Remote Control

Chapter five

Wanted: Audiences.

On the politics of empirical audience studies

Ien Ang

 

In his pioneering book The “Nationwide” Audience, David Morley situates his research on which the book reports as follows: “The relation of an audience to the ideological operations of television remains in principle an empirical question: the challenge is the attempt to develop appropriate methods of empirical investigation of that relation.”¹

Although this sentence may initially be interpreted as a call for a technical discussion about empirical research methods, its wider meaning should be sought in the theoretical and political context of Morley's work. To me, the importance of The “Nationwide” Audience does not so much reside in the fact that it offers ...