Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World
Ien Ang
Language: English
Pages: 193
ISBN: B00MF179J2
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on television audiences, and , in response to recent criticisms of cultural studies, argues that it is possible to study audience pleasures and popular television in a way that is not naively populist. Ang examines how the makers and marketers of television attempt to mould their audience and looks at the often unexpected ways in which the viewers actively engage with the programmes they watch.
Living Room Wars highlights the inherent contradictions of a `politics of pleasure' of television consumption: Ang moves beyond the trditional forcus on textual meanings to explore the structural and historical representations fo television audiences as an integral part of modern culture. Her wide-ranging and illuminating discussion takes in the battle between television and its audiences; the politics of empirical audience research; new technologies and the tactics of television consumption; ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies; television fiction and women's fantasy; feminist desire and female pleasure in media consumption, and the transnational media system.
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124 positioned truths, constructing 77–81 positivism 37, 44, 46, 136 postcolonial nations 165 Poster, Mark 170 postmodernism 1, 85, 128, 149, 152, 157 postmodernity 142, 157–8, 161; capitalist 162–3, 168, 171, 174–80; in Europe 157 poststructuralism 37, 38, 41, 74, 93, 110, 119, 120, 128, 175, 177 power 101–2, 140; in family 181–2n; forms of 170–2, 178–9; and knowledge 170; theory of 43, 120–1 Press, Andrea 115–16 Index 180 prime-time television programmes 29, 86, 88, 115 pro-life movement
portrayed. […] Citizenship recognises problems outside the self, outside the immediate realm of responsibility and power of the individual citizen. […] Citizenship therefore constitutes the viewer as someone powerless to do anything about the events portrayed other than sympathise or become angry. The whole domestic arrangement of broadcast TV and the aesthetic forms it has evolved to come to terms with this domestic arrangement provides broadcast TV with the capability to do this and no more.
anything, then, Reading the Romance is inspired by a deep sense of the contradictions and ambivalences posed by mass culture, and by a recognition of the profoundly unresolved nature of critical theory’s dealings with it. This does not mean, however, that ethnography is an unproblematic project. In every ethnographic study the researcher has to confront very specific problems of access and interpretation, which will have a decisive impact on the shape of the eventual account that is presented by
the early chapters of the book, Radway’s self-chosen vulnerability as an ethnographer is made quite apparent. In these chapters, the dialogic nature of the ethnographic project, which according to Radway is one of its central tenets, is more or less actualized. Of course, the narrative voice speaking to us is Radway’s, but the limits of academic writing practice seem to make a more heterologic mode of textuality as yet almost unrealizable (see Clifford and Marcus 1986). She describes her initial
postcolonial nations will generally depend heavily on Western products, it is, again, the transformative properties of local consumption which are crucial for an appreciation of their cultural distinctiveness. When British anthropologist Daniel Miller went to Trinidad to document contemporary life on this South Caribbean island, he was soon confronted with the centrality of the American soap opera The Young and the Restless in the population’s everyday cultural experience. Why? Miller interprets