Living Room Wars: Rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world

by Ien Ang

This brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on television audiences and, in response to recent criticisms of cultural studies, argues that it is possible to study audience pleasures and popular television in a way that is not naively populist.

Genres: Nonfiction

220 pages, Hardcover

First published December 21, 1995

About the author

May Ien Ang is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), Australia, where she was the founding director and is currently an ARC Professorial Fellow. She is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Born in Java, but raised and educated in the Netherlands, Ang received her Doctorate in the Social and Cultural Sciences, from the University of Amsterdam in 1990. She is among the global leaders in cultural studies. Her work focuses on media and cultural consumption, the study of media audiences, identity politics, nationalism and globalisation, migration and ethnicity, and issues of representation in contemporary cultural institutions. In 2001 she was awarded the Centenary Medal 'for service to Australian society and the humanities in cultural research'.

Her writing encompasses contemporary Asia and the changing new world (dis)order, Australia-Asia relations, as well as theoretical and methodological issues. She is a prominent public commentator in Australia and a member of the Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Reviews

[Susie Meister · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ang responses to recent media and cultural studies that attempt to treat "audience" as a homogenous, quantifiable entity. His thesis speaks to what he calls the condition of post-modernity, and argues that the chaos of audience should be considered in understanding the logic of power relations in capitalist postmodernity. He claims audience can uncover the broader critical understanding of the peculiarities of contemporary culture. He rethinks our understanding of audience including ideas of gender "of" media studies, and argues instead of gender in media studies. He encourages problematizing gender within audience studies. Another theme of Ang's analysis is an emphasis on "everyday living" and how television adapts the material it presents to the situation within which it is viewed: private homes. "Watching television can begin to be understood as a complex cultural practice full of dialogical negotiations and contestations, rather than as a singular occurrence whose meaning can be determined once and for all in the abstract." (39)