching the other (quantitative) half of this 'Media Audience' postgraduate subject would never have dreamed of asking. Yet, from my cultural studies colleague's perspective, as a post-Barthesian specialist in literary theories of 'reading', it was an entirely appropriate question, as we shall see in this chapter. My colleague said that 'methodology' was not part of his competence. His panicular 'binary' was that of 'theory' and 'criticism', rather than 'theory' and 'method'. So how, he asked, did one actually do focus group work or long interviews? What were they for? Could I convince him that he (and the audience studies students) would be any better off if they knew about 'methodology'? What did this additional repertoire of 'methodology' add to the 'theory' that students debated already? Most importantly, how could I answer some pretty foundational critiques that poststructuralist theories were mounting against approaching the everyday experiences of people as some kind of 'truth', whether by focus group, long interview, survey, or any other methodology? This chapter begins to answer these questions. Why, in other words, is there a need for a book on television audiences that emphasises theory and

2 Beyond celebration: from local ecstasy to global risk

In their 'critique after postmodernism', Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan challenge recent theory's tendency towards an 'ivory tower' self-referenriality. Adam and Allan accept poststructuralism's • • • • •

critique of 'meta-narratives' pluralisation of 'reality' contextualization of 'truth' and 'validity' reflexivity emphasis on the tentative fluidity of 'local' stories and accounts.

But they also challenge poststructuralism's outcomes. This is to say that, despite its theoretical potential for active engagement, commitment and 'life politics' (Giddens 1991), this type of theory recurrently prioritizes cultural plurality and invention for their own sake. The rich diversity of cultural forms, practices and identities is being celebrated at the expense of a critical analysis of their implication in the daily renewal of the pernicious logics of class, sexism, racism, homophobia, ageism and nationalism, amongst others, that are all too indicative of 'postmodern' societies. (Adam and Allan, 1995, p. xv) 'Celebration' and 'critical analysis' are the key terms in opposition here; and it is the latter that recognises the 'pernicious logics' of human risk as matters of daily renewal and routine. Contrary to celebratory notions of diversity, for the authors these logics constitute both local and global orders of risk of the following: poverty and structural unemployment; domestic violence and women's public exposure to harassment, fear and exploitation; racial disadvantage and racist politics at the heart of our corporate-consumer 'multiculturalisms'; gay bashings; older people's impoverished invisibility; nationalist wars and 'ethnic cleansing'; biotechnological exploitation of 'underdeveloped' societies. These orders of risk only have to be listed, the

3 Some histories of the television cop series

The full title of this book, Watching television audiences: Cultural theories and methods, specifies its particular brief. That is to say, among the many foci on 'audiencing' as a macro/local phenomenon it might take, this book emphasises particularly the academic researcherrrv audience relationship within cultural studies. Audiences watch the screen, and we also - as researchers and writers - watch them watching, as active members of Alasuutari's 'moral frames'. But how do we understand that multiple 'watching'? In recent years there has been a ferment of current theoretical debate about: • ontology (what is the nature of being human, of reality?); • epistemology (what is the relationship between the researcher and the audience, between those who inquire and those who are 'known'?); and • methodology (how do we access the world, and gain knowledge of the 'other'?). Denzin and Lincoln have noted that researchers face 'an embarrassment of choices [that] now characterize the field of qualitative research. There have never been so many paradigms, strategies of inquiry, or methods of analysis to draw upon and utilize' (Denzin and Lincoln, 1998, p. 22). They argue that the paradigms of qualitative and ethnographic research have become so multiple and fractured during the historical 'stages' that they describe, it is now possible for 'any given researcher to attach a project to a canonical text from any of the above-described historical moments' (1998, p. 22). In this book's first substantive chapter on a particular television genre and its audiences, lwant to begin to illustrate some of the general arguments of the first two chapters by choosing as 'canonical', or at least symptomatic, research texts on television police series between the 19705 and 1990s. These will mark the shifts and flows within academic interpretive communities during that period, and illustrate the ways in which globalising and

4 Talking about television soap opera

During the CCRR fear of crime study, in our long interview with a 16-yearold Sydney teenager, Lisa, we heard a view that was also expressed by a number of other respondents. As she discussed her viewing of 'reality genres' like the news, she said 'you don't see the ordinary events' in them. Rather, 'ordinary events' are reserved for fictional series like police shows, where they are 'not believable'. With child molesting it's [shown on the news] on a bigger scale pedophilia, old men or something, rather than just like in a family situation.... Muggings get shown heaps on cop show~ but don't really get shown on the news very much. And the same with like family abuse or whatever, it gets shown on shows but doesn't really get on the news so much. And drug addict mothers get shown on cop shows but not really on the news. More would happen on cop shows because they're not believable. For Lisa, these 'ordinary events' have been a familiar and long-term part of her teenage life. When she was about 11, she used to go to a girlfriend's house, where she witnessed her friend being molested by her mother's much younger boyfriend. No police were called; and Lisa's friend did not want to tell her mother because she worried that she would be sent away from home. Lisa now says, 'It was pretty bad in some ways. But it was O.K. because we like talked to each other heaps about it. But it was a bit bad not being able to tell anyone [else).' Lisa also recalls that when she was 10 or 11 a man who pretended to be a doctor attempted to molest some of the primary school children. One day, this man followed Lisa and a friend into the toilets, and they 'freaked out and ran.' For months after that they had to always go to the toilets in pairs. Then, a couple of years later, she was robbed in an alley near Bondi Junction train station by a man who took her Reeboks. A boy she knew was also robbed of his shoes, hat and shirt. Lisa's house at Bondi was burgled twice;

5 From pleasure to risk: Revisiting 'television violence'

Two positions adopted by len Ang as a feminist audience theorist have been extremely important; but also - if taken too singularly - problematic. The first is her emphasis on women's pleasure in television, rather than the more familiar focus (from quite different perspectives) on 'instrumental' approaches to television and audiences; for example, that television violence has bad effects on children. The second is her challenge to 'universalist' (mainly quantitative) methodologies. She focuses instead on qualitative and especially 'situated' methods that can give us more access to women's multisubjective 'experience in the meanings, pleasures and dangers' of genres like soap opera and the romance. Ang's work is particularly important in the context that Alasuutari describes as 'third generation' audience theory. Here, he argues, we should be concerned with what the place is 'of expert knowledge produced by media researchers . . . in reproducing or transforming the frames within which the media and "audiencing" are perceived' (1999, p. 7). As Alasuutari says: It is obvious that the instrumentalist perspective of mass communication research on its object is not of its own making, it is in fact only echoing culturally embedded concerns about mass media .... There is of course really nothing wrong about addressing people's concerns with the help of systematic research, but it is also useful to ask where such concerns stem from in the culture and society .... Whose concerns are they particularly? (1999, p. 11) 'Third generation' audience theory has therefore shifted its ground from the 'effects' of television's 'bad' content on passive and susceptible audiences. But it is also moving beyond the opposite (leftist) tendency where 'Whatever researchers studied they seemed to find symbolic resistance' (1999, p. 10). Rather, there is now a greater empirical emphasis on the moral frames and

6 Two approaches to 'documentary'

This chapter will not attempt to summarise or critique the huge literature on 'TV violence', since this has been done many times before. What it will try to do is begin to focus on audience's symbolic resources, whether these be experiential (e.g. women's knowledge gained through lived experience of domestic violence) or mediated (e.g. children's learned narrative schemas for 'what police do', 'what workers do', etc.). 'Cognitive' approaches of this kind arc not fashionable in some quarters, but in my view audience knowledge (or the lack of it) is a crucial aspect of the so-called 'semiotic democracy' of the media. To draw attention explicitly to this issue of audience knowledge (as an important aspect of human agency) I have chosen to focus on audience research relating to documentary, since this TV genre is (in the eyes of both TV producers and in public perception) especially dedicated to 'information' and knowledge flow. My focus will be to compare multi-genre audience research by Schlesinger et al., and Tulloch and Tulloch (1992, 1993), while focusing mainly on the 'documentary' aspects of their work. I will begin by going a little further into Schlesinger et al.,'s case study, because there are a number of similarities between these two research projects. • First - and unusually within a cultural studies framework - both Schlesinger et al., and the Tullochs combine qualitative with quantitative methodologies. • Second, both adopt a multi-genre rather than single-programme approach. Schlesinger et al., screened for their participants a soap opera, a crime reconstruction series, a fictionalised 'documentary', and a feature film which had been shown on television. The Tullochs screened for their child/teenage viewers a soap opera, a cop series, a documentary, a war series, a science fiction series, and a talk-back studio discussion. • Third, both research projects specifically chose their television genres to revisit the 'effects of violence' debate from a media/cultural studies perspective that was concerned with issues of genre and representation.

7 Cartoons: Modality and methodology

In the mid-1980s - post-linguistic tum and in the middle of the 'ethnographic' shift of audience studies - Bob Hodge and David Tripp wrote what was arguably the richest socio-cognitive analysis of the television audience of that time, and certainly the most path-breaking study of the child audience of cartoons. I will start with an extract of audience discussion from their book, Children and Television, as a way of illustrating the range of methodological, conceptual and theoretical values they achieved at a moment when audience research was beginning to tum more dominantly to feminist emphases on pleasure. Let me first set their audience research scene. Five children are sitting in a circle with a female interviewer. There are two girls (Kristie and Michelle) and three boys (Adrian, Craig and Stephen). They have just watched a fiveminute sequence of the television cartoon Fangface. This is a cartoon about a baby werewolf, Fangs (who changes when the moon or image of the moon 'shines' on him), and his three daring teenager friends: one girl (Kim) and two boys (Biff and Pugsie), who together 'find danger, excitement and adventure'. In the particular episode the children have seen, a monster called The Heap (who is really a professor sacked from the university for inventing a ray that transforms men into monsters) attacks other academics and steals scientific equipment. Fangs and his friends go to the rescue of the one remaining professor and his young daughter. They save them from The Heap's cave in the mountain, and, after a chase, turn The Heap back into the bad professor. who is led off into captivity at the end. As they discuss this episode of Fangface with the interviewer, the children are being recorded by a video camera. From this focus group discussion, Hodge and Tripp isolate the following extract.

Int:

Mm. Can you all speak up a bit. You don't need to whisper. What sort of people do you think they were? [Looks round group, focuses on Kristie.]

8 Watching TV videos: Annie, Rocky and an audience of ~one, two, or three'

One of the (sometimes explicitly intended) outcomes among 'televisual literacy' scholars is the emphasis on 'equal', 'balanced' and 'rational' discussion of television between parents and children. Hodge and Tripp say that 'a more open and equal relationship over television could be an educative and bonding factor' (1986, p. 218); and Messenger Davies says that 'tele-literate children have both literate and tele-literate parencs who help them to see the connections between TV, books, theatre and real-world experiences' (1997, p. 38). This sense of familial harmony, balance and mutual, rational education is one that Valerie Walkerdine is deeply suspicious about. This chapter looks at some of Walkerdine's 'audience' analysis as a powerful counter-position to the various 'children, television and violence' and 'televisual literacy' work I have described. In particular, Walkerdine's work differs markedly from research into children's watching of television that mixes quantitative with qualitative methods, in so far that Walkerdine often analyses just one person 'watching' TV, and uses a contextualised psychoanalytical and poststructuralist framework to do so. At the same time, her interest in familial conflict rather than 'middle-class' harmony, and her focus on fantasy rather than the more instrumentalist interest in 'education' of Hodge, Tripp and Davies, draws her much closer to len Ang's interest in pleasure and gender. In addition, Walkerdine is reflexive, examining her own role as researcher in the 'reading television' process. In focusing mainly on Walkerdine's work, this chapter also prioritises an academic analysis of the TV video audience. This, as we will see, is a very different 'take' on this issue from that of public pressure groups like the National Viewers and Listeners' Association or the Movement for Christian Democracy (Hill, 1999).

9 Back to class and race: Situation comedy

In his chapter in Buckingham's Reading Audiences, Martin Barker says, I believe that audience research is being cramped by being set predominantly within a feminist framework. My argument will be that the return to a class perspective is crucial; that is, returning to issues of the organisation and control of production, and of our own lives, within the framework of capitalism: and the understanding of cultural form including those of gender - as partial responses to these structures. (1993, p. 161) In fact, the issue of class has never been entirely absent from the audience studies agenda. We have seen that Hodge and Tripp, and the Tullochs, drew attention to issues of class and symbolic resources among children. It is certainly the case that feminist theories of pleasure and fantasy have been more hegemonic in recent years. But audience analysis like Walkerdine's discussed in chapter 8 works in powerful ways to bring gender and class analysis together with reflexive understandings of both fantasy and oppression. One might equally say, with Barker, that issues of racelethnicity (with the important exception of Marie Gillespie's work) have been off the audience studies agenda; and one can further agree with Barker's main point: that too much focus on the audience separated from the 'organisation and control of production' leads to the kind of banal populism that Ang, Morris and many others have criticised. Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis's Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream, published just before Barker's comments, responded much more fully to this class/race/ethnicity agenda, in the context of the production of one top-rating situation comedy. Jhally and Lewis's notion of 'enlightened racism' is an effect of class - or more exactly, of the fact that '[a]ny analysis of class structures (in the USA] is simply absent from our popular vocabulary' (1991, p. 134).

10 Foundations in encoding/decoding: Current affairs and news The direction of the book so far has been via current feminist analysis of pleasure and ethnographic theories of the everyday to audience studies that focus on age, ethnicity and class. This is in no way intended as a 'reactionary' return to outmoded and simplistic notions of 'ideology-critique'. But neither is it to underestimate the power and importance of theoretical narratives which, as Martin Barker says, have often been underestimated in recent times. In fact, as Andrea Press's work indicates, it is perfectly possible to combine 'hegemonic', 'resistance' and poststructuralist theories. This is a good moment, then, to return to the seminal work on current affairs audiences of David Morley. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance for television audience studies of the publication in 1980 of David Morley's The 'Nationwide' Audience. Following his earlier book (with Charlotte Brunsdon), Everyday Television: 'Nationwide' Television, these books were the first sustained 'encoding/decoding' couplet in the Stuart Hall tradition. Because of the regular reference (especially in American work) to the Birmingham 'School' as a definitive 'source' for media and cultural studies, it is easy to forget how little of an empirical and sociological nature was published at this time of screen theory's textual hegemony. This is not to say that the British Film Institute, publishers of Screen, did not also promote work that examined the structures of television. In the same series as the Morley (and Brunsdon) books, they published a book of that name by Nicholas Garnham, as well as Colin McArthur's Television and History, which was part of an important debate with Screen luminary Colin MacCabe about the 'classic realist text'. But, in my experience, this was a debate where McArthur was always somewhat on the back foot, consigned to the yesterday of those people supposedly naive enough to believe in the real. This was the period of the audience inscribed in the 'classic realist text', via a hierarchy of discourses - at the top of which was the discourse that never pronounced its name. The dominant critical

11 Conclusion: Cult, talk and their audiences

A major theme of this book has been audience pleasures and audience anxieties and fears. A theoretical theme has been reflexivity, and the role of the researcher in situated 'tales from the field'. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to conclude with the pleasures (and anxieties) of the audience researchers themselves. Fandom has been a preoccupation of audience theorists within cultural studies for some years now; and some of those audience theorists have been fans themselves. As we saw in chapter 2, many theorists explain this preoccupation as an outcome of postmodernism. 'Postmodern media culture creates the condition of fandom, of affective investment in appropriated objects wherein the investment further empties them of meaning' (Munson, 1993, p. 14). Fandom is the site and stake of a society without 'impassioned commitment' to rational discourse and narratives of knowledge or liberation. Fandom marks the affective society, but also, I have argued, the society of risk - the society where experts are dethroned. This concluding chapter looks at three recent studies of fandom which I have enjoyed. Only two of these academics have been fans of the subject matter they have analysed. The other researched and wrote a study of fandom because of her anxiety, as a feminist, about the TV programme, Beverly Hills 90210, that she was studying. So only two of the three researchers would self-describe as a fan of cult television. The third saw the cult of 90210 as something that others (mainly the young women she taught as an academic and musician) were into. What difference did this make, theoretically and methodologically, to these research projects and their 'audience' findings? What can we learn about cultural and media studies from a study of academic fans (and non-fans) writing about other fans?

References

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