Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies presents a multifaceted exploration of audience research, in which David Morley draws on a rich body of empirical work to examine the emergence, development and future of television audience research. In addition to providing an introductory overview of the development of audience research from a cultural studies perspective, David Morley questions how class and cultural differences can affect how we interpret television, the significance of gender in the dynamics of domestic media consumption, how the media construct the ‘national family’, and how small-scale ethnographic studies can help us to understand the global-local dynamics of postmodern media systems. Morley’s work reconceptualizes the study of ideology within the broader context of domestic communications, illuminating the role of the media in articulating public and private spheres of experience and in the social organization of space, time and community. The collection contributes both to current methodological debates—for instance, the possible uses of ethnographic methods in media/cultural studies— and to new debates surrounding substantive issues. such as the functions of new (and old) media in the construction of cultural identities within a postmodern geography of the media. David Morley is Reader in Media Studies at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. He is the author of The ‘Nationwide’ Audience (1980) and Family Television (1986). 7 Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies David Morley LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1992 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1992 David Morley All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Morley, David Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies I. Title 302.23 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Morley, David Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies/David Morley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Television viewers—Research. 2. Television broadcasting—Social asoects. I. Title. PN1992.55.M65 1992 302.23’45–dc20 92–10404 ISBN 0-203-39835-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-39970-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-05445-1 (Print Edition) Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Part I Theoretical frameworks 39 1 Television audience research: a critical history 41 2 Psychoanalytic theories: texts, readers and subjects 55 Part II Class, ideology and interpretation 67 3 Interpreting television: the Nationwide audience 69 4 The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: a critical postscript 111 Part III Gender, domestic leisure and viewing practices 123 5 Research development: from ‘decoding’ to viewing context 125 6 The gendered framework of family viewing 131 7 From Family Television to a sociology of media consumption 151 Part IV Methodological issues 163 8 Towards an ethnography of the television audience 165 Part V Television, technology and consumption 189 9 Domestic communication: technologies and meanings (with 191 Roger Silverstone) 10 The consumption of television as a commodity 203 11 Private worlds and gendered technologies 211 Part VI Between the private and the public 237 12 The construction of everyday life: political communication 239 and domestic media v 13 Where the global meets the local: notes from the sitting- 259 room Notes 279 Bibliography 287 Index 303 Acknowledgements In so far as this book has some basis in empirical research, I should like to thank Ed Buscombe of the British Film Institute and Bob Towler (sometime Head of Research at the Independent Broadcasting Authority) for being prepared to fund The ‘Nationwide’ Audience and Family Television projects respectively—in each case, when no other institution would do so. My thanks go also to all the members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Media Group 1972– 8, but especially to Ian Connell, in those early days. My thanks to Ellen Seiter and Jane Armstrong, who both helped me out, perhaps more than they realized, at a difficult moment. I would like to thank Roger Silverstone, both for inviting me to participate in the research project on ‘The Household Uses of Information and Communication Technology’ at Brunel University from 1987 to 1990, and for granting his permission for me to reprint material here (Chapter 9) which we wrote jointly. My thanks to Ien Ang and Kevin Robins who have both, in their different ways, made our intellectual collaborations serious fun. Last, and most particularly, my thanks to Stuart Hall and Charlotte Brunsdon, for their insight and encouragement throughout. Much of the material collected in this volume has seen previous publication in earlier forms. Chapter 1 draws on material originally published in D.Morley, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience, London: British Film Institute,1980. Chapter 2 draws on material from my ‘Changing paradigms in audience studies’, in E.Seiter et al. (eds) Remote Control, London: Routledge, 1989, and also from Texts, readers, subjects’, in S.Hall et al. (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson, 1981. Chapter 3 is an edited version of a course unit, Interpreting Television, published by the Open University Press (1981) as part of the OU’s ‘Popular Culture’ course. Chapter 4 was originally published in Screen Education (1981). Chapter 5 draws on material from my Family Television (1986). Chapter 6 was published in an earlier version ‘Domestic relations: the framework of family viewing’, in J.Lull (ed.), World Families Watch Television (© 1988 Sage Publications, Inc.). Chapter 8 draws on some material which also appears in an article, ‘Communication and context’ (jointly written with Roger Silverstone), which appears in N.Jankowski and K.Jensen (eds), A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research, Routledge, 1991. A differently edited version of Chapter 9 appeared in Media, Culture and Society 12(1) (1990). An earlier version of Chapter 12 appeared vii in D.Swanson and D.Nimmo (eds), New Directions in Political Communication (© 1990 Sage Publications, Inc.). Chapter 13, again in an earlier version, appeared in Screen 32(1) (1991). I am grateful to all those concerned for their permission to reprint these materials here. My thanks go to Dave Mason and to Sue Field Reid, for helping me to convert a mountain of cut-and-paste into a finished (?) product. viii Introduction The sequence of the materials in this book is organized in an attempt to offer a particular reading of the trajectory of my research, as it has moved from the analysis of the ideological structure of factual television programmes, through a concern with the wider field of popular programming, towards the multifaceted processes of consumption and decoding in which media audiences are involved. This work has also involved an attempt to reframe the study of ideology within the broader context of domestic communications, entailing the interdiscursive connections of new technologies, broadcast media and family dynamics. Most recently, the work has been concerned with the fundamental role of the media in articulating the public and private spheres, and in the social organization of space, time and community. This, I would argue, is the proper context in which current debates about the role of the media in the construction of cultural identities can most usefully be situated (see Morley and Robins 1989, 1990 and 1992). I am aware both of the dangers of hindsight, and of the dangers of claiming an over-coherent trajectory to this work. It has simply been a case of returning, again and again, to the same old questions about cultural power, sometimes reformulating those questions in different ways, and at various points shifting the angle of vision from which the questions have been asked. The work can be said to have involved a series of shifts in its principal foci of interest, moving from a concern with questions of ideology and the analysis of televisual messages, through a set of questions concerning class structure and the decoding process, towards an emphasis on gendered viewing practices within the context of the family. From this point on, the work has been engaged in two principal shifts, one concerning the decentring of television as the focus of interest (towards a more inclusive concern with the uses of various information and communication technologies in the domestic sphere), and the other involving a broader consideration of the functions of such media in the construction of national and cultural identities within the context of a postmodern geography of the media. There is not only a degree of repetition between chapters, but also a certain uneveness of tone, given that they were originally written for a variety of readerships. It has, none the less, seemed best to leave the material largely in its original form. 2INTRODUCTION This Introduction is intended to offer (section 2) some reflections on the intellectual context in which the trajectory of this work originated, a retrospective view (section 3) of the significance (both positive and negative) which has been attributed to the work (especially the Nationwide audience study), and an intervention (section 4) in current debates as to the direction which audience studies should take in the future. However, by way of preamble, it seems necessary to offer also some explanation of the significance (at least to me) of the words in the book’s title.