Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences

Living Room Warsbrings together Ien Ang's recent writings on media audiences to ask what it means to live in a world saturated by media. Ang suggests that we cannot understand media audiences without deconstructing the category of "audience" itself as an institutional and discursive construct. Living Room Warshighlights the inherent contradictions of a 'politics of pleasure' of television consumption: Ang moves beyond the traditional focus on textual meanings to explore the structural and historical representations of television audiences as an integral part of modern culture. Her wide-ranging and illuminating discussion takes in the battle between television and its audiences; the politics of empirical audience research; new technologies and the tactics of television consumption; ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies; television and fiction and women's fantasy; feminist desire and female pleasure in media consumption; and thetransnational media system.