INTERPRETING TELEVISION: THE NATIONWIDE AUDIENCE

3 INTERPRETING TELEVISION: THE NATIONWIDE AUDIENCE

1 This programme analysis was completed and written up for publication by Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley (Everday Television: ‘Nationwide’, London: British Film Institute, 1978). The subsequent audience research was conducted by David Morley, supported by a grant from the British Film Institute, and published as The ‘Nationwide’ Audience, London: British Film Institute, 1980.

THE ‘NATIONWIDE’ AUDIENCE:

A CRITICAL POSTSCRIPT

In writing this chapter I am indebted to a range of people for their critical comments on the earlier work—among them John Corner, Philip Schlesinger, Tony Trew, James Donald, Adam Mills, Stuart Hall and Charlotte Brunsdon.

1 F.Parkin, Class, Inequality and Political Order, London: Paladin, 1971; see especially chapter 3 . Parkin’s model was adapted and developed in relation to the media audience in Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and decoding in TV discourse’ CCCS, University of Birmingham, 1973.

2 See the formulation in S.Hall et al., ‘The unity of current affairs television’, WPCS no. 9, CCCS, and in C.Brunsdon and D.Morley Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’, London: British Film Institute, 1978.

3 S.Hall, ‘Once more round preferred readings’, mimeo, CCCS, 1978. 4 See V.Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, London: Academic Press,

1973. 5 For these points, I am particularly indebted to Tony Trew. 6 See S.Neale, ‘Propaganda’, Screen 18:3, (1977). 7 See G.Kress and R.Hodge, Language as Ideology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1979, and R.Fowler et al., Language and Control, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

8 See, in particular, the work of Bourdieu published in Media, Culture and Society, 2:3 (1980).

9 See Parkin, op. cit., and Hall, op. cit. 10 See R.Dyer, ‘Victim: hermeneutic project’, Film Form, Autumn 1977, 19–21. 11 See T.Ryall, The notion of genre’, Screen 11:2 (1970). 12 See A.Mattelart and S.Sieglaub, Communications and Class Struggle, Vol. 1, New

York: International General, 1979, and P.Cohen and D.Robbins, Knuckle Sandwich, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

13 See ‘Recent developments in English studies’, in S.Hall et al., Culture, Media and Language, London: Hutchinson, 1981. 14 See English Studies Group, op. cit., p. 239. 15 C.Brunsdon, ‘Crossroads: notes on soap-opera’, paper to Rutgers University

Conference ‘Perspectives on TV and Video Art’, 1981. 16 D.Hobson, ‘Housewives and the mass media’, in S.Hall et al., Culture, Media and Language,

NOTES 281

17 P.Corrigan and P.Willis, ‘Cultural forms and class mediators’, Media Culture and Society 2:2. 18 See S.Suleiman and 1. Crossman (eds), The Reader in the Text, Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 32. 19 D.Hymes, ‘On communicative competence’, in J.Pride and J.Homes (eds) Socio- Linguistics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

FROM FAMILY TELEVISION TO A SOCIOLOGY OF MEDIA CONSUMPTION

1 Many of these observations derive from critical comments offered by Valerie Walkerdine in response to the Family Television project. I am grateful to her for these contributions.

TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE TELEVISION AUDIENCE

1 Some sections of this chapter also appear in ‘Communication and context: anthropological and ethnographic perspectives on the media audience’, coauthored with R.Silverstone, in N.Jankowski and K.B.Jensen (eds), A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research, London: Routledge, 1991.

2 See Trinh T.Minh-ha’s Woman Native, Other, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, for a further discussion of these issues, especially in relation to S.Adoltevi’s argument: ‘Today…the only possible ethnology is the one which studies the anthropophagous behaviour of the white man’ (Adoltevi, Negritude and Negrologues, Paris: Union Générale d’Etudes, 1972; quoted in Minh-ha, op. cit., p. 73). Minh-ha explores the metaphors of anthropology as ‘gossip about gossip’, and of interpretation—as an attempt to ‘grasp the marrow of native life’—as itself a cannibalistic rite.

3 For a more extended review of the literature on Orientalism (and on ‘Orientalism- in-reverse’), see D.Morley and K.Robins, ‘Techno-orientalism: futures, foreigners and phobias’, New Formations 16 (Spring 1992).

4 For an interesting exploration of the possibilities of ‘ethno-semiotics’, see J. Fiske ‘Ethnosemiotics: some personal and theoretical reflections’, Cultural Studies 4:1, (January 1990).

5 Geertz is referring once again to the conceptual issues raised by Ryle’s famous example of the difficulties involved in interpreting such a seemingly simple event as the movement of a human eyelid (as indicating, for example, either an involuntary twitch or a conspiratorial signal to a friend, etc.). Geertz’s original discussion of these matters is to be found in his Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 6–7. See also Carr, op. cit., on this point. For an interesting critique of the relativist and textualist perspectives which have influenced the field of cultural

282 NOTES

studies in the wake of Rorty’s influential (1978) reading of Derrida, and for a spirited defence of a critical realist position, see Norris (1991).

6 For a detailed discussion of the methodological procedures employed in the HICT study, see R.Silverstone, E.Hirsch and D.Morley, ‘Listening to a long conversation: an ethnographic approach to the study of information and communication technologies in the home’, Cultural Studies 5:2 (May 1991).

7 But see my comments in the Introduction here, in support of Corner’s (1991) observations on the corresponding dangers of radical contextualism.