James Hay

The Audience and Its Landscape

* Introduction James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella. Audience Studies And The Convergence Of Research Traditions * Viewers Work Elihu Katz. * Combinations, Comparisons, and Confrontations: Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Audience Research Karl Erik Rosengren. * Audience Research: Antinomies, Intersection, and the Prospect of Comprehensive Theory David L. Swanson. * After Convergence: Constituents of a Social Semiotics of Mass Media Reception Klaus Bruhn Jensen. * The Pragmatics of Audience in Research and Theory James A. Anderson. Rethinking The Audience As An Object Of Study * Recasting the Audience in the New Television Marketplace? Jay G. Blumler. * Toward a Qualitative Methodology of Audience Study: Using Ethnography to Study the Popular Culture Audience Andrea L. Press. * Notes on Children as a Television Audience Ellen Seiter. * Figuring Audiences and Readers Tony Bennett. * Marginal Texts, Marginal Audiences Larry Gross. * Notes on the Struggle to Define Involvement in Television Viewing Tamar Liebes. * On Not Finding Media Effects: Conceptual Problems in the Notion of an Active Audience (with a Reply to Elihu Katz) Robert Kubey. The Politics Of Audience Studies * The Politics of Producing Audiences Martin Allor. * Power Viewing: A Glance at Pervasion in the Postmodern Perplex John Hartley. * The Hegemony of Specificity and the Impasse in Audience Research: Cultural Studies and the Problem of Ethnography Janice Radway. * Ethnography and Radical Contextualism in Audience Studies Ien Ang. Locating Audiences * Hemispheres of Scholarship: Psychological and Other Approaches to Studying Media Audiences Byron Reeves. * From Audiences to Consumers: The Household and the Consumption of Communication and Information Technologies Roger Silverstone. * Audiencing Violence: Watching Homeless Men Watch Die Hard John Fiske and Robert Dawson. * The Geography of Television: Ethnography, Communications, and Community David Morley. * Satellite Dishes and the Landscapes of Taste Charlotte Brunsdon. * Afterword: The Place of the Audience: Beyond Audience Studies James Hay.

Rethinking convergence / culture: an introduction

Over the first decade of the twenty-first century there has been a growing perception that we live in an era of media ‘convergence’. There are at least four ways that the expression ‘convergence’ has been deployed and its meaning solidified as a description of new synergy (a ‘horizontal’ realignment) among media companies and industries, as the multiplication of ‘platforms’ for news and information, as a technological hybridity that has folded the uses of separate media into one another (e.g. watching a television broadcast on a cell phone), and as a new media aesthetic involving the mixing of documentary and nondocumentary forms. This special issue, ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’, acknowledges the usefulness of these accounts of convergence but is skeptical not only about the overuse of the term but also about its limited conceptualization. This issue is particularly interested in the prominent tendency to describe ‘media convergence’ as comprising, or at the centre of, a ‘culture’ what Henry Jenkins has referred to as a ‘convergence culture’. Our issue asks what difference it makes that the present is considered, or best understood, as a moment of ‘media convergence’ but also what difference it makes that media convergence (as a description of the present) is articulated as ‘cultural’ or as symptomatic of a historical formation (or less modestly, a new ‘era’ or ‘epoch’) best described as a ‘convergence culture’. How and why has ‘convergence culture’ gained traction as a term for making sense of the present? What assumptions in recent accounts of ‘convergence culture’ have been made about media, convergence and culture and their supposedly organic connection to one another? To what extent has ‘convergence culture’ become a buzzword whose meanings and currency have not as yet been fully mapped? We suggest that understanding contemporary media/convergence as constitutive of a ‘new media culture’ requires more careful reflection and elaboration. We raise these questions in this journal, Cultural Studies, because the predilection for casting media as constitutive of a culture has a history in/as Cultural Studies. Considering the linkage between Media Studies and Cultural

Introduction: Toward an analytic of governmental experiments in these times: Homeland security as the new social security

The idea for this project developed out of conversations in early 2003 between Mark and James, and gradually with and among the other contributors, about the implications of the creation of a Department of Homeland Security in the US. While our project’s title refers to the formation of this department, and while the essays in this collection more or less consider Homeland Security’s rapid emergence as a central strategy of government and as an indispensable way of modernizing and rationalizing (‘advancing’ and ‘reinventing’) liberal government in these times, our project is and is not about this institution. We have sought to assemble perspectives about the various ways that a Homeland Security developed through (re-articulating, organizing, mobilizing, and acting upon) a variety of programs oriented toward the management of risk. These programs are not always affiliated directly with the State-administrations of government, even though these ‘non-State’ programs operate by generating policy (guidelines and rules of behavior) and through techniques for calculating, recognizing, and managing risk and various other kinds of perceived/imagined problems. Some of these programs are oriented toward managing risk in the US, and others are about achieving a national security beyond the borders of the US. Some of these programs pre-date September 11, 2001 and the Bush administration, and in many respects our project is less an intervention into discussions about September 11 than an attempt to understand collaboratively the many histories that have contributed to the formation of a Homeland Security. Furthermore, a project that references Homeland Security (however indirectly) needs to acknowledge how a Homeland Security’s mission, purview, and experimentalism have changed or been revised over its short history. Mark and I have had to rethink this project in light of events surrounding the devastation and responses (or lack of responsiveness) to Hurricane Katrina and surrounding the revelation (as this introduction goes to press) that President George Bush regularly has authorized, without courtsanction and oversight, the monitoring of communication by citizens and/or residents in the US since September 11, 2001 (and this revelation following revelations about secret courts and state-approved torture justified as

Locating the Televisual

and equally interiorized (e.g., the darkness of the movie theater, the dream-like nature of identification with screen images, the centering or decentering of a viewer’s imaginary relation to screen space). One contradiction surrounding television criticism therefore concerned how to bring criticism’s conception of space to bear on a potentially more mobile relation of the viewer to the television set, on the broadcasted nature of television that brought signals into homes, and on the increasingly pervasive presence of the video monitor in and outside domiciles. Of course, true critics could simply ignore these features, continuing instead to talk about television as only what appeared on the screen and as if the viewer were always engaged with the TV set—as if every home were the eternally mythic suburban home, as if the TV room were a kind of camera obscura, as if some TV critics weren’t capable of reading, listening to music, and watching television all in the same place. And while reading and movie watching certainly were a part of the reorganization of an environment outside the home or the movie theater, criticism seemed unconcerned with that issue. 12. One of the most vivid examples of this tendency in film studies has been that of Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger (1985). 13. While Harvey generalized the material modalities of aesthetic (“cultural”) mediation, reading in the aesthetics of space what economic theory already explains, Jameson (1991) generalized the economic tendencies of post-Fordism to ground his claims about a postmodern aesthetic/culture. Both saw culture as being determined primarily by economic developments. In certain respects, postmodernist criticism (including that which informs “critical geography”) placed television at the center of postmodernity: television as the metaphor/example par excellence of late-twentieth-century culture, of simulation, and as agent of a global occupation by American pop culture. On one hand, television was implicated in the breakup of rationalism as the organizing principle of culture, subject formation, and space in modernity, and on the other hand, television was the abstract embodiment of an equally abstract concept of social totalization: the networked society. Although treatments of postmodernism that have emphasized the interconnectedness of media and their subjects (or the connection of media to other virtual sites collectively comprising a networked society) have offered a way of thinking about the environmental features of television, in ways not common in earlier criticism, they nonetheless have generalized that environment—seeing a postmodernist aesthetic or “the cultural logic of late capitalism” everywhere or in highly essentialized forms. For instance, it is one thing to suggest that television is a technology that relies on shopping malls to maintain structures of power, and it is another to imply that television = shopping malls = a postmodern environment. 226 Television & New Media / August 2001

Too Good to Fail: Managing Financial Crisis Through the Moral Economy of Realty TV

This article thinks about citizenship and media in the context of the recent “financial crisis,” and the role of a collapsed real estate market in the crisis. Specifically, the article examines the transformations and recent legacy of what the author refers to as realty TV, a vein of Reality TV programs oriented toward the virtues, pleasures, and rewards of capitalizing on home improvement and investment during the first decade of the 21st century. The article considers the historical contradictions of realty TV’s demonstrations of the virtues of the home makeover (as self-enterprise, self-actualization, and self-investment) before 2008, and the contradictions of realty TV’s role in reproducing a new “moral economy” of self-responsibilization in the wake of the subsequent financial crisis. This latter moral economy developed partly in response to the rapidly increasing number of home owners who were unable to meet the requirements of their mortgages and who then voluntarily abandoned their homes and mortgages because of their inability to recoup equity in these homes. The article is particularly interested in how this recent history of realty TV provides a perspective for thinking about the recent financial crisis in different terms and examples typically used to explain the crisis by political economists. By examining how a moral economy for managing financial crisis has been produced through television “programs” which serve as technical resources for maximizing personal financial security and for managing the insecurities and instabilities of house and home as “investment opportunity,” the article also suggests ways that television is being reinvented within new technologies of self-government and citizenship. And in that way, the article considers historical determinations shaping TV and its relation to other media/technologies not typically addressed in media studies.

‘POPULAR CULTURE’ IN A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW POLITICAL REASON

Since the US presidential campaign of 2004, references to a new political ‘populism’ abound. Sometimes the politics of populism has been waged over the claim, by the Left and the Right, to populism. Although there is a long history of political movements representing themselves as populist, the struggle over the claim to populism has certain recent inflections, and matters differently than in the past, and in the USA differently than in other parts of the world. One thing that distinguishes the recent political populism in the USA is its articulation to and through a ‘media revolution’. My intervention in a collection of essays interested in rethinking ‘media convergence’ involves rethinking certain assumptions about the relation between the ‘media revolution’ associated with ‘new media’ and a new ‘convergence culture’ and the emergence of (the claims to) a new political populism in the USA. In so doing, the project also engages the writings of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, Paolo Virno and Michel Foucault in order to rethink the relation between ‘the popular’, ‘populism’ and ‘population’.

Designing homes to be the first line of defense: Safe households, mobilization, and the new mobile privatization

In February 2005, the ‘9/11 Public Discourse Project’ and the ‘America Prepared Campaign’ sponsored a public letter, ‘Homeland Security Starts at Home’ a public service announcement circulated in newspapers and magazines (such as the New York Times Magazine , 6 February 2005, pp. 25 27). In part, the letter introduced the two organizations’ mission: to remind readers about the informational resources of the Department of Homeland Security (‘to find out about different emergencies and how to prepare for them’) and to encourage ‘a national conversation’ about the recommendations of the ‘9/11 Commission Report’ recommendations ‘regarding not only what the American government must do to be ready for another terrorist attack but what all citizens must do’. According to the letter, knowing what to do (i.e. being ‘ready’ by being informed) involves a fairly simple and straightforward technology for citizens: a ‘family communications plan’. The rationale for needing and implementing a family communications plan is also simple and obvious:

The Many Responsibilities of the New Citizen-Soldier

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was formed on 25 November 2002, it was the largest reorganization of the federal government in over fifty years, and provided the first new cabinet-level department in over sixty years. It was supposed to oversee twenty-two government agencies and over 17,000 federal employees. So when Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), one of the most recognized architects of neo-conservative policy in the US and of legislation creating the department, stated that there were dangers creating such a large bureaucracy but that it would be a chance ‘‘to try new ideas,’’ his statement did and did not represent a noteworthy paradox. The paradox was that, particularly for neo-conservative libertarians, the department’s formation conflicted with their aversion to ‘‘big government’’ and to what many of them had referred to as a Nanny State. The Nanny, as feminization of the welfare state, was perceived to have begat and looked after a culture of dependency* nagging, regulating, and snatching everyday freedoms, such as the right to eat ‘‘transfatty’’ french fries (recently prohibited in NYC eating establishments) and thus to make oneself big without the intervention of ‘‘big government.’’ As overseer of traditionally ‘‘feminine’’ domains such as ‘‘home’’ and ‘‘the land,’’ a Homeland Security Department could not be perceived by its proponents or subjects as a Supernanny. Gramm’s reference to trying new ideas, however, did not contradict years of initiatives by both Republican and Democratic administrations to ‘‘reinvent government’’*a discourse concerned with ‘‘downsizing’’ and ‘‘outsourcing’’ federal programs and with fostering public private ‘‘partnerships.’’ ‘‘Reinventing government’’ was the objective of the early Clinton Gore administration’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government and for ‘‘welfare reform’’ in the late 1990s. The NPRG helped to provide the precedent and rationale for the Bush

Interview with Armand Mattelart

Armand Mattelart: When I began my research my concept of power was modeled on a state of the world at the time. In the 1960s and still in the 1970s there was a real inequality of exchanges. During the 1970s there were rising demands from so-called third world countries. It was about a new world information order. I think it’s important to recognize that. We thought about everything in terms of those inequalities, and also in terms of cultural imperialism because the United States was the center of the global economy. From that moment there were different critiques of those unequal relationships, but I think there were reasons explaining a common notion of cultural imperialism. Cultural Imperialism wasn’t born just anywhere.

The automated states, automated government, and self-automation of the ‘smart’ appliance: three questions about refrigerators:

This essay considers the automation of the everyday through ‘smart’ domestic appliance, specifically the current regime of smart refrigerators. The essay revisits and rethinks perspectives about media by McLuhan, focusing particularly on his discussion of clothing, cars, clocks, light bulbs, and highways as ‘media’. The essay outlines a critical practice (a ‘critical refrigerator studies’), as a means of rethinking ‘media power’, through perspectives by Foucault about technologies of government and through perspectives by Otter about Liberal objects.