Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

This brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on television audiences and, in response to recent criticisms of cultural studies, argues that it is possible to study audience pleasures and popular television in a way that is not naively populist.Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on media audiences to ask what it means to live in a world saturated by media. What does our media audiencehood say about our everyday lives and social relations, and how does it illuminate the condition of contemporary culture ?Ang suggests that we cannot understand media audiences without deconstructing the category of 'audience' itself as an institutional and discursive construct. Her accessible style throws light on some of the complexities of media consumption in a postmodern world, including those related to gender politics and the globalization of culture.Living Room Wars points to the inherently contradictory nature of the media's role in shaping our identities, fantasies and pleasures, imbricated as they are in the exigencies of capitalist consumption and the institutions of the modern nation-state. Living Room Wars presents an indespensible tool for bridging audience studies, media studies and the larger concerns of cultural studies.