Television and Everyday Life

longue durée
(see Scannell, 1988).
Television’s influence is displaced and diffused by its position within these
multiple times and spaces. Indeed the position of the audience in these multiple
temporalities and spatialities is crucial. The failure to recognise this multiplicity
or to measure the extent of its contradictions lies at the heart of the relative
failures to understand television’s role in everyday life. In this chapter, in which
I take a more critical position in relation to existing research than I have hitherto,

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On the audience
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I want to illustrate and account for these failures, but also to identify the
successes. In the final chapter I will offer a more synthetic account which
involves placing the audience within the containing structures and practices of
everyday life.
The power of television, or its lack of power, is constituted in its difference
and its unevenness, dynamically. Audiences too have varying degrees of
freedom to construct a relationship to the individual texts of the medium or to
the medium as whole. Individuals can be deeply moved (for better and worse)
by what they see and hear on the screen. Others can, and do, ignore those
images and sounds, or let them slip away like water in the sand. For yet others,
as I have argued, the continuities of soap operas or of television itself offer a
kind of security otherwise unavailable through other media. And even more,
there is the drip feed of the 
longue durée,
the more or less consistent, more or
less resistant, diet of ideology and entrenched values, invisibly informing and
constraining all kinds of social action and belief.
The field of audience studies has been in tension, I suggest, because it has
not really recognised these differences in audiences’ positions in space and
time, nor has it been able to incorporate the differences it has recognised into
its methodologies. Our research has been undermined, ultimately, not just by
the complexities of the place of television in everyday life, real as these
obviously are, but by our relative failures, even in the new wave of audience
research, to recognise both the limits of our claims and the incommensurabilities
between them.
In this chapter I will try and disentangle the assumptions and implications
of various influential approaches to the television audience. In doing so I
will be suggesting that audience researchers also need to be ‘nomadic’. They
have to recognise, of course, that the problem of television’s power does not
admit an easy solution, but they also have to admit that no solution is even
conceivable without an acknowledgement of the complexity of the social
and cultural relations in and through which audiences are embedded. In this
sense an enquiry into the audience should be an enquiry, not into a set of pre-
constituted individuals or rigidly defined social groups, but into a set of
daily practices and discourses within which the complex act of watching
television is placed alongside others, and through which that complex act is
itself constituted.
Emerging from the pages that follow, both in this chapter and the concluding
one, will be, I hope, the basis both for a mediating theory of the television
audience and a theory of, in the broadest sense of the term, mediation. I make
no great claims for originality. Recent research has provided much in the way
both of clues and demonstrations relevant to my argument.
Very broadly one can distinguish two distinct approaches to the study of
the audience: that which focuses on the dynamics of mediation and derives
some sense of the audience through an analysis of effects, influences or

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Television and Everyday Life
pleasures, depending on where it locates the key moments in the process of
mediation; and one which focuses on reception and derives some sense of the
audience through an analysis of their activity and passivity, their individual or
social status, again depending on how the key moments of reception are located
and understood. Running through both approaches are sets of assumptions
which have significant implications for their commensurability and
incommensurability—especially about space and time—about the locus and
the temporality of audiences and audiencing.