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.It s no accident I think that this shift occurred at the same time as, first, in the USAprogrammers began to pay attention to viewer demographics and quality showsbegan to be produced for particular audiences, and, second, cable television, with itspromise (not kept) to usher in an epoch of commercial-free choice and variety, tookoff.The consequence of all this was that cultural studies work on television becamecommitted to a particular kind of empirical research on media audiences: qualitativeresearch, often involving participatory observation (i.e.the researcher joining withhis or her subjects in their activities), aimed not at studying how shows were under-stood but at understanding the role of television in everyday life, and most of allamong fans of particular genres or shows.Such work has often pictured TV fans inromantic, sixties-idealist terms: for instance, they are conceived of as being engagedin upsetting received norms of good taste and aesthetic culture by poaching partic-ular elements from shows and using them as a basis for their own creative expression116 T EL EVI SI ON(see Jenkins 1992).As cultural studies researchers examined viewers more and moreclosely they also began to analyse the criteria that viewers use to judge programmes(with realistic turning out to be key).And they paid attention to how television wasinfused into practices of self (the techniques that people use to construct their char-acter and life) for instance by inserting memories of watching old shows into lifestories.Once television viewers became the object of research so too did TV sociability the way TV draws people together or isolates them, the way it reinforces familyauthority structures or undoes them, and so on.It is in this context too that one branchof cultural studies has become increasingly interested in the impact of TV (and themedia generally) on the public sphere.The public sphere as a concept remains tiedto Jürgen Habermas analysis of the civic institutions which underpinned EuropeanEnlightenment.For Habermas, famously, a bourgeois public sphere emerged in thesalons and coffee houses of late seventeenth-century Europe (especially in England),marked out from commercial and domestic life on the one side and the apparatuses ofstate on the other.It was not dominated by the court, and was dedicated to discussionand the circulation of ideas through which rational reflection and reform could gradu-ally be applied to social institutions.For Habermas, this public sphere (which existsmore as a theoretical construct than as a historical reality) was under threat by thenineteenth century.High capitalism re-feudalised it; and, or so the argument goes,the modern public sphere is under the sway of commercial interests, mass entertain-ment and technocrats (Habermas 1989).This argument has been reconceptualised by John Hartley, who has put forward analternative notion of the mediasphere.For him the media connect together different cultural domains for audiences (the media is a bridge rather than a field), as well ascreating a sense of the audience itself as community.This is in opposition to Habermasnotion of a public sphere shared by a politically delimited national community (Hartley1996, 28).For Hartley, the media become the primary means through which acommunity not only knows itself to be a community but also makes the internalconnections required to become a community.This is an important notion because ithelps us see the productive role of television, which lies outside both the model ofrepresentation (since television connects social and cultural fields rather than repre-sents society) and the Habermasian model of discursive rationality in which televisionwas seen as failing to provide for rational and civic public debate.However Hartley s concept risks overestimating the degree to which the media andtelevision in particular has subsumed older concepts of society.If you are immersed inthe media, either as a cultural studies academic or as a viewer, then the media seems tobe the stage on which social reality presents itself.But to whatever degree society hasabsorbed television into itself, most everyday lives are lived at a certain distance fromtelevision, even in the West.It is important not to forget that most information and117 MEDI A AND T HE PUBL I C S PHEREorientation about the world comes from elsewhere: from friends, from schools orworkplaces, churches, etc., or indeed from books.What is the public sphere for youngurban blacks in the USA for instance? It exists in the basketball courts, swap meets,local stores, schools, clubs, street hangouts and parties as much as if not more than inthe media (which, of course, almost uniformly represents them negatively).What isthe public sphere for the educated upper middle class? For the born-again Christian?For the recent Ethiopian migrant? To repeat: especially for those who do not recognisetheir lives in TV representations, the media forms a kind of background hum to therhythms of ordinary existence, the occasional distraction or amusement rather thanthe framework of life itself [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.It s no accident I think that this shift occurred at the same time as, first, in the USAprogrammers began to pay attention to viewer demographics and quality showsbegan to be produced for particular audiences, and, second, cable television, with itspromise (not kept) to usher in an epoch of commercial-free choice and variety, tookoff.The consequence of all this was that cultural studies work on television becamecommitted to a particular kind of empirical research on media audiences: qualitativeresearch, often involving participatory observation (i.e.the researcher joining withhis or her subjects in their activities), aimed not at studying how shows were under-stood but at understanding the role of television in everyday life, and most of allamong fans of particular genres or shows.Such work has often pictured TV fans inromantic, sixties-idealist terms: for instance, they are conceived of as being engagedin upsetting received norms of good taste and aesthetic culture by poaching partic-ular elements from shows and using them as a basis for their own creative expression116 T EL EVI SI ON(see Jenkins 1992).As cultural studies researchers examined viewers more and moreclosely they also began to analyse the criteria that viewers use to judge programmes(with realistic turning out to be key).And they paid attention to how television wasinfused into practices of self (the techniques that people use to construct their char-acter and life) for instance by inserting memories of watching old shows into lifestories.Once television viewers became the object of research so too did TV sociability the way TV draws people together or isolates them, the way it reinforces familyauthority structures or undoes them, and so on.It is in this context too that one branchof cultural studies has become increasingly interested in the impact of TV (and themedia generally) on the public sphere.The public sphere as a concept remains tiedto Jürgen Habermas analysis of the civic institutions which underpinned EuropeanEnlightenment.For Habermas, famously, a bourgeois public sphere emerged in thesalons and coffee houses of late seventeenth-century Europe (especially in England),marked out from commercial and domestic life on the one side and the apparatuses ofstate on the other.It was not dominated by the court, and was dedicated to discussionand the circulation of ideas through which rational reflection and reform could gradu-ally be applied to social institutions.For Habermas, this public sphere (which existsmore as a theoretical construct than as a historical reality) was under threat by thenineteenth century.High capitalism re-feudalised it; and, or so the argument goes,the modern public sphere is under the sway of commercial interests, mass entertain-ment and technocrats (Habermas 1989).This argument has been reconceptualised by John Hartley, who has put forward analternative notion of the mediasphere.For him the media connect together different cultural domains for audiences (the media is a bridge rather than a field), as well ascreating a sense of the audience itself as community.This is in opposition to Habermasnotion of a public sphere shared by a politically delimited national community (Hartley1996, 28).For Hartley, the media become the primary means through which acommunity not only knows itself to be a community but also makes the internalconnections required to become a community.This is an important notion because ithelps us see the productive role of television, which lies outside both the model ofrepresentation (since television connects social and cultural fields rather than repre-sents society) and the Habermasian model of discursive rationality in which televisionwas seen as failing to provide for rational and civic public debate.However Hartley s concept risks overestimating the degree to which the media andtelevision in particular has subsumed older concepts of society.If you are immersed inthe media, either as a cultural studies academic or as a viewer, then the media seems tobe the stage on which social reality presents itself.But to whatever degree society hasabsorbed television into itself, most everyday lives are lived at a certain distance fromtelevision, even in the West.It is important not to forget that most information and117 MEDI A AND T HE PUBL I C S PHEREorientation about the world comes from elsewhere: from friends, from schools orworkplaces, churches, etc., or indeed from books.What is the public sphere for youngurban blacks in the USA for instance? It exists in the basketball courts, swap meets,local stores, schools, clubs, street hangouts and parties as much as if not more than inthe media (which, of course, almost uniformly represents them negatively).What isthe public sphere for the educated upper middle class? For the born-again Christian?For the recent Ethiopian migrant? To repeat: especially for those who do not recognisetheir lives in TV representations, the media forms a kind of background hum to therhythms of ordinary existence, the occasional distraction or amusement rather thanthe framework of life itself [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]