ABSTRACT
Stuart Hall’s ‘We are all in our heads different audiences at once’, for me marks the definitive move away from a paradigm that was organized around texts producing subjectivies. Even though Hall related the different audiences we are to the text, he also said: ‘We have the capacity to deploy different levels and modes of attention, to mobilise different competences in our viewing. At different times of the day, for different family members, different patterns of viewing have different “saliences”.’ (1986:10) The departing point for this paper exactly is the question of salience. Or, more to the point, given the shift in media studies towards the audience and contexts of viewing, how and when everyday media use becomes meaningful needs to be carefully thought through. One of David Morley’s respondents in Family Television, who has a habit of putting the television on in the early morning, says: ‘Sometimes I intend to look at it…but…at the end of it I’ve seen everything but I’ve heard nothing. You know what I mean?’ (1986:56) Do we know what she means?
