Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences

by Ang,Ien

• ISBN13: 9780415128018
• ISBN10: 0415128013
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1995-12-22
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Living Room Warsbrings together Ien Ang's recent writings on media audiences to ask what it means to live in a world saturated by media. Ang suggests that we cannot understand media audiences without deconstructing the category of "audience" itself as an institutional and discursive construct. Living Room Warshighlights the inherent contradictions of a 'politics of pleasure' of television consumption: Ang moves beyond the traditional focus on textual meanings to explore the structural and historical representations of 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 and fiction and women's fantasy; feminist desire and female pleasure in media consumption; and thetransnational media system.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: media audiences, postmodernity and cultural contradiction	p. 1
The Battle Between Television and Its Audiences	p. 19
On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research	p. 35
New Technologies, Audience Measurement and the Tactics of Television Consumption	p. 53
Ethnography and Radical Contextualism in Audience Studies	p. 66
Melodramatic Identifications: Television Fiction and Women's Fantasy	p. 85
Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure: On Janice Radway's Reading the Romance	p. 98
Gender and/In Media Consumption	p. 109
Cultural Studies, Media Reception and the Transnational Media System	p. 133
Global Media/Local Meaning	p. 150
In the Realm of Uncertainty: The Global Village and Capitalist Postmodernity	p. 162
Notes	p. 181
References	p. 189
Index	p. 202
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