Faculty of Arts
quotations used in lecture 9 – who’s watching: television audiences
“Audiences are a huge problem for TV studies – physically outside the TV set, they are figuratively within it, in that the men and women behind, above and within TV production take securing and moulding audiences as their primary objective.”
• Toby Miller, Television Studies (
“The audience only exists when it is watching.”
• Graeme Burton, “Audiences, Meanings and Effects,” Talking Television (
“Ratings represent the means by which the activity of a socialized, serialized viewing audience can be assembled, bought, and sold.” Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 90-91.
“Our common-sense notion of the audience comes from the time when audiences were defined by the fact that they constituted a group of people gathered in one place for the purpose of participating in a specific collective event. Thus, physical co-presence was an important part of the audience experience.”
• Michael Curtin, “From Network to Neo-Network Audiences” in The Television History Book (
“Viewers of television certainly exist. However, they are also, all of them, a figment of various imaginings.”
• John Hartley, “The Constructed Viewer” in Television Studies, ed. Toby Miller (
“This phase of audience research, then, has become known as the ‘effects’ or ‘hypodermic needle’ model, a simple stimulus-response approach which imagines the media as a kind of narcotic and the relationship between media/audience as one where the audience can, it presumes, be straightforwardedly ‘injected’ with a message.”
• Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn, “Paradigm Shift: From ‘Effects’ to ‘Uses and Gratifications’,” in The Audience Studies Reader, ed. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (
Denis McQuail, Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction (London: Sage, 1987).
“In its more functionalist moments, ‘uses and gratifications’ oversaw, theoretically speaking, a complete transfer of power from the TV message to the TV viewer. If the ‘effects’ approach was guilty of treating the television message as univocal and uncontested, then some members of the ‘uses and gratifications’ school were equally culpable in giving the viewer the power to consciously accept, reject and manipulate the meaning of the message at will.”
• Justin Lewis, The Ideological Octopus: An Exploration of Television and its Audience (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 14.
“Any society/culture tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose …its classifications of the…world upon its members. There remains a dominant cultural order, though it is neither univocal or uncontested.”
• Stuart Hall, qtd in David Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 52.
“[Ethnography’s] value for us lies in its shift of emphasis away from the textual and ideological construction of the subject to socially and historically situated people. It reminds us that actual people in actual situations watch and enjoy actual television programs. It acknowledges the differences between people despite their social construction, and pluralizes the meanings and pleasures that they find in television. It thus contradicts theories that stress the singularity of television’s meanings and its reading subjects.”
• John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 63.
David Morley, The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: BFI, 1980).
Robert Hodge and David Tripp, Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986).
Ien Ang, Watching
• Virginia Nightingale, Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 145.
“The problem is that people are not audiences by nature but by culture.”
• Nightingale, Studying Audiences, p. 147.
“Deciding when a person is in a relation of audience and that relation ceases is problematic. In some contexts, the audience-text relation might exist only during the time-space of viewing. But it is highly likely that the relation will continue outside this context, as the viewer [for example] experiments on a personal problem with a soap opera tactic – dresses like, speaks like or acts like a character.”
• Nightingale, Studying Audiences, p. 147.
“Viewing/reading is not a necessary condition of audience but merely one of its forms.”
• Nightingale, Studying Audiences, p. 147.
“We are at a point where we have to reconsider what it means to engage with a television programme, to ‘follow’ a specific show. Already, shows such as Attachments – there are, as I shall discuss later, several other examples – present us with a situation where the text of the TV show is no longer limited to the television medium. We need a new word for the process, just as we had to settle on the term ‘surfing’ in the mid-1990s. In watching, experiencing, engaging, or living with Attachments as I do, I am witness to more than just the sometimes bizarre melange of television flow which dazed Raymond Williams in the 1970s; indeed, I am not just a bewildered observer, but am becoming part of the broader text.”
• Will Brooker, “Living on
“Attachments has deliberately ‘overflowed’ the bounds of television, and through its simulacrum of a website has let itself merge into the vast diversity of the internet. And so my experience of its characters, situation, and plot has also become integrated with the sites I jump to from [the website], the MP3s that its characters recommend, the discussions with ‘real life’ visitors I have on its bulletin board, and even the mail I received a few days later from ‘Reece’. Sites such as these raise important questions about the experience of watching television, and the concept of the television audience. To what extent has the nature of watching television changed due to dedicated websites that offer an immersive, participatory experience?”
• Brooker, “Living on
“We are not yet witnessing a seismic shift in what it means to watch television:
but I am sure that we are witnessing the beginning of that shift….This use of the website as extended primary text, providing key information on plot and character, is echoed by recent examples in the British media whereby television shows interlock and interact with their associated websites. Occasionally the hierarchy shifts completely, as in the case when the shock eviction of Nick Bateman on the
• Brooker, “Living on
“The experience of following a favorite TV show has already changed for many viewers. The structures are there to enable an immersive, participatory engagement with the programme that crosses multiple media platforms and invites active contribution; not only from fans, who after all have been engaged in participatory culture around their favored texts for decades, but also as part of the regular, ‘mainstream’ viewing experience. It will happen, increasingly, and we will need new terms to discuss the shifting nature of the television audience. The concept of overflow helps to establish this new vocabulary.”
• Brooker, “Living on
“The experience of being part of an audience will change, and will perhaps, in its shift towards greater participation, become similar in some ways to what we are used to thinking of as fandom: a pattern of engagement characterized by detection, discussion, interaction and community.”
• Will Brooker, “Conclusion: Overflow and Audience,” in The Audience Studies Reader, ed. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (
