ABSTRACT
Buckingham’s first notion of audience is the approach taken by Albert Moran and by Tom O’Regan in examining scheduling practices and viewing habits— part of television as an institution composed of ‘elements in flux’. The invitation within the text to some kind of resistant audience reading is the feature of Graeme Turner’s notion of ‘transgressive’ TV operating ambiguously as both conventional and parodic form. In some cases, even where the emphasis is on audiences as socially and routinely subordinated groups, the article still only analyses the ‘audience-in-the-text’. Both Curthoys and Docker and Hodge refer to the ‘resistance effect’ of actual and active audiences, but (as with Fiske) neither chapter goes very far into Buckingham’s fourth approach—ethnographic and empirical audience study. The goal of ethnographic audience inquiry is ‘thick’ interpretation of cultures, and of how social realities and constructions are themselves interpreted by their members.
