Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Summary: Living Room Wars. Rethinking media audiences for a postmoder
Review: Written within the tradition of cultural and media studies, this book offers a wonderful resource for those interested in critical approaches to ethnographic sudies on audiences. The four chapters that constitute the first section present an in depth critical discussion of the assumptions of previous theories, research, and measuring methods used by traditional academic and commercial analysis of audiences. They situate the debate about audiences in the realm of the consumption of TV as a domestic experience and point out the limitation of those traditions which decontextualized the audience from their consumption environment. The second section provides strong evidence of how women negotiate cultural and personal meanings when watching TV. One of the articles, for example, deconstructs the traditional premise that portrays them as passive and alienated viewers of soap operas. This section intends to offer a solid theoretical basis to understand how gender is related to media consumption by giving actual examples of ethnographic interpretive research. The last section situates media reception in the complex landscapes of globalization systems. It emphasizes how local audiences "localize" global media by re-interpreting those "global" media in their local experiences, challenging the thesis of global cultural homogeneization hold by some traditions in sociology and media studies. Finally, I want to point out that the value of this book is not only the relevance of the topics that are addressed, but the solid academic base that supports their main thesis. Moreover, among the virtues of it, I can name the clarity of the language, the well organized exposition of complex ideas and, of course, the passion of the discussion that will definitely involve even those readers with no previous expertise in media or cultural studies literature. This book can definitely have a place with important advances in media and cultural studies such as David Morley's Television, Audiences and CulturalStudies or Shaun Moores' Interpreting audiences.