ABSTRACT
Specific interests and orientations, material and intellectual, generally shape the perspective from which people come to define their object of study, and the kinds of knowledge - its form and content, its scope and substance - people pursue. It is often said, and often not without a sense of modernist nostalgia, that the television audience is becoming increasingly fragmented, individualized, dispersed, no longer addressable as a mass or as a single market, no longer comprehensible as a social entity collectively engaged and involved in a well-defined act of viewing. Recent culturalist audience studies are directly faced with the limits and limitations of comprehensiveness as an epistemological ideal. Of course it is true that the recognition of diversity in audience activity has been a major strand in the development of social-scientific audience research, ranging from uses and gratifications research to reception analysis, to observational work on television's social uses within the family.
