Audience Studies: studying how television gets watched

This chapter looks at the approach to the site of audiencing based based in the discipline of cultural studies. Focus here will be to review 3.2 ethnographies of audiencing (p206) 

Background: ethnographers expose features of everyday life (habits, routines and rituals, small talk and gossip) that are taken for granted, commonplace and trivial. Their work seeks to understand meaningful social life (worlds) first hand, direct experience...techniques and methods involve participating, observing, listening and talking to people as they go about their everyday lives. 

ethnography then is a window, a flanderer into other peoples lives, it is Gillespie states; (2005 p207) 'suited as a method that explores the way active interpretation of the mass media takes place in the richness of everyday contexts. Furthermore, Fiske (p206) describes audiencing as a variety of practices, an activity. 

however Rose states due to the changes in the digital media environment and its increase over the past decade, people are able to move more fluid between activities, for example; we can if we want to watch the tv, send texts and answer emails all at the same time...some theorist argue that different media technology now saturates our lives and it is difficult to see how audiences should be thought of and how they should be researched which as a result causes implications for the ethnographer ..
Rose suggests that in particular the home, which would involve the ethnographer to observe an audience over an duration of time...talking to them about their viewing, but other things too.. ethnographer, James Lull (1990) suggests that there are 4 things to consider when planning a study of a particular audience:

• access to the audience. Lull (1990) is difficult and suggests a committee board run by a church or school, explain what you want to do but to keep vague. Ask for membership list and then contact names. he suggest that 25-30% of families contact will agree to participate in study.
• observation techniques. Lull suggests recording what you see and hear: unobtrusive note-taking
• data collection. Lull advocates that spending between 3-7 days with a family is enough to offer their behavior. for example: 1-2 days- what the house looks like, family history etc, day 3-4 to exercise recording the family dynamics, i.e. participating in important routines. Final stage is to interview each member of family separately.
• analysing data. Lull comments, ethnographer generates a lot of data from observational notes and interview material all of which requires to be interpreted

He also comments on the fact that the research although maintains a disinterested eye and ear..the objective observer-reporter, must not give away during the process what their real object of (Lull 1990 )
interest, that is: television viewing. 

• Walkerdine's (1990) account of a family watching Rocky ii (in the home) observing their activities as an academic researcher she describes a personal account of her own revulsion of the scene and the working man watching it (p210) and how later when watched alone she becomes upset when viewing the same scene in a different way...she states that class dynamics of the situation were invisible to her, her being an academic (reflecting as an audiencer too) and he the working class. 
• Gillespie spending 2 years in Southall living with a family, does this question how much time is required when observing a families activity? Gillespie argues that watching TV and more so talking about is important to the way social identities are made. described as 'TV Talk' 

To conclude is to look at Morley (television audiences and cultural studies (p 18) in particular 4. Audience studies, now and in the future? here Morley states television audiences were thought of a passive consumers 'to whom things happened as televisions miraculous powers affected them'...he continues, 'turned into zombies'. however we know this not to be true, Morley takes Evans (1990) suggestion that recent audiences are active (I maintain here that this is simply because of the advancements of new technology, i.e. reality shows such as big brother, skating on ice, 'i'm celeb get me out of here', who wants to be a millionaire audience's (home or indeed elsewhere) are open to choice to watch and vote for there favorite whilst perhaps, doing other activity's. 

referring back to a report (works on progress submitted 2011 Northumbria University) I have toyed with the idea to whether the recipient is, or is not, an ‘active’ participate to the creative process. The notion ‘interpassivity’, a term that describes the act of delegation or better still how we see works of art self-fulfilling, as discussed by Pfaller (2003) when replacing it with interactivity in art is,

... ‘to record a program they feel relaxed and go out to meet some friends while the program is shown. Later they come home, they check whether everything has been recorded, and then, with deep satisfaction, they put the tape on a shelf without ever watching it. It is as if the machine had watched the program instead of the observers, vicariously’.

Arguably Warhol’s films can be viewed in the same way, for example; 'Sleep' five hours and twenty one minute’s (1963) and ‘Empire State Building’ (1964) eight hours and five minutes, ‘the impassivity (Le Choismier Christophe, date unknown), and resistance to interpretation formed by the repetitive images define Warhol's journey into cinematic art’. Film Culture 33 (1964) present an interesting description ‘The first thing he does is that he stops us from running...his camera rarely moves’, it appears to remain on the screen always, you are aware of the ‘flicker, Crimp (2012 p142) of the film projector, which lays down a beat sixteen per second to organise the moment of the grain from frame to frame’. To demonstrate the notion of Interpassivity but from another perspective is ‘apparatus theory’, Baudry (1974) argued that ‘cinema worked through identifications not only with characters in the movies, but also with the position of the camera’. Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Rope (1929), and The Birds (1963) amongst others, are significant examples of characters representing the spectator’s side of the screen. Furthermore, Wood (1989 p102) suggests that 'we tend to select from a film, quite unconsciously those aspects that are most relevant to us, to our problems and our own attitude to life, and ignore the rest’ he continues ‘that we tend to use such identification as a means of working out our own problems in fantasy form’.

The idea of the spectator being interpassive is an interesting concept, if I view the creative process as a self-fulfilling product, that enjoys itself on our behalf through media such as film, internet, TV etc, the spectator in effect is positioning, Strange, (2005 p78) ‘themselves as the cultural consumer outside the creative process’, however I also contend that they are part of the product by examples offered above??   

What does all this mean exactly, is it the apparatus we choose to use, that is, TV, (red button setting on TV to enable us to interact) recording, forward/backward, Ipod, laptop, mobile etc etc, I think its not about being passive I prefer the term interpassivity as noted above, if we allow ourselves to rely on such technologies and at the same time pursuing other activities that are not necessarily in the confines of a living room, but on a train, bus, pub, cafe etc...There is no particular routine set anymore, changes in society means that we can allow ourselves to dip in and out as we please. Pfaller notes, 'the true motivation for readymade laughter in TV comedies is interpassivity. I don't have to engage in recognising, sympathising with and interpreting the drama'