Television and Everyday Life

Nationwide
study, is a refocus
on the audience, and on reception rather than on mediation, as the site for the
investigation of the power of television. As some recent commentators (esp.

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On the audience
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Curran, 1990) have noted, this seemed to involve a reinvention of the wheel,
for audiences as active consumers or constructors of media messages had been
part of the literature certainly since the pioneering work of Katz and Lazarsfeld
(1955), as well as, in relation to the child audience, the early work of Schramm,
Lyle and Parker (1961).
The ‘discovery’ of the audience as reader and the correlative (and
tautological) ‘discovery’ of the text as polysemic has had, and continues to
have, significant implications for our understanding of the power of television.
But it has also enhanced (or done very little to resolve) the considerable
indeterminacy at the heart of our understanding of the audience, of audience-
text relations, and of the multiple but structured determinations of meaning
and influence that need to be better resolved if we are in turn to understand the
place of television in everyday life.
RECEPTION
The predominant route along which this diversity of meaning and interpretation
has been explored has been that defined by the various examples of audience
research based on the moment of reception. It is at this point, of course, that
the otherwise presumed and unchallengeable authority and integrity of media
messages is seen to begin to break down. The ensuing fragmentation creates a
huge research problem for media analysts. As Denis McQuail observes:
Media use can…be seen to be both limited and motivated by complex and
interacting forces in society and in the personal biography of the individual.
This is a sobering thought for those who hope to explain as well as describe
patterns of audience behaviour.
(McQuail, 1987, 236)
Denis McQuail’s summary judgement on the challenges faced by audience
researchers comes at the conclusion of a discussion of the research on audience
activity, satisfactions and uses. The research with which he is concerned, often
labelled ‘uses and gratifications’, has its origins in the post-war work of Katz
and Lazarsfeld (1955). It focussed on the role of the individual in the mediation
of information within society—information of all kinds, not just that provided
by the media. This was an attempt to understand the individual, albeit the
individual within the ‘group’, as a key element in the transmission and
incorporation of publicly generated information into the patterns of action and
belief in everyday life. From it stemmed a view of media-use based in turn on
a view of the audience as active—active in an individual way, and choosing
types of content according to both rational and emotional needs. It was this
individualising of media use—a social psychology of the audience as
decontextualised, if not from the interactions that make up the patterns of
everyday life, at least from the more determining structures of social life, such

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Television and Everyday Life
as class, gender or ethnicity—to which David Morley (1980) took exception
in his work on the television audience.
If uses and gratifications research posited, as it did, a contextualised
individual, it was the individual as a member, or not, of a social network that
counted. The defining context was that of interpersonal relations.
7
Katz and
Lazarsfeld’s argument was based on an idea of sociability: that the individual
was embedded in a network of neighbourhood, community and group relations,
and that media information passed through this, usually in a two-step flow via
opinion leaders. Morley misread this, seeing Katz’s problematic as essentially
based in the decontextualised individual. The argument is more accurately put
as being between the need to recognise other levels of sociality (rather than
merely sociability) which Morley saw at the time as taking precedence over
the empirically observable activities of everyday life.
McQuail’s ‘sobering thought’ actually marks one of the essential tensions
within the study of the audience, even once one grants that audience a dynamic
role in the mediation process: it is the tension between the individual and the
social. The other essential tension, of course, lies in the notion of the audience
as either active or passive, though here, as I will argue, the tension is as much
a product of the failure of media researchers to think through the specific ways
in which both activity and passivity can be defined and used, as any ontological
difference between activity and passivity.