The Audience in Everyday Life

Living in a Media World

S. Elizabeth Bird

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135379872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

The Audience in Everyday Life argues that a media audience cannot be studied in front of the television alone--their interaction with media does not simply end when the set is turned off. Instead, we must study the daily lives of audiences to find the undercurrents of media influence in everyday life. Bird provides a host of useful tools and methods for scholars and students interested in the ways media is consumed in everyday life.

1
Beyond the Audience

Living in a Media World

Introduction: Media as culture

Even as everyone appears to acknowledge Western culture's "media-saturated" reality, many of us deny it in our own lives. As a media scholar working within the discipline of anthropology, I get used to the comments: "I make up my own mind about politics; I don't need the media"; "I guess what you do is interesting, but of course I never watch TV myself." Many anthropology students resist the idea that studying media is relevant to an understanding of contemporary culture. Interesting, perhaps an elective that offers diversion from the serious pursuit of their discipline-but hardly significant. Yes, media messages do insidious things to people, but not of course to me.

I think the common sense view I encounter so frequently in my discipline is symptomatic of the way many Americans think of the media. They are aware that images are everywhere, and they sometimes feel beleaguered by the onslaught of messages. They worry about the "effect" of media on children, and they seethe about "biased" reporting or negative stereotypes. Yet they still resist full acknowledgement that today the media are not extrinsic to Western culture, but fully internalized-that "the obvious but hard-to-grasp truth is that living with the media is today one of the main things Americans and many other human beings do" (Gitlin 2001, 5).

Each time I teach a graduate seminar on the media in contemporary culture, I begin with the time-honored "media deprivation exercise" (Dardenne 1994; Mastrolia 1997), asking students to avoid all media for a week, and to write a journal about their experiences. At the outset, most are blase; they hold images of themselves as serious, committed individuals, living lives free of external influences. Some proudly point out that they do not own a television. A week later they return, some almost shamefaced, as their journals and class discussion take them in directions they had never expected. A mother talks about how she is accustomed to watching a particular TV program with her teenage daughter, and then talking about and "around" it in a comfortable moment of connection. This week she had missed that terribly, and her daughter was irritable and upset by the break in routine. The issue was not the message of the show itself, but the relational context they had built around it. Another describes vividly his genuine fear when he had to turn off the radio for his daily 45-minute commute. "Suddenly there were all these sights and sounds that seemed to overwhelm me, and I felt disoriented. Later I actually heard a birdcall!" Social lives are put on hold, because they included movies or music. A political junkie feels withdrawal from news, and realizes she cannot enjoy her continuous processing of current events without media input. Another acknowledges her dependence on regular visits to an Internet chat forum. No one lasts more than four days; it is just too difficult. "It felt like withdrawing from the world," writes one ruefully. At this point, we are ready to start looking seriously at the media as culture.

A striking point that emerges from the deprivation experience is that, although it tends to confirm the clichè of "media saturation,"it also shows that as individuals, we experience media in non-predictable and non-uniform ways. One can be a proud TV-avoider, yet still be almost physically dependent on recorded music. One can watch TV most of the time as a casual, passive viewer, but be a knowledgeable, active "fan" of a particular program. The images and messages wash over us, but most leave little trace, unless they resonate, even for a moment, with something in our personal or cultural experience.

The amorphous nature of media experience was brought home to me when a doctoral student in my department almost reluctantly approached me to discuss themes emerging from her dissertation research, which was an analysis of the narratives of women who had been sexually abused while in the military (Redvern-Vance 1999). She was discovering that as women told their life stories, they would constantly use media references to interpret their experiences. These references ran the gamut from news, to talk shows, to soap operas. They invoked names like Oprah, Bill and Hillary, Monica, Anita Hill, Kelly Flynn (the Air Force pilot discharged for adultery and lying in a notorious 1997 case). One talked about her childhood identification with Popeye, Mighty Mouse and Superman. One woman's "hero" was Archie Bunker, because "he let people know that white people can be ignorant"; later she identified with the film In the Heat of the Night, and named her dog Mr. Tibbs. Another, unable to articulate the depths of her emotions, lent the researcher videos, such as the film Priest, which focuses on sexual abuse, explaining that these would help tell her story. Yet another scheduled her interviews around her TV-watching obligations, and quite explicitly defined her own life as a "soap opera."

This student, a perceptive researcher, realized it had never occurred to her to ask specifically about media; certainly she was not doing what we might call "audience research." Yet eventually she could not escape the reality of media as a kind of cultural frame that pervaded her respondents' lives. Her understanding of that led her to a greater ability to relate to the women with the empathy needed for the sensitive research she was doing.

All this leads me to a discussion of why the notion of the audience has become so problematic in media studies. We really cannot isolate the role of the media in culture, because the media are firmly anchored into the web of culture, although articulated by individuals in different ways. We cannot say that the "audience" for Superman will behave in a particular way because of the "effect" of a particular message; we cannot know who will use Superman as some kind of personal reference point, or how that will take place. The "audience" is everywhere and nowhere. In this book I try to explore this rath er vague notion of how we actually interact with the media. In so doing, I hope to contribute both to the ongoing debate on "the audience" within media studies, and also to suggest to fellow anthropologists how important it is to come to grips with the central role of media, both in contemporary Western culture and in rapidly-changing cultures all over the world. My case studies focus on people as active, selective makers of meaning; our culture maybe "media saturated,"but asindividuals we are not, or at least not in any predictable, uniform way. In my final chapter, I return to a question that rightly dogs us active audience advocates-but what about power and constraint? We may be able to make creative, individual meanings from this torrent of messages and images, but we can still only work with what we're given.

What About the Audience?

During the late 1980s, a flurry of scholarly activity effectively dismantled the idea that there really can be an "audience" out there waiting to be studied (e.g., Allor 1988; Erni 1989; Grossberg 1988; Fiske 1988; Radway 1988). It has been established that the very conception of the word tends to reify the "transmission" view of communication, whereby a message is transmitted to a receiver, with varying degrees of interference or "noise" affecting the impact of the message. And, as Hartley (1992) and others have pointed out, it separates "them"-the audience-from "us"-the researchers, in a way that belies the reality that all of us are living in a mediated culture. Most people play many roles in their lives, and "being an audience" is probably not that important a one. The audience is an everchanging, fluid concept: "The conditions and boundaries of audiencehood are inherently unstable" (Moores 1993,2).

So in understanding the role of the media in contemporary Western culture, we must somehow grasp the quality of the kaleidoscope, exploring how media articulate with such factors as class, gender, race, leisure and work habits, and countless other variables. The problem of course is that once we accept this pervasive, culturally-embedded nature of the media, it becomes very difficult to conceive of studying the phenomenon, without falling into the trap mentioned by Radway (1988) in which "Users are cordoned off for study and therefore defined as particular kinds of subjects by virtue of their use not only of a single medium but of a single genre as well" (1988, 363). As Seiter (1999) asks, "How do we draw the line in our data collection between audience research and the study of society, the family, the community?" (p. 9).

Radway saw ethnography as the only solution, advocating a major collaborative project in which a team of ethnographers fan out across an entire city and study how people's leisure practices are articulated in their lives. She does agree that this could be "potentially unwieldy and unending" (p. 369)—an understatement, to say the least. This kind of comprehensive endeavor has not been taken up as a serious project. Indeed, for some years now, audience scholarship has had something of a dilemma. The text-based response studies are seen as inadequate in capturing the kaleidoscopic quality of our media culture; if we cannot define an audience, is it effectively impossible to study it? Furthermore, the postmodernist "crisis" in anthropological representation (Clifford and Marcus 1986) left many uncertain about whether it is even valid to attempt to "speak for the other," making ethnography itself problematic (Bird 1992b). It seemed as though media reception studies were in something of a funk. Is our only option simply to hang oat and wait for people to mention media in the course of everyday conversations and actions, or in interviews about other subjects? In that case, we will tend to produce variously rich anecdotes, like Redvern-Vance's inadvertent stories, or like Barker's (1998) discussion of his friends' conversations about movies, in which he perceptively calls into question the very terminology of audience research, "exposure," "arousal," "watch."

The Opening up of Ethnography

As Alasuutari (1999) writes, we are now seeing a "third generation," of reception studies, building on the models represented by Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding approach and the now-classic qualitative audience studies of Ang (1985), Lull (1990), Morley (1980,1986), Radway (1984), Hobson (1982), and so on, but moving in rather broader directions.¹ And we are seeing anthropologists entering the field of media reception studies, meeting and engaging with the anthropologically-inspired work that in the past has largely originated from within the fields of cultural studies and communication. As recently as 1993, Spitulnik argued that "There is as yet no 'anthropology of mass media " (p. 293); today we are finally beginning to see a body of literature that defines itself as just that (e.g., Askew and Wilk 2002, Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, & Larkin 2002).

Essentially, this interdisciplinary "third generation" approach acknowledges the very real problems associated with trying to separate text/audience from the culture in which they are embedded, yet also accepts that it may be perfectly valid to enter the discussion through one particular genre or medium. Alasuutari (1999) argues that a "third generation" approach does not necessarily abandon specific audience studies, but that "the objective is to get a grasp of our contemporary 'media culture,' particularly as it can be seen in the role of the media in everyday life..." (p. 6). Thus the goal must be to contextualize and to draw connections between media/audience and the larger culture. On the one hand, this opens the door to cast our net wider-to explore the kind of "opportunistic ethnography" that shows us "media culture" in action in a legitimate and fruitful way, most usually in the culture within which the researcher is already comfortable. For instance, Barker's (1998) account of his friends' response to a movie is not unlike an episode from the accounts of anthropologists who "hang out" over an extended period of time in another culture, observing carefully and keeping systematic notes over time (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw 1995). His analysis of how one young man apparently used the character of Judge Dredd to frame his sense of identity as a "fascist" (Barker 1997) is another example of a similar approach, while Couldry (2000) is continuing to develop the intriguing notion of a "passing ethnography," which takes into account the mobile, ephemeral nature of much social interaction today. Anthropologist John Caughey was a pioneer in media anthropology with his exploration of people's "imaginary" relationships with media figures. His studies go far beyond any notion of a fixed, static "audience" (Caughey 1984, 1994). Rather, they speak volumes about how media images are naturalized into everyday American life, just as spiritual and mythological images are naturalized in oral cultures. His nuanced, sensitive account of one woman's "imaginary relationship" with actor Steven Segal is an intriguing exploration of how significant media can be in both personal identity and enculturation (Caughey 1994). Occasionally, other anthropologists have followed this lead, focusing not on specific text/audience relationships, but on everyday experience, as in Fisherkeller's provocative study of adolescent identity construction, in which she uses an in-depth life-history approach to conclude that teenagers "look to television culture, consciously or not, to acquire imaginative strategies for acting on their dreams and hopes for the future, and for coping with social dilemmas" (1997,485, italics in original). These kinds of analyses, focused on small-scale explorations of individuals' processes of meaning-making, can take us in directions that are quite different from conceptions of the static audience.

At the same time, we do not need to close the door on systematic, ethnographically-inspired studies that seek to explore specific moments of media interaction, as for example Seiter (1999) does with television. Like many before him, Alasuutari espouses an ethnographic approach as the ideal. However, he suggests that we might do well to follow the lead of anthropologists and move beyond a definition of ethnography that equates it with long-term participant-observation. As he writes, "It has been argued that a proper ethnographic study in audience ethnography entails at least several months stay in the 'field'" (1999,5). From this perspective, the qualitative reception studies done over the years are failures as ethnography, based as they are mostly on interviews. Evans (1990), along with Wester and Jankowski (1991) argues that many audience studies touted as ethnographic do not meet the requirements of true ethnography, while Murdock (1997) decries the tendency in cultural studies to "stretch the definition of ethnography to cover almost any effort to collect extended accounts of people's beliefs, responses and experiences" (p. 184). He argues that such techniques as interviews, focus groups, diaries and so on "can offer a solid basis for creative interpretation-but... cannot provide thick descriptions" (p. 184) because they lack "a rounded account of the ways that people's utterances, expressions and self-presentations are shaped and altered by the multiple social contexts they have to navigate the course of their daily lives" (184—5). While advocating a true "return to ethnography" (p. 185), Murdock gives no guidance as to how, for example, a media reception study could realistically achieve the ideal of holism he seems to be advocating. Maybe ethnography really is impossible after all, as some have seriously argued (see Bird 1992b).

Yet perhaps ironically, this search for a pure ethnography comes "at a time when anthropologists... are increasingly questioning the whole notion of a 'field'" (Alasuutari 1999, 5) and wondering about the ideal of holism (Marcus 1986). Fur thermore, as any anthropologist knows, ethnography has also long encompassed a range of methods that supplement or even replace classic fieldwork, and that may perfectly legitimately be used to study media reception-especially if combined with a broader analysis of cultural context. "Ethnography is not, in and of itself, a way to gather information" (Angrosino 2002, 3). Texts for student anthropologists outline many methods and approaches, including life histories, autobiographies, personal narratives, self-descriptions, diaries, interviews, and (dare I say it!) surveys and other quantitative methods (Bernard 1998; Angrosino 2002). The message from anthropology these days is that methods should be chosen not by using some standard of ethnographic "purity," but because they are appropriate for a particular project.

Classic ethnographic fieldwork may not be an appropriate method for studying dispersed media audiences, at least for the ethnographer working alone. Traditional participant-observation is most obviously necessary when studying a culture that is completely foreign to the researcher—when a new language must be learned or an unfamiliar worldview understood. Media anthropologists like Miller (1992), Wilk (1994), or Hahn (1994) quite rightly spent considerable time in the field. It may also be extremely valuable in contemporary society, when studying relatively self-contained sub-cultures and institutions, especially those with developed social conventions and rules. But many media ethnographers are studying cultural phenomena with which they are already familiar as participants, and there is a variety of techniques that build on this familiarity. In these situations "'fieldwork' has actually started years before" (Alasuutari 1999, 8), allowing the native researcher to focus attention on phenomena that are already quite familiar, whether the context is India (Parameswaran 1999; Mankekar 1999) or the United States. And we should not agonize unnecessarily about pure "holism" as a goal. Few anthropologists study complete, self-contained societies any more (if they ever did), but write ethnographies that explore specific questions and issues. Their holistic perspective emerges in the attempt to see these questions and issues in context, and linked to other aspects of the culture; in that regard holism is still an important anthropological credo, even as we understand that it is no longer a pure reality in an interconnected world.

Why Methods Matter

Rather than worry about relatively insignificant issues like time spent in the field, I believe we should be thinking more carefully about matching suitable methods to the subtle questions we are trying to ask. Our aim should be to achieve an "ethnographic way of seeing," (W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Beyond the Audience: Living in a Media World
• 2 Media Scandal Meets Everyday Life
• 3 Piecing a Cyber-Quilt: Media Fans in an Electronic Community
• 4 Imagining Indians: Negotiating Identity in a Media World
• 5 A Popular Aesthetic? Exploring Taste through Viewer Ethnography
• 6 CJ's Revenge: A Case Study of News as Cultural Narrative
• 7 Media Ethnography: An Interdisciplinary Future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index