Television and Everyday Life

6
ON THE AUDIENCE
1
‘“
Screen
theory” constantly elides the concrete individual, his/her constitution as a
“subject-for-discourse”, and the discursive subject positions constituted by discursive
practices and operations’ (Morley, 1980, 169).
2
Hawkins and Pingree (1983 and 1990) offer a critique of the cultivation analysis research
on a number of grounds, not least the difficulty of providing psychological or social-
psychological explanation for the revealed correlations (i.e. at an individual level). They

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Television and Everyday Life
also point out that they have no evidence that first- and second-order beliefs are correlated,
so that it is by no means clear how, if at all, the two are related and how television
viewing is to be understood in this relationship (or lack of it) (Hawkins and Pingree,
1990, esp. 43ff.).
3
Sonia Livingstone, in yet another recent review disagrees: ‘its relative theoretical naivity
in the conception of the effects process (an unspecified process of cultivation), its
reliance on the much criticised method of content analysis to determine programme
meaning…and its use of social statistics and opinion polls…make cultivation analysis
one step in a long theoretical development’ (Livingstone, 1990, 16). A long step in a
misguided theoretical development, palpably. I discuss Livingstone’s own
approach below.
4
This process is not really undermined by Gerbner’s insistence on the process of
cultivation as a ‘gravitational’ one rather than a ‘unidirectional’ one, since in his own
words: ‘[Different] groups of viewers] may strain in a different direction, but all groups
are affected by the same central current. Cultivation is thus part of a continual, dynamic,
on-going process of interaction among messages and contexts’ (Gerbner 
et al.,
1986, 24).
5
For a more recent, and significant, study of television’s influence, particularly in relation
to the audience’s ability to learn and to reproduce what they see on television news,
and thereby its functions as an agenda-setting medium, see Philo (1990, esp. his
conclusion pp. 154–5). Philo also links his findings to, though claims greater precision
than, the work of Gerbner 
et al.
6
Eco was at pains to distinguish openness and indeterminacy. As Sonia Livingstone
points out, it is a distinction which many recent analysts have overlooked: ‘As for
aberrant presuppositions and deviating circumstances, they are not realizing any
openness, but, instead, producing mere states of indeterminacy. What I call open
texts are, rather, reducing such an indeterminacy, whereas closed texts, even though
aiming at eliciting a sort of “obedient” co-operation are, in the last analysis,
randomly open to every pragmatic accident’ (Eco, 1979, 6–7, cited in Livingstone,
1990, 42).
7
‘Communications research aiming at the study of short-run mass media effects must
take systematically into account an individual’s relatedness-to-others…No longer can
mass media research be content with a random sample of disconnected individuals as
respondents. Respondents must be studied within the context of the group or groups to
which they belong or which they have “in mind”—thus, which may influence them—
in their formulation of opinions, attitudes or decisions, and in their rejection or
acceptance of mass-media influence-attempts’ (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955, 131).
8
See Klaus Bruhn Jensen (1990, 74): ‘The polysemy of media texts is only a political
potential, and the oppositional decoding of media is not yet a manifestation of
political power.’
9
It is easy to exaggerate and parody some of Fiske’s writings. He is aware of those
dangers, and also of the links between his version of culture and the accounts of the
relationship between the popular and the elite, and the public and the private which
have already established their symbiotic and dialectical relationship to each other. The
key terms here are carnival and dialogia; and the key theorist Bakhtin—though see
also Burke (1978).
10
David Morley, Eric Hirsch and I combined on an ESRC/PICT funded study on
information and communication technologies in the home (see Silverstone, 1991a; and
Silverstone 
et al.,
1992). Many of the arguments offered within this book arose as a
result of that empirical work, and in discussion. I am enormously grateful for both my
colleagues’ involvement in the project.

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Notes
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