Content area
Full text
Television and New Media Audiences
ELLEN SEITER, 1999
New York, Oxford University Press
pp. xii+ 154; $65.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper)
Television and New Media Audiences is the latest example of a growing genre of audience research heavily influenced by cultural studies and ethnographic methods. It `explores television consumption in the contexts of the home and the classroom, as mediated by family relationships and the relationships between teachers and children', placing special emphasis on class, gender and the `leisure gap between men and women' (p. 5).
After a brief introduction, the author provides a review of the relevant literature on qualitative audience research. This includes a discussion of ethnography and the perils of understanding the `other', the literature derived from Stuart Hall's work on encoding and decoding, feminist studies of the domestic sphere, Pierre Bourdieu's writings on cultural capital and a comparison of cultural studies and `mass communications'. The latter is superficial at best and, like so many works in this genre, creates something of a strawman against which a more sympathetic treatment of cultural studies is advanced. All-in-all though, the chapter serves as a useful...