Studying Audiences

Virginia Nightingale

"Studying Audiences; The Shock of the Real" provides a critical overview of two decades of research into the television audience. With the development of ethnographic research methods, hailed by Stuart Hall as "a new and exciting phase" in audience research, researchers turned their critical attention to groups of "ordinary people" watching television, combining interviews and participant observations with textual analysis of television programs. In a comprehensive analysis of the origins and achievements of the "cultural studies audience experiment," Virginia Nightingale evaluates five projects which helped to shape the field of television audience research, including Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morely's work on "Nationwide," Ien Ang's "Watching Dallas" and David Buckingham's study of "Eastenders" and its audience. Nightingale traces how central tenets within audience studies were challenged by discourses of post-colonialism, fan activism and new theories of writing, arguing that audience research is necessarily a complex activity.