European Television Discourse in Transition

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European Television Discourse in Transition Current Issues in Language and Society (Unnumbered) Kelly-Holmes, Helen Multilingual Matters 1853594628 9781853594625 9780585148885 English Television--Social aspects--Europe. 1999 PN1992.6.E95 1999eb 302.23/45/094 Television--Social aspects--Europe.

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European Television Discourse in Transition Edited by Helen Kelly-Holmes MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon Buffalo Toronto Sydney

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-85359-462-8 (hbk) Multilingual Matters Ltd UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Australia: P.O. Box 586, Artamon, NSW, Australia. Copyright © 1999 Helen Kelly-Holmes and the authors of individual articles. This book is also available as Vol. 5, No. 4 of the journal Current Issues in Language and Society. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd.

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Contents Helen Kelly-Holmes: Foreword

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Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson: Home and Away: Television Discourse in Transition

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The Debate

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Paddy Scannell: Home and Away: Television Discourse in Transition: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson 46 Ian Hutchby: Where is the Discourse? A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson

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Andrew Tolson: Some Thoughts on Generic Time: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson

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Paul Chilton: Reflections on Truth, Reality and Fragmentation in the Third Age of Broadcasting: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson 58 Dennis Smith: Legislators and Interpreters in the New Television Age: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson 69 Anne White: When Worlds CollideSome Cinematic Afterthoughts on the Televisual Experience in the Third Age of Broadcasting: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson

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Farid Aitsiselmi: Media Literacy in the Third Age of Television: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson

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Tony Weymouth and Claire Wieclawska: Unsettling Accounts: The Discourse of Disorientation. A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson 82

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Foreword Helen Kelly-Holmes School of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK What makes television such a fascinating and challenging object of study is precisely what makes it so frustrating: its instability. Stabilityor rather the lack of itprovided a leitmotif through our discussion during the first seminar in the 'Media and Society' strand of the Current Issues in Language and Society seminar series. Terms such as 'destabilisation', 'disorientation', 'dislocation' featured time and again as we attempted to make sense of the current impact of the multi-channel environment of satellite and cable television, barely daring to predict the effects of 'mega-channel-land', once digital television becomes more widely established. What are the implications of this development for society, for groups, for identities, for our sense of time, space, place, for education, for language, for genres, for 'ideologies', for communication, for our work as teachers even? These were all issues of concern raised during the seminar. The level of concern was, one suspects, perhaps a feature of the fact that most of us participating were products of what Wenham (1982) terms the 'second age of television', when '. . . television was organised as a regulated and essentially national medium dependent on the scarce resource of electromagnetic frequencies' (Smith, 1998: 1). Now, thanks largely to technological innovation and also ideological shifts, 'television is becoming, at its roots, international, prolific, regulated lightly if at all' (Smith, 1998: 1). This ideological shift is also reflected in how we think about television today. As Price (1995) points out: Rather than thinking of broadcasting entities as primarily 'public' or 'private' our mental categories have a new divide: global broadcasting enterprises, regional (supranational) broadcasting enterprises, and, then, a residual category of broadcasting entities that work primarily within traditional borders, often more locally than before (Price, 1995: 17). All of the issues we discussed are far from disputed. Before contemplating whether or not satellite, cable and digital television will destabilise identities, we must ask ourselves whether television actually contributes to a sense of identity, and, if so, how? On the one hand, it can be argued that during the 'first' and 'second' ages of broadcasting, television (and also radio) '. . . provided the concentrated essence of a nationally authorised culture' (Smith)no more evident than in 'Auntie BBC', whose founding mission today reads like paternalistic propaganda. Such terrestrial channels, the national, publicly funded channels in particular, constructed 'the nation', the public that sat down together to share the news about their place and time issued authoritatively from the capital. More than this, however, as Smith (1998) points out, 'what the inventors never quite realised was that television would become normative, that so much of what we see on the screen would contrive to suggest how things ought or ought

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not to be' (p. 1). Thus, a mirror was held up to 'the nation', showing individuals and groups what their roles in society might be, providing them with an ideal of family, career and social life, of appearance, education, consumption to which they ought to aspire. This, even where rejected and disputed, has, in and of itself, provided some source of identity for the watching public: [television] has . . . come to govern the senses and the conscience, to offer an ordering of things, even to exaggerate the chaos and orderlessness of things. A child looks at the screen and discovers what it is or ought to be or might be to be a child; an old person sees how one reacts to the perils of age (Smith, 1998:2). Thus, according to Smith (and others), much of our socialisation into prescribed identities has been the product of television viewing. We learn how to communicate, how to consume, how to deal with relationships, how to solve problemstelevision fulfils many of the functions performed by oral communication in earlier societies not structured around the nuclear family cocooned in its private space. Even with the loosening of apron strings and move away from an overtly paternalistic approach that inevitably occurred with the arrival first of the new commercial channels, and, more recently, with the dawn of satellite and cable broadcasting, television, it can be claimed relatively uncontentiously, '. . . still offers a continuous flowing river of experience from which we have come to draw much of the substance of our identities' (Smith, 1998: 1). How then will satellite, cable and digital broadcasting affect national identities? As Price (1995) points out, 'the coming of satellite began physically to undermine the national character of state television . . . the powerful images of television [were] receivable without the check of a nation-based gatekeeper'(p. 14). The audience for any given station is thus becoming more dilutedat least in geographic terms. Not only are individuals able to 'eavesdrop' on channels designed with a particular language and common knowledge in mindsomething that has been possible for many years on the borders between European countriesbut now channels such as Eurosport and Euronews are in fact targeting a 'European' audience. The difficulties and frustrations of such projects, highlighted by Meinhof and Richardson in the paper, also provided lively material for the debate. What criterialinguistic, economic, political, cultural, historical etc.are used to decide that certain stories are 'European' news? How can the 'European' audience be defined? And how should this 'European' news be presented to this 'European' audiencein what language, with which cultural references, with what knowledge accepted as given? Again, here we have instability. The safe, or at least familiar domains and practices of 'national', 'regional' and 'local' news and newsworthiness can no longer be relied on. What is 'home' and what is 'away' in the European context? 'Europe' and 'European' are themselves highly disputed and unstable terms. Do they simply mean, in the context of Euronews at least, the European Union, as Darek Galasinski argues in the debate. Do they mean more? Do they include Central and Eastern Europe? Or could they in fact mean lessEuroland, the land of the single European Currency, for instance? And in all of this, what role does such a channel play in the construction of a 'European' identity, whatever that may be?

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Interestingly, Meinhof and Richardson argue that Euronews is at its best in terms of news, information and entertainment value when it shows us the diversity of Europe, the multitude of political opinions which we do not normally see on national news. What does this tell us about such a European identity? The sense of geography and temporality offered by terrestrial television also contributes in a not insignificant way to our sense of identity, as highlighted in the title Home and Away. 'Home' and 'Away' were easily identifiable in the context of terrestrial television with its boundariesparticularly in the British context where 'leakage' from other countries did not take place. As Price (1995) points out, 'If one looked at the world's . . . television systems, an essential, almost ever-present feature would be their rootedness in a single place and their exclusive relation to that place' (p. 11). For most European state broadcasters, this place was the nation's capital, the centre from which programmes were broadcast outwards to the very peripheries of the 'nation', but no further, unless by accident. The federal broadcasting system in Germany, for example, and the growth in regional broadcasting have seen parallel centres grow up, but still such centres are geographically fixed and this is seen to be important. For example, in the BBC regional news for the Midlands, the title sequence contains footage of Birmingham, the largest city, if not the declared capital, in the region and the headquarters of BBC in the Midlands. Equally, our sense of time, of continuity and progression was reinforced by television. This wasand still is, in the context of terrestrial televisiongiven by daily programmes such as the news, which is broadcast at fixed and known intervals, soap operas and serials with their continuous narratives which attempt to mirror the continuity in our own lives, and even the idea of which nights have 'good television', thus, perhaps affecting our timing of social events. In their contribution, Meinhof and Richardson argue that this is being distorted in some wayit is too early to say howby satellite and cable television. It seems clear that such factors as the availability of 24 hour news and archival material on such channels will in some way affect our sense of place, time and, ultimately, identity, but again, the frustrating aspect is the nature of the object of study. We need hindsight and yet we are in the midst of these changes, although, perhaps interesting insights can be gained from the American experience. In his 1985 study of the impact of electronic media, television in particular, on everyday life, Meyrowitz posited the thesis that 'the electronic media, especially television, have had a tremendous impact on Americans' sense of place': Electronic media have combined previously distinct social settings, moved the dividing line between private and public behaviour toward the private, and weakened the relationship between social situations and physical places. The logic underlying situational patterns of behaviour in a print-oriented society, therefore, has been radically subverted. Many Americans may no longer seem to 'know their place' because traditionally interlocking components of 'place' have been split apart by electronic media. Wherever one is nowat home, at work, or in a carone may be in touch and tuned-in . . . the changing relationship between physical and social place has affected almost every social role. Our world may suddenly

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seem senseless to many people because, for the first time in modern history, it is relatively placeless. (Meyrowitz, 1985: 308) This phenomenon which hit multi-channel America long before the UK and Europe can be viewed in a positive or a negative light. On the one hand, 'knowing one's place' implies placing a certain boundary around an individual's life, experience, expectationswhether self-imposed or not. On the other hand, 'not knowing one's place' suggests, alongside the opening up of possibilities and choices, an inevitable loss of a traditionally constructed identity, an anchoring, perhaps even a sense of belonging, a weakening of 'Home', although not necessarily a strengthening of 'Away', given the fragmentary and disparate nature of the 'Away' of multi-channel land. It was interesting to note the terminology we adopted during the debate and what this tells us about 'Home' and 'Away'. 'Real television' was automatically understood as the terrestrial channels, the norm against which change ought to be measured, the desirable, quantifiable and identifiable status quo that is threatened by these technological developments. Satellite television, as Kay Richardson has pointed out elsewhere, tends by its very nature to appear 'not real'. It is not grounded in time or place, it is not transmitted from an identifiable centre (as for instance the brand name British Sky Broadcasting suggests): In this mythic structure, we associate ground with meanings to do with practicality, common sense, facticity, ordinariness and so forth. Its opposite, sky is associated with fantasy, imagination, transcendence. And so, even when the satellite channels are delivering the same old series we have seen countless times before . . . it is as if they are not coming to us from anywhereor at least, not from anywhere on earth. (Richardson, 1997: 201) Thus, she argues, 'the "mystery" of television has increased rather than decreased with the coming of satellite channels' (Richardson, 1997: 202). Much of 'real', i.e. terrestrial, television's role in anchoring us and creating our reality by offering us continuity, routine, the familiar markings of our days, weeks, months and years, seems to have been eroded by satellite and cable broadcasting with its disrespect for temporal anchoring, its re-running of old episodes of soap operas and serials dislocated from their original time and place, their situation in television 'reality'. At the other extreme of some sort of reality (real time at least) continuum lie the satellite and cable channels that seek to provide the most real, hyper-real television. Twenty-four hour news channels with updates every fifteen minutes provide 'real-time' coverage rather than 'television-time' coverage. They show us how mundane news is, while at the same time trying to make it exciting. They provide us with information about events 'as they happen', yet they disrupt the daily clocks by which we know that we can be informed of these events at 6 p.m. or 9 p.m. Equally, the way in which presenters on such channels relate to each other and to the audience (cf. Richardson, 1997) has further implications not only for our relationship with television and its role in constructing our sense of reality, but also for what we learn about interpersonal communication through television. Looking back over the history of satellite television in Europe to date, Collins (1992) sees it as, if certainly not a failure, then certainly not an unqualified success:

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Satellite television in Western Europe promised, or threatened, to deliver three things: more choice in programming to audiences, competition to established terrestrial broadcasters and an interationalisation of the audience. The history of satellite television in Western Europe is one of failure to deliver such changes. (Collins, 1992: 93) The greatest potential, the unique aspect of satellite and cable, namely the possibility of creating and attracting a truly international audience has, according to Collins, not really materialised. Instead, this 'internationalisation' has taken the form of broadcasters becoming international in order to serve a predominantly national audience free from the regulatory jurisdiction of government, a prime example being British Sky Broadcasting. Equally, something that claims to offer greater choice, greater opportunities, greater access may, in fact, simply have contributed to a strengthening of the status quo. As was pointed out in the paper and in the debate, the most successful satellite channels in Europe are theme-based, sport being the most obvious example. By giving audiences what they want and only what they want, the didactic role of television, its functionin the statecontrolled, terrestrial ageof informing, educating, challenging would seem to be disappearing. There is, of course, the argument that a valid function of television (particularly in the case of commercial television) is to entertain in a non-didactic manner, to provide in fact an escape from reality, rather than constructing it, an aspect that has met with much criticism, as Paterson (1998) points out: Programming is often accused of lacking intrinsic merit or purpose, as being undemanding and formulaic. Television is felt not to achieve its educative potential and to offer a cheapened experience. In this account, escapism is seen as wholly negative . . . However, other research has found something more complex: television viewing is as much about coming to terms with problems of life, reality seeking, as escaping from them into fantasy. (p. 58) Despite this optimistic analysis, and the fact that television can sometimes help us to solve our problems, to learn and to experience, much of this now takes place in a bizarre and fragmented way. Thus, ironically, access to these new media, access to the 'Away' may strengthen the 'Home'not in a public or collective sense, not in terms of a national identity, but in a private sense, whereby societal roles, educational goals, aspirations, knowledge and experience simply become even more limited for the individual. The 'Home' may contract to encompass only the individual's sphere of interest, thus contributing to a weakening of a national sense of place, a fragmenting of a sense of belonging and entitlement to, for example, participation in the democratic process, without any corresponding strengthening of an international or European sense of place. We feel ourselves to be at the edge of some great precipice, a momentous watershed in the history of communications both within Europe and the world, the so-called third age of television broadcasting. Yet despite all this change, all this newness and otherness, in many ways the 'Away' seems strangely familiar. It is, ironically, a place where we can revisit our past, our previous television viewing 'history', where we can find comforting reminders and enjoy the pleasure of hindsight. As Richard Collins concludes in his 1992 study of satellite

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television in Western Europe, '. . . the extension of viewer choice delivered by second generation satellite television is in large part an extension of viewer access to the film and television archives of the world' (p. 93). Moreover, as Natalie Fenton points out in the debate, the 'flattening of form' and the repetition of genre mean that television viewing in multi-channel environment may be even more routinised, less challenging than in the context of limited provision of terrestrial television. Even the notion of a transition is disputed. The division of television's development into three stages or ages (cf. Wenham, 1982) whilst offering a helpful model can also be seen as simplistic, something Andrew Tolson argues in the debate. There is too much going on in tandem to divide the process into crude stages, which imply that one age effectively stopped when another one started. Equally, terrestrialand state-controlledtelevision is still incredibly important and influential. Not everyone has orperhaps more importantlywants to have access to multi-channel land. Home-produced dramas still attract greater audiences. Also, as asked by Farid Aitsiselmi, what is the difference between a choice of two and a choice of fifty channels, except scale? Is television any different from radio, a medium which has always offered a very wide range of channels, the possibility of access to international channels, of 'eavesdropping', of addressing an international audience? What is different about television and why should it change our lives and society simply by expanding choices and introducing changes that, as is argued in the debate, radio has offered for many years? Perhaps the answer is the medium itself. By offering us sound and vision, television creates a very convincing version of reality, 'seeing is believing', particularly 'seeing' on television, and this 'seeing' has, up to the arrival of satellite and cable broadcasting, been anchored in a place and time, even an identity perhaps. All of these seem to be susceptible to destabilisation in this 'new' era. Will digital broadcasting, 'mega-channel-land', change everything or nothing? Will it be a brave new world, or simply more of the same? Are we, in fact, overemphasising the role of television in the construction of identitieslocal, regional, national or international? Are we overestimating the effect such technological changes may or may not have on them? The answer is, we simply do not know. Not only are the effects potentially destabilising, but the process itself is neither stable nor predictable, nor are the thoughts, ideas and predictions recorded in this issue. Nonetheless, it is a rich and rewarding field for speculation and consideration, as evidenced by the paper and debate. We know that this volume will inevitably date and do so rather quickly, given the pace of change in these new media. But it is still both stimulating and worthwhile to try to assess the present and predict the future, and, I suspect, it will be interesting to look back with the benefit of hindsight to see how accurate our predictions and considerations turn out to be. That all the issues raised in the paper and debate are contentious and hotly disputed among media and cultural studies theorists is evidenced by the responses to the paper. Paddy Scannell addresses a number of points raised by Meinhof and Richardson before concluding that 'the task of all of us who are fascinated by the rich phenomenology of broadcast (and narrowcast) pro-

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grammes and programming is to strive steadfastly to give adequate accounts of their care-structures: that is, how they are produced as that which they are meant and intended to be for each and every viewer or listener'. In his response, Ian Hutchby questions the whole nature of audience-centred media research, arguing that it ignores television as talk. Andrew Tolson questions the relevance of real time for the multi-channel viewer, arguing instead for an alternative way of viewing the temporal relationship between television programmes, soap operas in particular. Paul Chilton reflects on a range of issues, investigating the truth assumption of television and questioning whether the multi-channel environment does in fact lead to fragmentation. Dennis Smith puts up a challenge to intellectuals to participate and shape these new changes, which he sees as linked to the increasing consumerisation of citizens. Anne White takes up the taste argument, by looking at how the high-low culture continuum (or dichotomy) of television is dealt with cinematically, while in his contribution, Farid Aitsiselmi identifies the educational challenge presented by increased access to a multi-channel environment. Finally, Tony Weymouth and Claire Wieclawska respond broadly in agreement with Meinhof and Richardson's arguments and identify some related and relevant debates currently taking place in British broadcasting. Although the media have inevitably been part of our discussions in many past issues, this volume, as stated above, is the first to deal exclusively with the theme of media and society. Alongside the existing themes of language and the state, sociolinguistics, language and identity, discourse analysis and translation as intercultural communication, we intend to publish issues under this theme on a regular basis. The next issue of Current Issues in Language and Society will again take up the topic of translation as intercultural communication, the main contributor being the well-known translation theorist, Mary Snell-Horby. References Collins, R. (1992) Satellite Television in Western Europe (revised edn). Acamedia Research Monograph 1. London: John Libbey. Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paterson, R. (1998) Drama and entertainment. In A. Smith (ed.) Television: An International History (2nd edn) (pp. 57-68). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Price, M.E. (1995) Television, the Public Sphere and National Identity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Richardson, K. (1997) 21st century commerce. The case of QVC. Text 17 (2). Smith, A. (1998) Introduction. In A. Smith (ed.) Television: An International History (2nd edn) (pp. 1-6). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Wenham, B. (1982) The Third Age of Broadcasting. London: Faber and Faber.

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Home and Away: Television Discourse in Transition Ulrke Hanna Meinhof Department of Modern Languages, University of Bradford, West Yorkshire, BD7 1DP, UK Kay Richardson School of Politics and Communication Studies, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX UK Television in Europe is going through a period of transition. The 'second age' of broadcasting was the age of television: the new, or 'third age' is a television age of a different kind, as Europeans move into a multi-channel environment. The new multi-channel environment underpins a fragmentation of the audience into smaller viewing groups than those which traditional television could command. In addition, this environment has the power to destabilise the experience of individual viewers, who may become less sure than before of what they are watching, who is talking to them and when, and where the broadcast is originating from. The new viewing environment can produce juxtapositions which are unplanned in any production process. The kinds of juxtapositions which are of most importance in coming to terms with the new TV world are those which affect phenomenological stability, namely the parameters of space and time. Those new temporal and spatial relations, which viewers must engage with in constructing textual meaning are potentially the most destabilising. In this paper we distinguish between a stronger and a weaker version of the argument that the new audiovisual environment is inherently destablising, and promote the weaker version, as being more analytically secure than the postmodernist alternative. There is no doubt that television in Europe is currently going through a period of transition. The primary character of the transition is technological, as audiences are introduced to the new 'delivery systems' of cable, satellite and digital transmission; and its causes must be sought in the economic and political conditions within which broadcasting as an industry conducts itself. What is much less certain are the implications of these changes for the routine viewing experiences of audiences across the continent. On the one hand, a celebratory perspective (largely from within the industry) points to the enormous increase in viewer choice, with the huge expansion in the number of channels which will become available. On the other hand, a pessimistic voice denies that the 'choice' is anything more than superficial, and charges that audiences will have to pay a high price in terms of quality. The positions in this debate are familiar enough and can be revisited in the extensive media commentary and the academic discussion which has accompanied the technological innovations, their exploitation by media entrepreneurs and the responses from within the political sphere to both the industrial and cultural implications. Following the perceptive predictions of Wenham (1982), we can regard the present period as a move into the 'third age of broadcasting': The first two ages of British broadcasting each lasted about thirty years. The first, that of radio domination, began in 1922 and ended in 1953, when the

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pageantry of the Coronation triggered a transfer of power and of popularity from radio to the infant television. The second age, from 1953 to today, has been the 'Golden Age of Rationed Television'. BBC-1, then ITV, then BBC-2, have been fashioned into a programme service of flexibility and of force, deliberately but delicately regulated by the BBC and the IBA in accordance with the wishes of the Parliaments of the time. But now, just around the corner, lie the twin developments of increased picture transmission by satellite and by cable. Just how, and how quickly, they will be allowed and encouraged to develop is a matter for open speculation, but there can be no doubt that the end of rationing that they imply will administer drastic shocks to the traditional mechanisms of broadcast production, distribution and exchange and to the regulatory arrangements that have sustained them. (Wenham, 1982:15) It is the 'third age' of broadcasting, the era of multi-channel television in different European countries, which concerns us here. Aspects of the transition include the gradual but incontrovertible 'naturalisation' of the new delivery systems; direct broadcasting by satellite, and broad-band cable. Across the countries of Europe these have been introduced to varying depths of penetration (see Weymouth & Lamizet, 1996). These systems facilitate considerable expansion of the number of channels on offer, along with increasing complexity in the range of ways that programming is delivered to the homes of the viewers. The result is a situation where some channels might be receivable through all three delivery modes, whilst others would be available only on cable, or terrestrial, or satellite. The coming of the digital services complicates the picture further; the new digital TV providers are acting both as a relay for channels available through the existing systems and as a provider for a small number of unique channels, such as, in Britain, Film Four. Within Europe, and allowing for national variations, television was introduced primarily as a public service, and enjoyed not only extensive public regulation as a result but also the relative protection of public funding. There is still variation within the continent regarding the extent of private ownership of channels, though it is certainly on the increase. However, some degree of public funding looks set to continue into the 'third age' of broadcasting, but alongside everincreasing amounts of television funded in other ways: by advertising, product placement, sponsorship, overseas sales of TV product, promotional marketing, subscription and pay-per-view revenues. The economic considerations for viewers are those which affect their consumption choices: not only between delivery systems, but also what additional sums to pay, whether as subscriptions for 'premium' channels or as one-off charges for pay-per-view offerings. Within this changing context it is impossible not to wonder about the cultural consequences: about the ways in which the place of television in viewers' lives may be changing with the coming of the multi-channel environment. Will viewers become less faithful to particular viewing choices, whether these are particular channels or particular programmes? Will they 'customise' their viewing to an extent which makes the traditional craft of 'scheduling' an anachronism? Will the new TV channels produce further debasement of contemporary taste cultures, or provide opportunities via niche channels for taste

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enhancement? Does the United States of America really provide a model for what Europeans can expect over the coming years? These are questions about the viewers: their behaviours, their cognitions and their experiences. But it is important, in addressing such questions, to start by reflecting upon the textual conditions of viewingthat is to say, upon the character of programming in the third age of broadcasting and the terms upon which viewers are able to engage with that programming. This is an enterprise which requires not only the skills of discourse analysis, confronting the newer kinds of discourses now available on television, but also an imaginative engagement with the conditions of multi-channel viewing itself. It also requires a fairly clear sense of what the TV experience was like during the 'second age' of broadcasting, which still, for many viewers, constitutes the given, against which the more recent changes are experienced as new. To summarise our argument: the multi-channel environment underpins a fragmentation of the audience into smaller viewing groups than those which traditional television could command. In addition, this environment has the power to destabilise the experience of the individual viewer, who may become less sure than before of what she is watching, who is talking to her and when, and where the broadcast is originating from. The new viewing environment can produce juxtapositions which are unplanned in any production process. The kinds of juxtapositions which are of most importance in coming to terms with the new TV world are those which affect phenomenological stability, namely the parameters of space and time. Those new temporal and spatial relations, which viewers must engage with in constructing textual meaning are potentially the most destabilising. The idea of the audiovisual environment as destabilising is not a new one; ours can be considered a 'weak' version of this type of argument as against a stronger but much less analytically secure version which we shall discuss below. Beyond Traditional Television: Discontinuity and Dislocation There is a 'strong' versionmuch stronger than our ownregarding the change from a stable to an unstable media environment. A new kind of post-modern sensibility and identity is seen to be emerging, fostered in part by the new media environment. The spirit of this analysis is often highly celebratory of the new tendencies, seen as essentially subversive of restrictive conventions. It is an argument which draws implications from the media environment to the nature of (post)modem sensibility and identity. Here, there is a much more celebratory interpretation of the new perspective, the fragmenting discourses now in play are as liberatory as the older ones were repressive. In this logic, if the unitary is repressive, the fragmenting must be liberatory. In one form of postmodernism, the emphasis is on the nature and experience of the new spatiality produced by international communications and image networks. This is a global space of image, screen and surface, where real and imaginary orders become fused. The experience of this decentred hyperspace, this space of absolute proximity and instantaneity, may be one of disorientation, dislocation and fragmentation, or, altema-

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tively, it is possible to 'make a virtue of the capacity to negotiate disorder', to accept disorientation and fragmentation as a state of authenticity (Rustin, 1989: 121; from Morley & Robins, 1995: 74). Morley and Robins themselves express considerable scepticism about these claims, and Robins has pursued the sceptical view further in his discussion of the technologies of cyberculture and cyberspace (Robins, 1996). For the new televisual environment any evaluation of the experiences of dislocation and discontinuity needs first to establish the basis from which they are to be inferred: this can take place at the level of the textual construction of new communicative forms and/or by empirical study at the level of the new viewing experiences to which these forms may give rise. As far as textual properties are concerned, we can focus on the sequencing, programming and the coexistence of multiple channels, as well as on the formal elements of individual programmes themselves: their multimodality, the bricolage of textual fragments, the multidimensional intertextual interconnections and the co-occurrence or rapid transitions between conflicting viewing positions. Such communicative innovations have been celebrated, for example in relation to the MTV channel, especially in its earlier years, and with the popular and critically acclaimed drama series Twin Peaks (see Collins, 1992). At the most extreme level, dislocation would suggest an experience where the viewing does not make sense. When viewers know that their interpretative powers are no longer of use to them, then TV discourse has become incoherent and only the spectacular level of appreciation remains. Moments of interpretative failure certainly do occur. They occur, for example, when by virtue of the eavesdropping made possible in the new TV environment, we encounter TV programming with very different cultural conventions to our own. For British viewers, German conventionsor their absencefor marking boundaries between segments may produce momentary dislocations of this kind. For example, a news item read out in the studio by a newscaster may be followed by an on-location report relating to a totally different item with no 'transitional' work. Nor does an advert break require a boundary marker before reversion to the programme into which it is inserted. Dislocation effects of this kind are likely, however, to be temporary, and to disappear once familiarity with the different conventions is achieved. Nor do we attach much significance to dislocation effects which are caused by an arbitrary switching of channel on the part of the viewer. These are not in principle any different from the experience of shifting attention between one type of communicative frame and another, from a TV show, for example, to a living-room conversation on a different and unrelated topic. Following Jensen's arguments (1995) and annually published surveys such as Petar and Datamonitor, we see no evidence for thiscertainly not yet. If, however, dislocation could be seen to be a feature within the context of continuous viewing of a single channel this would be a more persuasive argument, since here the viewer is not herself choosing the path: if, for example, viewers were confronted with new forms which undercut sense-making practices by flouting significant conventions which underpin the ways by which viewers understand what they see. But here we must keep in mind the speed with which new conventions become naturalised. Before the advent of private

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channels in Germany, spot advertisements on the terrestrial channels were limited to a particular period each day, and each ad was clearly differentiated by a boundary device in the same way as happens on British TV. Yet German TV viewers do not experience dislocation effects without these markers now that they have grown accustomed to the private channels, since new conventions were rapidly understood and naturalised. In the same way, the thematic discontinuities of, say, six spot advertisements within a commercial break do not set out to make sequential or collective sense. Viewers who do draw thematic connectionssay between an ad for whisky followed by one for a patent headache pilldo so on their own initiative. Authorial responsibility for such connections can be entirely denied on the part of the schedulers. In short, the possibility of dislocation effects exists only in so far and as long as viewers are unfamiliar with the relevant conventions: afterwards, viewers' knowledge of the medium allows them to recognise and respond to the boundary markers or other such conventions which constitute the structural devices of the medium. Ultimately it is the coherence of the world, not of the text, which must be protected, 'saved' by the viewers' sense-making practices. There are obviously ample possibilities for texts to come across as incoherent to viewers for all kinds of reasonsexperimental formal aesthetics, lack of familiarity with the content, and so on. But does this subvert the phenomenological coherence of the viewers' world? The destruction of ontological security through forms of programming with no respect for laws of object constancy, reciprocity of perspectives, or sequential/causal event structures is very unlikely. To start with, most programming does in fact respect coherence. Highly experimental programmes which set out to undermine this security are an acquired taste of a minute cultural elite, in the same way as are the experimental films in the art cinema: they are uncommon and watched by niche audiences already accustomed to the aesthetics of discontinuity (Twin Peaks is a special case, not a typical one). Conventions of TV naturalism are still very strong in drama as well as drama-documentary: whether the setting is outer space (Red Dwarf), 'olde Englande' (Tom Jones), a modern workplace (Dinnerladies) or the 'real' behind the scene drama of London's main opera house, Covent Garden (The House), or Heathrow airport (Airport). Dislocation effects between programmes (or between programmes and commercials/promotional texts, or between either of these and continuity sequences) are rendered ineffective through boundary maintaining devices which are either familiar already or become so quickly once practices change; dislocation effects which arise from the use of the remote control device are selfinflicted and thus not within the broadcaster's control. In short, whilst the potential for creating discontinuities in a viewing experience has indeed increased as a result of the new media environment where viewers can choose to engage with the unfamiliar, any serious dislocation effects on viewers who do not deliberately choose such exposure are unlikely. Television and Every-day Life Our own 'weaker' version regarding the new media instability takes its point of departure from Paddy Scannell's characterisation of the role of broadcasting (radio and television) in modern life. Scannell (see Scannell & Cardiff, 1991;

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Scannell, 1988; Scannell, 1996) has been foremost amongst those writers keen to stress the familiarity of radio and television within the lives of late twentieth-century citizens: a familiarity which is in part constitutive of lived experience, which is national in its orientation, and which can, at this most basic level, be regarded as essentially benign in its democratising effects upon the social order. This has been Scannell's confident position up to and including 1996 when his most recent book was published. The three quotations below show Scannell's continuing belief in the role of radio and television in the construction of private and public life: The cultures of public and private life today converge and intermingle on radio and television. To study their communicative ethos is to study the organisation and characteristics of public life in today's world, since much of what we know and understand as public life is constituted in and by the activities of broadcasting. (1996:21) Our historical study showed how this came about; how broadcasting gathered together a quite new kind of public lifea world of public persons, events and happeningsand gave this world an ordered, orderly, familiar, knowable appearance by virtue of an unobtrusively unfolding temporal sequence of events that gave substance and structure to everyday life. (1996: 153) The fundamental temporal structures of broadcasting remain the same. New events have been discovered, old ones discarded: less emphasis now on royal ceremony perhaps, more on sport. But now, as then, there is a stable temporal framework to the output of radio and television working through the days of the week, the months and the years. The broadcasting calendar creates a horizon of expectations, a mood of anticipation, a directedness towards that which is to come, thereby giving substance and structure (a 'texture of relevances') to everyday life. This patterned temporal regularity remains through all the years, and if it is disturbed it gives rise to noticings and remarkings. (1996: 155) This account of broadcasting and its function in the lives of the audience is, broadly speaking, a constructivist account of the relationship between discourse and reality. Constructivists view the reality of social life as sustained, in whole or in part, through discourse: it is the concepts and propositions adopted in our talk and our writings which form the basis of intersubjectively shared realities. Face-to-face discourse possesses most strongly this reality-constructing power, since in such contexts each person's world can be ongoingly confirmed by the other's ability and willingness to comprehend utterances and respond to them. Broadcast talk very rarely involves the fully-fledged interactivity of face-to-face conversation. But it does at many points imitate features of such talk. A case in point would be the insistently 'involving' monologue on the shopping channels (such as QVC) now available in many European countries, which constantly assumes a loyal viewer familiar with the channel's conventions, its presenters and its schedule (see also Richardson, 1997). Below is a typical example of this kind of viewer address:

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Welcome to this hour of jewellery. We've got some really pretty jewellery to look at, including our Today Special Value. It sold very well earlier on when I showed it to you at two, so if you weren't watching at two, where were you? (Originally broadcast 15 April 1997.) At another level, the reality-confirming power of television resides in its constancy: like electricity, gas and water supplies, it is now permanently available at the flick of a switch, allowing viewers at any time to (re-)connect their own lives with the world beyond the domestic space. The appeal of the 24-hour news channels derives in large measure from that property, as much as it derives from the information delivery function of such channels. The 24-hour news channels operate upon a principle of repetition, of cyclicity. They repeat their stories every hour, on the hour, updating them when they can, changing the running order in line with reassessments of significance. The principle of cyclicity itself is traditional, of course. What is new is the shortness of the cycle: it is a pattern which seemingly realises the concept of news as unceasing events, across the world, with no 'down time'. Both radio and television use talk to establish relations between broadcasters and their audiences; but television adds to this the power of the visual image. By convention, on television, viewers are invited to see depicted entities and scenes as having a reality which is independent of the viewing process. This convention creates for viewers a 'transparency effect'; the sense of watching, not a mediation of reality, but reality itselfhowever much we are told that broadcasters have contrived the images which they present to us as real. It can often take considerable effort of will to use our knowledge to refuse the experiential effect (See also Meinhof, 1994; Richardson, 1994). This, then, is a view which emphasises the stability of traditional broadcasting arrangements and the communicative ethos which they fostered. Beyond Traditional Television: De- and Re-stabilising Our argument in this paper, and in our recent book (Richardson & Meinhof, 1999), is that there is a sufficient clustering of destabilising features in the new media environment to cast some doubt upon the validity of the stabilising role of TV as a description of the communicative ethos for broadcasting in the 21st century. We shall pursue this argument through two short case studies: one focusing upon the experience of watching soap operas in the new media environment, and one upon the characteristics of a new German TV channel which broadcasts across Europe by satellite. Watching Soaps in Britain and Germany The world of soap operas, as traditionally understood in Europe, has been recruited by Scannell following Geraghty's (1981, 1991) influential work, in support of his view regarding the familiarity of television. Soap operas are stories 'in a perpetual ''now''', where characters pursue their lives 'unrecorded' between one episode and the next, and where events run in parallel with time in the actual world. As a result of this, and of their longevity: People in these fictional worlds are knowable in the same way as people in

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the real world are known and knowable. The key is the correspondence between the movement of time in the fictional world and the real world: for, since these move in parallel and at the same pace, it follows that the lifetime of viewers and listeners unfolds at the same rate as the lives of the characters in the story. Thus, one stands in the same temporal relation to them as one does to one's own family, relatives, friends and everyday acquaintances. Moreover, access to these fictional worlds corresponds closely to the forms of access one has to the people in one's own everyday world: in both, people are encountered in similar settings and circumstances, and in the same way. And just as, in our own lives, we acquire through the years our own accumulating biography as well as an accumulating knowledge of the lives of those around us, so too, in the same way, we come to know the people in the stories. We can recall past incidents in their lives with the same facility as we can remember events in our own lives and in the lives of those we know and have known for years. We can 'drop out' of the narrative for a while and then return and pick up the threads in the same way as we drop out of and resume real life situations and relationships. (Scannell, 1996: 158-159) Soaps attract major audiences, and the British as well as the Germans prefer to watch the home-grown shows, most of which are transmitted on several days each week: Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Brookside, Lindenstrabae (Lindenstreet), Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love), Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten (Good Times, Bad Times), Marienhofetc. The premise of these shows is still that in all ways they keep pace with the world of the viewers, even though the fictional worlds revolve around personal not public events. But public events do intrude into the discourse of the soapsmajor ceremonial events, major sporting eventsand the soap characters celebrate the same public holidays as their viewers, and at the same time (see also Meinhof, 1998: Chapter 4). But soap viewing in Britain and Germany is not what it used to be. The 'soap law' of synchronicity with real time still applies; but its logic has been undermined by the new conditions of viewing. Viewers of terrestrial television have long been familiar with the asynchronous soap, via the experience of watching the Australian imported series, especially Neighbours and Home and Away. These series, made for one national context but astonishingly successful in the British context, did not, in their making, reject the principle of synchronicity. But they were constructed for one canonical audiencein Australiaand subsequent screenings outside that context necessarily lost that temporal congruity. British viewers in July might be watching Australian characters construct 'December' and celebrate Christmas. The Otherness of Australia was sufficient to absorb this experience within the parameters of normal viewing, where some programming is 'now' and some is 'not now'. This was only phase one, however, in a process which has since gone further. Most of the home-grown soaps in the UK now offer a weekly 'Omnibus' edition, on their regular channels, and these allow viewers to catch up on episodes they may have missed before the next week's events begin. But more interesting than this is the radically asynchronous viewing of soaps which is now a possibility. Each of the major soap series in the UK is rebroadcasting, as a continuous series,

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its archive on satellite or cable. Coronation Street and Emmerdale go out on Granada Plus, Brookside goes out on UK Living and EastEnders on UK Gold. But this is not only a feature of satellite TV. The German weekly soap Lindenstrabe (Lindenstreet: ARD) which on 20 December 1998 had reached episode 681 was being repeated week-daily on wdr (episode in 480s). Verbotene Liebe, (Forbidden Love) ARD's week-daily soap was broadcasting episode 939 (on 18 December), but had reached, on the same day, episode 414 on mdr and episode 238 on wdr. Both wdr and mdr are regional terrestrial channels which uplink to Astra and are thus transnationally available. Each of these reruns takes the viewers 'back in time' to see what the characters were up to in the past. Coronation Street, with its astonishingly long run, has pushed back the furthest, into the 1970s. Brookside is replaying the 1980s, and EastEnders and Emmerdale have taken us back to the early 1990s. And what this means is that, during the same calendar week, it is possible to experience both 'now' and 'then' soap worlds. It is not likely that this 'simultaneous' availability of the old and the new will lead to major or enduring confusions of sense, since each of the sequences is so firm in its internal continuities. The storylines (and thus the characters) of each sequence are continuous, and distinct. In the case of Coronation Street, the picture quality of the old sequence is very much inferior to that of the new. However, there are two interesting consequences which follow from this parallel availability. One is the opportunity for fortuitous but telling juxtapositions, where attention is directed to the irony of 'how things turned out'. Soap storylines are scripted, but scripted so as to evoke the kind of 'emergence' that characterises real life. In real life we apply hindsight to our earlier selves. 'If I had known then what I know now!' Viewing a soap archive allows similar reflections on the lives of the soap characters. In June 1996, whilst we were doing the research for Worlds in Common?, the narrative of EastEnders' archive sequence had progressed to a week in the early 1990s when Pauline Fowler's Auntie Nellie (Nellie Ellis) left hospital to be looked after in the Fowler household. Pauline is married to Arthur, and there is a short dialogue between the convalescent Nellie and Arthur when she says to him, reflecting on the frailties of old age, 'Try not to grow old'. He replies 'I'll try not to'. Meanwhile, back in the 'real' EastEnders' world, on BBC 1, the viewers of 1996 are following a storyline dealing with the aftermath of Arthur's death. It is possible, though unlikely, that the scripts department at EastEnders had planned ahead, and that the death of Arthur is anticipated by them even as the earlier sequence was going out live, back in 1994. But this does not detract from the poignancy of the 'Arthur'/'Nellie' exchange as replayed in June 1996. In summer 1998, the archive sequence of Coronation Street had a storyline involving the young Gail Potter, her boyfriend Brian Tilsley, and his mother, Ivy. Gail and Brian planned to marrybut were confronted with the strong opposition of Brian's mother, in whose eyes Gail was certainly not good enough for her only son. Meanwhile there was a storyline in the contemporary episodes in which Gail and Brian's own son Nick (Brian having died many years ago) married his neighbour Leanne Battersby. Needless to say, Leanne was just as objectionable to Gail as Gail at one time had been to the deceased Ivy Tilsley. This simply is not noticed at all in the storylining and script of the later episodes, but

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the availability of the earlier ones may contribute to the viewers' appreciation of Gail Platt's 'biography'. Where is 'Now' and 'Then'? The other consequence which follows from the simultaneous availability of then and now is its contribution to the more general effect of temporal uncertainty to which the new viewing conditions are leading us. In the second age of broadcasting, all programmes belonged to the moment for which they were scheduled. 'Canned' or live, this rule governed the conditions of programme making and of reception; 'repeats' were common, but they were contextualised as repeats and appropriately framed. In the new TV world, repeats may be more common than first screenings. Whole channels exist, such as the German satellite channel tm3, which deliver nothing but recycled material. This is understood by the viewers no doubt: and yet it compromises the older convention of TV which belonged to the moment. One consequence of this is that viewers have to get used to the increasingly common experience of 'discounting' the referentiality of time expressions. Non-fiction entertainment programmes, such as Style Challenge, Changing Rooms are still produced primarily for the 'old' conditions. So they will allow themselves to end with a 'See you tomorrow!', or a 'Until next week!', safe in the knowledge that the next episode will be broadcast on the viewer's 'tomorrow' or her 'next week'. The shared horizons of expectation are in place and the fulfilment of those expectations confirms the essential continuity of the world and of the viewers' and the broadcasters' place within it. But rebroadcasting changes all this. A repeat will still end 'See you tomorrow!'but it may go out on a Friday, when the next episode will not be screened until the following Monday. More commonly still, programmes which were originally constructed to occupy a once-a-week slot, will be given a daily slot on a new channel. The viewer who understands the schedule will learn to ignore the presenters' 'Until next week!' But there may come a time when all such indexicalities are discounted; those which do as well as those which do not apply within the viewers' world. It is the distinction between first screenings and repeats which sustains the referentiality of such expressions. This distinction is important if deictic reference is to hold good. The broadcasters are in a position to attempt to sustain the distinction to an extent, by supplying each programme with temporal status signsthis is a repeat, this is a new seriesor to undermine it by withholding such signs. The signs may be positioned within the text itself, as above, or in the continuity announcements between programmes, in the flow of the channel's own discourse, or 'externally', on other channels and in other media, the most important of which are the printed listings in magazines and daily papers. But conventions of broadcasting are matters of mutual trust between the broadcasters and their audiences. It may not be in the interests of the broadcasters to sustain the conventions, to provide the status signs; they may feel their audience figures will be stronger if they leave the temporal status of a programme unclear, so that only viewers who have actually seen previous broadcasts will know for sure that it is not 'fresh' to the screen. We do not have enough evidence to be sure that television is moving in this

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direction. Some of the available indicators suggest that the old conventions still hold good. It is worth pointing out that the listings for terrestrial channels in such publications as Radio Times in Britain or Hör Zu in Germany, still faithfully indicate in small print when a screening is a repeat. Furthermore, new series are generally accompanied by considerable promotional discourse, both on-screen and off, whilst repeats have a much quieter presence. We have noted an interesting linguistic shift in relation to some of the new channels carrying American programming. American series, when first screened on European channels, cannot quite be trailed as 'new series' in the same way that new series made for 'home' audiences can. For one thing, the original broadcast (in the US) may be more than a year prior to the European release. But there is a formula for such transmission, in cases where the series itself has an achieved identity in the European context. The formula in English is 'new episodes'. Trailers will flag a particular slot occupied by a familiar product. It may be a sitcom like Ellen, or Cosby, or Clueless, or a talk show like Jerry Springer or Sally Jessy Raphael or Geraldo. On non-English channels the language of the trailer will be the national language; on English channels the accent will be British rather than American. In both cases the point of the trailer announcing 'new episodes' of these series is to draw attention to the fact that the viewer can expect to see something she has not seen before, albeit from a series which she does already know about. The point here is that viewers have become accustomed to the practice on certain new TV channels, such as Paramount Comedy, of continuously recycled successful product. A series is broadcast, over a period of weeks; it comes to an end, the same series is repeated, in the same slot. Thus, particular episodes of such shows can be seen again and againuntil the channel is able to introduce the attractive 'new episodes' which might draw back those viewers who had abandoned the channel once the pleasure of the experience had become exhausted through repetition. We should note here, too, the increasing use on the 'old' channels as well as the new of the practice of 'stripping'. Stripping is a scheduling practice which involves the broadcasting of a particular series at the same time every (week) day. As a result of this, not only do weekdays become more alike than under the more traditional custom of giving series' weekly slots, but also, resources get used up much faster than before. The news has always been a stripped product, but it has also been a live product and one which by its nature was fresh each day. The newer development is the stripping of recorded series, both non-fictional (like Style Challenge on UK Style, and a whole sequence of repeat game-shows on the German satellite channel tm3) and fictional. (like Friends on Sky One; Lindenstrabe on wdr; Oprah Winfrey on tm3; Cagney and Lacey, Raumstation Unity on vox; Sparks and Sparks on super rtl; Star Trek and Baywatch on Sat 1). The Multi-channel Environment and the Fragmented Audience In the European multi-channel TV environment it is the increase in channel choice which provides the material basis for all speculation regarding the fragmentation of viewing. With multiple channels available, the mass audience is more likely in principle to fragment into smaller groups, each watching different channels. Meanwhile, the individual viewer may channel hop more

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frequently as well as engaging in what is known as grazing or surfing: consuming the merest fragments of 'texts' across the whole spectrum of channels. There is little evidence to date that such forms of behaviour are having radical effects upon habits of consumption. It does not seem to be the case that the 'surfing' experience of TV is entirely taking the place of attentive concentration upon a particular programme for all or most of its duration (see Jensen, 1995). It is just as well for the textual analysis tradition that grazing is not usurping the place of other viewing habits, since there are no methods of textual analysis yet devised which could produce empirical accounts of the kinds of meaning that such practices would generate. We can note at this point, therefore, simply that the multi-channel environment is capable of producing meaningful juxtapositions which are unplanned in any production processas our earlier discussion of the British soap operas made clear. The meaning of specific juxtapositions is entirely localised and contingent of course. Imagine the mind of a viewer who switches from a cookery programme on one channel to another channel showing an episode of 999, involving a domestic fire accident and rescue. There is a significant thread of connection between cooking and fire: a causal connection which the viewer may or may not develop as an interpretative act. But on neither channel is that causal connection thematic. The viewer has enforced the transition from channel to channel just at the point where such a connection can be created. A few minutes earlier or later and the second programme might have been on a different story. Such a high degree of contingency may well set the details beyond the limits of empirical research techniques, and indeed beyond research significance, insofar as the point of research is to discover socially significant patterns of interpretation and meaning rather than individual idiosyncrasies. The contingency of specific juxtapositions drives us into a different approach: one which begins from an a priori conceptual framework. We as researchers need to specify the kinds of juxtapositions which matter to the argument that the multi-channel environment is destabilising the viewing experience of contemporary Europeans, and we take the view that the juxtapositions which are significant are those which affect phenomenological stability, and specifically the parameters of space and time which viewers are called upon to invoke in their construction of textual meaning. In brief, the argument here is that whilst TV in the 'second age' of European broadcasting, the era of regulated television and channel scarcity, spoke to Europeans as citizens of national societies from the present moment in historical time, TV in the 'third age' of broadcasting will not only undermine the ubiquity of national discourse but also its relation to the unceasing present will become more complex in the ways suggested by the discussion of British soaps offered above. In both of these ways the presence of television as a reassuring national discourse will be undermined in times to come. An important underlying axiom of the argument is that the coexistence of channels creates the conditions under which particular kinds of juxtaposition might become more habitual than they have been in the past. For example, the multichannel experience now provides channels with different spatial boundariesLiverpool Live! for the city of Liverpool, mdr in Germany for Saxonia-Thuringia, BBC for Britain, ARD for Germany, Rai Uno, Due and Tre for Italy, Euronews and Eurosport for Europe. CNN speaks from

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America to the rest of the world, notwithstanding its differentiation of CNN proper from CNN international. The coexistence of this range is interesting enough; it is made more interesting by the fact that satellite technology underpins Europe-wide reception, so that regional channels can be picked up by 'eavesdroppers' beyond the regions for which they were intended. Regional channels receive national and transnational transmission; national channels also receive transnational transmission. This is interesting not because there is any danger that national production and reception are likely to be lost, but because it creates conditions under which, through channel-hopping, juxtapositions can occur on a habitual basis between discourses of quite different spatial orientations. Linguists won't need to be told how important the deictic features of texts are in constructing spatio-temporal 'homes'. Movement between texts which are constructing different homes will be a more common experience in the new Europe than it was in the old one unless and until viewers find ways of eliminating that experience or minimising its effects. And if they do so, it will in part be because the destabilisation is more than they are willing to submit to. The discourses of non-national channels are of considerable interest in their own right. A channel like mdr for example, newly founded after the collapse of the centralised East German broadcasting system to fit in with the West German federal organisation, 'belongs' to a particular region of the former GDR (the three new federal states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, with headquarters in Leipzig). It makes much of its regional identity, for example by giving the nationally scorned dialects of the area considerable exposure. At this level it can be seen as a channel by, for and about the region where it originates. The production is local, the audience is local, the content is local. But this is misleading. Mdr, like all the German third channels, is received as a terrestrial channel in its own area, with some overspill into neighbouring areas. In addition, like many of the other third public service channels in Germany, it uplinks to the Astra satellite. The satellite transmission makes the output available beyond the region; indeed, beyond the country. Since the broadcasters are aware of this fact, there is some consciousness on their part of the channel as a publicity exercise addressed to the wider world. We have seen signs of this in one of its programmes, a 'lonely hearts' show entitled Je t'aime where people are allowed to speak on camera about the kind of partner they would like to find and settle down with. The show's presenter boasts of how far afield its appeals can reach: Moderator: (in boat on a lake) . . . and it's really interesting where and by whom Je t'aime is being watched, actually everywhere in Europe, but especially in Mallorca, in France, in Switzerland, in Austria, in Poland, in Romania, and even in Tunisia. And that's fantastic, just think of all the interesting mail. Which is what Adelheid would like to receive . . . (Running subtitles: Je t'aime is being watched all over Europe). 1 There are other signs that mdr does not wish to pass as merely local, merely complementary to the national channels. In contrast to most though not all of the other third channels, one of the elements in its programme diet is national and international newsand this programme is made locally, by mdr itself. It is not

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a networking of a nationally originated product as is the case with ITN's News at Ten, or most of the news broadcasts on the German third programmes such as N3, wdr, Südwest, B1, and Hessen. This points to a dilemma for local broadcasting organisations. The main selling point for local broadcasting, not to be found elsewhere in the schedules, is local content. Yet if such a channel restricts itself to local content, it accepts a lower-profile status than national TV as a condition of its existence. It also has problems of artificiality in seeking to find, or produce, 'locality' throughout its output. Mdr has pursued a different strategy. It has, in some ways, sought to compete with rather than to complement the national channels. But channels such as Channel One, a city-based broadcaster in Liverpool, have not been able to take such an approach. It has, instead, divided its schedule into national and local slots: the national slots are networked, and the local slots are devoted to news and features: the only genres, perhaps, where the local dimension is clearly distinctive from the national. Yet this is a mixed blessing: on the positive side it offers something which is not available on other channels: on the negative side, it leads to a restriction in content type which makes it much more restricted than its competitors in what it can do. With larger budgets, matters might be different: there might be true local production across all genres, fiction and nonfiction. But until such channels can produce large audiences this possibility seems remote. A different kind of complication arises for channels which seek to address a wider constituencynot national but transnational. The specific case of the European channels is interesting here. Euronews is a channel which attempts to address its viewers as Europeans and to construct a European audiovisual community. There is an awkwardness in the results of this project: the channel needs to both embrace and transcend the differences within Europe but in doing so it often underlines the intractability of a united Europe. Consider first how Euronews copes with the 'problem' of European linguistic diversity. It uses five different frequencies to transmit audio tracks in the five big languages of the European Union: English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Of course this does not do justice to all the mother tongues of Europe, but it is a start, and in line with other linguistic compromises at the widest level. The multilingual policy of the channel means that the images which are the same for all frequencies, have to fit five different soundtracks. To facilitate this, Euronews eschews the use of anchorsnewsreaders who introduce and lead through different sections of the programming. Written language on screen, such as the titles for particular sequences, may use all five languages, or deploy a form of 'Euro-Interlanguage', drawn from various Latin, Greek or AngloGermanic stems: Economia, for business news, Sante for a health magazine and so on. Place names appear only in their native forms and spellingsFirenze, not Florence, Wien, not Vienna, and so on. It seems that, at this level, viewers of Euronews are constantly reminded of the continent's diversity. Europe is not normalised as a pseudo-monolingual space, in spite of the facility for selecting a preferred language of exposition. There is also a thematic dimension to the dilemma of plurality vs unity. This can be seen in the channel's attempts to suggest a common European space where we are all equally interested in each others' public affairs. Euronews possesses

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little in the way of journalistic and production resources to create its own versions of national, European and global news. Consequently, it depends upon cannibalising material from national channels within member states and replacing the sound track as described above. For example, an item lifted from the Italian channel, Rai Uno, may be followed by one from TVE (Spain) followed by ARD (Germany) etc. The resulting succession of different national emphases often creates awkward and unconvincing collages of national news fragments, voiced over by a commentary which has been written and translated into the relevant languages but from which all local specificity has had to be deleted in order to make it comprehensible across the continent. One example on the 12 December 1996 comes from a report originating from Finnish TV on the first entry to the European Parliament of new Euro MP Marjo Matikainen-Kallstrom. To a Finnish viewer she is best known as a famous cross-country skier, but this is not a piece of information which Euronews feels it needs to relay to its viewers and it does not. That part of her interview is omitted, where in a pause in the voice-over she is heard to say in Finnish: 'I hope that I will still find the time to ski'. Though insignificant on its own, it is precisely the editing out of such local, mutually shared, often more personal detail which makes much of Euronews's reporting seem rather flat and colourless. However, on the positive side, it is precisely when Euronews points up and thematisies differences of national perspectives within Europe on a shared international concern, rather than one which is of mainly national interest only, that Euronews makes informative viewing. To give just one recent example of this, on Saturday, 19 December 1998, after the third night of bombing raids on Iraq by the US and Britain, the programme Perspectives on Euronews relayed emergency debates from different European parliaments, including Italy and Portugal. Their hostile response to the bombing stood in clear opposition to those of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Minister of Defence, and provided clear argumentative evidence for a more problematic version of events. Ironically then, it is the Europe of different views and perspectives rather than that of an implied unity which gives the channel some of its most interesting programming. From a technological point of view, comparative viewing of different national channels is of course easily available in 'primary' form to anyone with a satellite dish who speaks the relevant national language, but it is only Euronews which consolidates such material from a range of sources as well as providing appropriate translation. Finally, there is the formal dimension in the problem of constructing Europe which we will explore through a contrast between discourse of national identity and that of European identity using Michael Billig's (1995) work on 'banal nationalism' as a point of departure. Billig sets great store by the unobtrusive presence of deictic terms 'here', 'this', 'our' and so on, which turn out to have the nation as their referent: John Major claimed that 'this is still the best country in the world', and Tony Blair promised 'under my leadership I will never allow this country to be isolated or left behind in Europe'. Bush and Clinton, on their decisive election night, rhetorically pointed in the same direction. Clinton pointed to 'this, the greatest country in human history' and Bush to 'this, the world's

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greatest nation' (emphases added). This nation/this country: in no instance is there any ambiguity about which nation/country this is. This 'this' is the place of the evoked unseen and unseeable audience (or at least those of the audience presumed to belong to 'our' nation). It is evoked as the national place of 'us', conceived as a community. If the vocabulary appears pointedly concrete (as in 'this table', or 'this room', then the word points to something which cannot be apprehended in its totality and which is always more than a geographical location. This place has to be unimaginatively imagined and the assumptions of nationhood accepted, for the routine phrase to do its routine rhetorical business. Through this routine business, the nation continues to be made habitual, to be enhabited. (Billig, 1995:107) In such ways, nationhood is constantly being constructed and reinforced for its viewers. There is little chance of escaping the interpellation of membership in a national community, for it is a constant, if unnoticed, presence in all forms of public life and especially in the mass media. There is a really telling difference between discourses which posit nation-as-home, in the way described by Billig, and those which seek to posit Europe-as-home. The problem is that whereas a nation can be unobtrusively taken for granted, because it is so unequivocally given in the experience of its citizens (and in that of its visitors, transients, guest workers and immigrants, for that matter) and its reality so unquestioned, the same is not true for Europe. There is no deictic centre as yet to Europe which can be meaningfully and unconsciously evoked on a par with that of nationhood. As a result, in place of homeland deixis, in place of 'here', there is a constant naming of the home, of Europe. The word Europe becomes a high frequency noun, along with the prefix euro- and the adjective European, as in this 'trailer' pronouncement, one of many variations on the same theme: If it matters, if its European, if you need to know, its on Euronews, every day in every news bulletin. Euronews. This relentless reminding of who and where we are puts into relief the very tensions it tries to overcome. Conclusions In this paper we have argued that there are real changes in the conditions of viewing for Europeans with the coming of multichannel television, and that the dynamics of the new viewing experience can only be understood against the background of what television has been during its 'second age': regulated, national, routine, familiar. We will conclude with some further reflections upon the implications of these changes. We have argued that TV viewing as an expression of national solidarity is likely to become a characterisation of the past, of 'second age' of broadcasting. This follows because of the fragmentation of the national audience. When millions of viewers watch the same programme, at the same time, they share an experienceeven when there are different constructions of what that experience means. Knowing that the experience is shared is part of what makes it meaningful. It is not a private experience: it gives rise the next day to 'Did you

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see?' conversations which further consolidate the solidarity in a face-to-face context. When the viewing audience is distributing its viewing over 50 or more channels, then the experience is no longer shared and there is less scope for the conversations which ratify and deepen the common culture. This kind of fragmentation is inevitable even if viewers continue to prefer programmes made in and about their own country and addressed to them as members of that country, when they can now, much more than before, make quite different choices. They can choose to watch city channels, American channels, Europe-wide channels and channels from other countries in other languages. But as we noted above, such channels really do not draw large audiences. At this level, pre-given forms of national solidarity are setting up levels of resistance to new forms of TV discourse. Television's constitutive contribution to national solidarity will be eroded. And yet the legacy of that contributionthe legacy of the 'second age'seems to be working against all attempts to establish alternative grounded stabilities, and certainly, at present, against the European alternative. Nor is this the only paradox of 'third age' viewing. 'Second age' television was regulated, national, routine, familiar: the new media environment in some cases undermines those characteristics by intensifying them. The routine nature of television broadcasting, involved daily, weekly and seasonal schedules which converged with those of daily life and particularly its division by the normative work day into 'breakfast-time', 'daytime', 'early evening', 'prime-time' and 'night' schedules (once resources permitted television to occupy all of these positions). Likewise, the days of the week were differentiated from one another, and from the weekend schedules. There are tendencies in the new media environment which may well undercut these familiar structures. One of these is the increasing use of 'stripping', noted above, which makes all the days of the week alike. Another is the use of the hourly cycle, not only on the 24-hour news channels as we have observed but on other channels too where there is little differentiation of programmes, such as the QVC Shopping Channel. One hour is very much like another. Undoubtedly there is a routine here; a very insistent one. But it is not a routine which realises characteristics of lived experience. It is a formal routine, not an experiential one. It might even be called dehumanising. And as for the familiarity of 'second age' television, we should note that the familiarity of the old order was principally a familiarity of structure, and also of style and modes of address. It was not, in essence, the familiarity of repetition which is what the new environment now offers usat least in respect of the most popular series. And so now the pastMASH, Fawlty Towers, Coronation Street, Star Trek and Lindenstrabeis always with usan intensification of familiarity to the point of irrelevance. Note 1. (German original) . . . und es ist auch ganz interessant, wo Je t'aime von wem überall gesehen wird, eigentlich in ganz Europa, aber ganz besonders auf Mallorca, in Frankreich, in der Schweiz, in Österreich, in Polen, in Rumänien und sogar in Tunesien. Und das ist doch fantastisch, schon wegen der interessanten Post. Und die wünscht sich auch Adelheid.

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References Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Collins, R. (1992) Satellite Television in Western Europe. London: John Libbey. Geraghty, C. (1981) The continuous seriala definition. In R. Dyer (ed.) Coronation Street. London: BFI. Geraghty, C. (1991) Women and Soap Opera. A Study of Prime Time Soaps. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jensen, K.B (1995) The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication. London: Sage. Meinhof, U.H. (1994) From the Street to the screen: 'Breadline Britain' and the semiotics of poverty. In U.H. Meinhof and K. Richardson (eds) Text, Discourse and Context: Representations of Poverty in Britain (pp. 67-92). Harlow: Longman. Meinhof, U.H. (1998) Language Learning in the Age of Satellite Television. Oxford: Oxford Univerisity Press. Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995) Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge. Richardson, K. and Meinhof, U.H. (1999) Worlds in Common? Television Discourse in a Changing Europe. London: Routledge. Richardson, K. (1994) Interpreting 'Breadline Britain'. In U.H. Meinhof and K. Richardson (eds) Text, Discourse and Context: Representations of Poverty in Britain. Harlow: Longman. Richardson, K. (1997) 21st century commerce. The case of QVC. Text 17,2. Robins, K. (1996) Into the Image. London: Routledge. Scannell, P. (1988) Radio times: The temporal arrangements of broadcasting in the modem world. In P. Drummond and R. Patterson (eds) Television and its Audience (pp. 15-29). London: British Film Institute. Scannell, P. (1996) Radio, Television and Modern Life. London: Blackwell. Scannell, P. and Cardiff, D. (1991) A Social History of British Broadcasting: Serving the Nation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wenham, B. (1982) The Third Age of Broadcasting. London: Faber and Faber. Weymouth, T. and Lamizet, B. (1996) Markets and Myths: Forces for Change in the European Media. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman.

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The Debate Technological Change: Why is Television Different? Andrew Tolson (Queen Margaret University College): I would like to discuss the notion of dislocation and the impact of the new multi-channel environment. In fact we have always had a multi-channel environment on radio. Radio has been absent in your discussion up to now and, indeed, it seems to me that it is absent from the way in which the argument is set up. For example, in Wenham's schema, the first generation of broadcasting is radio, but the second age supersedes this completely with television, and radio is forgotten about, as if it ceased to exist. But if we reintroduce radio into this framework, then we can see that it has always offered the opportunity of listening to local, regional, national and international stations. It has also offered the opportunity to eavesdrop technologically on the broadcasting of other countries. If we think of the faces of old transistors and wirelesses, the names of different cities and countries were even imprinted on the bands. I grew up listening to Radio Luxembourg, which, although it was an English-language medium, was still somehow European without trying to be 'Euro'. It certainly was not simply national broadcasting in the way that Scannell talks about it. So, my point is, how new are these new opportunities really if we look at them in terms of broadcasting history rather than television history? I do, however, think there is something new about Euronews, because it seems to me that Euronews is trying to do something politically new in the sense that it represents an attempt to create a new political entity. But this is not technologically new, because in technological terms, these opportunities have been available to radio broadcasters and listeners for at least the last fifty years. So, perhaps we need to separate out the technological from the political and ideological, because in technological terms, this is not really something new. Ulrike Meinhof: These new channels and this multi-channel environment are not at all like Radio Luxembourg or comparable radio stations. Of course all of these things such as channel-hopping, eavesdropping etc. are and have been possible with radiothere is no problem with radio. There are simply all these different channels broadcasting in these different languages and kinds of language and that is either irrelevant, because the listener simply wants to listen to the music, or s/he switches to the channel that speaks his/her language. The problems start when visuals are introduced. The very great difference with Euronews is that the visuals are the same as on the national channels, but the soundtrack is different. The radio analogy simply does not hold true because television is a medium that is constructed out of two separate modes of communicationsound and visionand where one of these is creating a kind of transparency, an ideology, which is showing us something that has 'come the way' of the broadcaster so to speak, but this is also 'texted over' with input that still has to work. So meaning is made in a very different way. Kay Richardson: Just as a coda to that, the really interesting difference between radio and television is the success of local radio as opposed to the apparent lack

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of success of local television. Not regional television, such as Granada in the Northwest, because 'Granada-land' is too big to care about a local identity. Of course there are obvious financial and technological factors, but it is also interesting nonetheless. Joanna Thornborrow (Roehampton Institute): I agree that radio tends to get sidelined in media research. It is an interesting medium, particularly from a discourse analyst's viewpoint precisely because everything happens through talk without the visual aspects we are talking about here. So I wonder if it would really be possible to accomplish the same kind of effect on radio that Euronews is doing on TVthe mapping of the layers of voices onto a visual image would clearly not be possible, but I am not sure that even the mapping of the voice of a newsreader who also does simultaneous voiceovers over an original soundtrack would be possible without the visual support. We are talking about different orders of communicative discourse here. Andrew Tolson: That was not really my point though. What I wanted to stress was that if we introduce radio into the equation, then it becomes clear that it was always possible to access the broadcasts of other countries and to listen to a range and a diversity of local, regional and national channels. Interestingly, the only national Scottish broadcaster is a radio station. Ulrike Meinhof: I am still not convinced of the comparison with radio. For example, I doubt whether anyone here has ever gone into a hotel room in a foreign country and listened to a radio channel in a language that s/he didn't understand at all, which was only words. But we do this with television all the time. It seems like a very trivial point, but it does point to a very fundamental difference. Andrew Tolson: This is true, but my argument is not one about the medium, but about the spatiality aspect. The media are quite different, but the spatiality point still holds true. Helen Kelly-Holmes (Aston University): But in a way this is tied up with the medium. Because of the lack of visuality, we have, perhaps, always accepted this notion of spatiality that is tied up with radio. Radio appears a much less bounded medium because it is not geographically or spatially tied through images. Kay Richardson: Why is it that when a stock shot, a still for a news report, is needed, television companies do not simply use one with snow on the ground, if it is the middle of July? Why should this matter, if the spatiality and temporality aspects were the same as on radio? Television is trying to ground us, trying to create a here and now. To do otherwise would destroy the 'seeing is believing' effect. Natalie Fenton (Loughborough University): The other argument that fits in with thisand this point is made in the paper and has been well documented in the research on televisionis that visuality has a greater impact. Because there is that sense that 'seeing is believing', when the viewer is faced with that combination of sound and vision, it is harder to resist. We come across this all the time in media reception studies. It is almost a cliché, but still people will say things like 'It must be true, I saw it on television', whilst at the same time claiming that they do not believe everything the media tell them. And this credibility is something that does not exist in relation to radio or newspapers. The combination

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of sound and vision increases the power of television and makes it more difficult to resist. Juxtapositions, Temporality and Dislocations Darek Galasinski (University of Wolverhampton): I am not sure I agree with the idea put forward in the paper about the ease of recognition of this archival material for a number of reasons. I think if you challenged people to identify an episode of a particular soap opera or series and to say, for instance, whether it is five years old or two years old or a current episode, they would not be able to do this successfully, unless they knew the storyline. I also think that the education system today means that it would be very hard for a teenager watching a particular episode to pick up the clues about when that particular episode actually took place, unless there was some very obvious clue, such as the programme being in black and white. I'm not sure that they would recognise things such as, for instance, the style of clothing as being very different from today. Pat Odber (University of Birmingham): I think you are underestimating the capacity of young people to identify, for example, car brands. They would, for instance, be able to trace a particular car or motorbike to a particular era. Darek Galasinski: That is of course assuming that the brand new episodes of, for example, Coronation Street always feature the latest cars etc., which I don't think is necessarily the case. To take this even further, I think the recognition factor becomes largely irrelevant in many contexts. For example, the 1980s series, Miami Vice is now being shown on Polish television, but I don't think this is recognised as archival material, simply as another cop series from the USA. There are also series which are designed to be atemporal. Andrew Tolson: But that is exactly the point. They are not designed to be a continuous serial. The argument in the paper is about soap operas, which are designed to have a chronology, a continuous narrative. Darek Galasinski: How then can we square the idea of easy recognition with this notion of fuzzy maps of temporality or location? It seems to me that we cannot. Natalie Fenton: I wonder if we're overemphasising the idea of temporality and whether we shouldn't perhaps approach this using a different frame. For example, if we review the research that has been done on soap operas, we see that what is important for viewers is not necessarily the fact that they are supposed to be sharing common time, but instead the relationships, the feelings and emotions, the storylines and the narrative structure. This is proven by the fact that we can have an Australian soap opera that is totally out of sync with time in this country, but which, nevertheless, is very successful. So, in my opinion, it's not necessarily to do with temporality, but rather with the narrative content. Andrew Tolson: I'd like to pick up on this point about how we relate to continuous serials. The quote from Paddy Scannell, where he compares the characters in soap operas to our everyday acquaintances, is, in my opinion, exaggerated. It is a polemical point that fits in with the general polemic of his book, which is that there is this very strong link between the temporality of broadcasting and the temporality of everyday life. But I don't think we actually

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relate to people in soap operas as real people; we relate to them rather as characters. They are characters embedded in the narratives of the soap operas and so we can watch the repeats without necessarily feeling dislocated. I accept that there is an element of temporality in soap operas, but I think Scannell exaggerates the point. Pam Moores (Aston University): If we bring together the two argumentsthe spatial and the temporalone of the things that is interesting in relation to what we said about recognition is the whole phenomenon of Australian soap operas and their success. Most of the audience here in Britain watching these soap operas has never been to Australia and is therefore not able to 'recognise'they must simply accept at face value. As a result of the geographical dislocation, the detailed temporal framework becomes fairly irrelevant, except in cases of differences of whole decades. Because of the combined effect of the temporal and geographical dislocation, such series and their viewers are not looking for close identification with the outside world of the series. Instead, they are more focused on relationships. Also, such series are very much enclosed in their own local environments. In many cases there are few if any references to the outside world, to politics or current affairs. Even though we might watch them today in Britain, we still know very little about AustraliaAustralian fashions, seasons, cars etc., and we are not encouraged to situate them in a historical or political context. Ulrike Meinhof: I think, perhaps, we need to distinguish different types of soap opera conventions. I agree that Scannell's point is exaggerated, but I think he is also picking up on what is received wisdom in soap opera literature, for example, the debate about soap operas relying on space and time rather than action and plot. If we think about it, we can see that there is a massive effort put into making these temporal and spatial links: for example, the daffodils are forced in EastEnders in order to make us remember that it is spring. It is also not true that in soap operas such as EastEnders and Coronation Street there are not political references or allusions to the outside world. For example, on the 40th anniversary of the end of the War, EastEnders, interestingly enough, ran a very long sequence, not on the Second World War, but on the Falklands War. In the German soap opera Lindenstrabe, a big fuss was made about the election of Chancellor Kohl, to the extent that the result of the exit poll was actually declared during that particular episode of the series. This represented a major effort on the part of the producers, but they insisted on doing it, which says something interesting about their desire to link in with the reality of outside events. On the one hand, we don't want to say too much about intentionality, but on the other hand, it is hard to ignore it when so much effort is made to establish links, as in these examples. Kay Richardson: This idea of the importance of temporality in soap operas should be taken together with other aspects in considering the effect of the timeshifting nature of television. It may well be that the pleasure of watching soap operas has, in fact, to do with the emotional content, rather than what might be termed the 'gearing'. Nevertheless, I think the gearing is important to another kind of level of relationship with television, because it is still a significant dimension. Although it might not be programmed for in the same way, it is something that the viewer knows and recognises the minute s/he watches an

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archive episode. Viewers say to themselves, 'I have seen this episode before' or 'No I haven't seen this before'. This is tied up with a viewer's own television viewing 'history'. In the British context, this is very much the case with Coronation Street in particular. I can accept the point about Scannell's quote being perhaps exaggerated and one test of this, for instance, is the sense of moral obligations, which we don't feel towards characters, but which we do feel towards our family and friends. They have to care about us in the same way we have to care about them, and this is absolutely not the case with Coronation Street characters! I would rather take the temporality of soap operas as part of a range of examples in which the temporal framing of things matters or doesn't matter. And, with satellite and cable, maybe we are moving into a world where this doesn't matter, where, if the presenter says 'see you tomorrow' at the end of a programme, nobody cares whether that is a real tomorrow or a virtual tomorrow, and even if the broadcasters care about this, they cannot control whether the viewer will in fact tune in tomorrow to find out what will happen next. So we are rather looking at it as one part of a clustering of features that are time-sensitive and part of a projection of a future in which some attempt to 'stay with the viewers' remains important or really becomes unimportant. Helen Kelly-Holmes: Perhaps, then, that will be the distinction between 'real' television, i.e. the terrestrial channels, and 'nonreal' television, i.e. the satellite channels. Viewers will still demand this interpersonal contact with 'real' television, but will be prepared to accept that this doesn't happen on 'non-real' television. Andrew Tolson: I watch Brookside on 'real' television, but not in its regular slots during the week. Instead I watch the omnibus edition which is broadcast on a Saturday. The point is that I can still relate to Brookside even though it is not in my real time, my dailiness, as Scannell would perhaps call it. Instead I relate to the characters in the narrative and I tune in to see how they are getting on once a weekthese are not like friends who are part of my everyday reality. Helen Kelly-Holmes: Although you did just say something interesting and perhaps revealing about the temporal frameworkthat you like to check up on these characters every week. Kay Richardson: And, you obviously want to do this before next week's episodes start. Andrew Tolson: Yes, but this applies to all narratives. Nobody reads the fifth chapter of a book before reading the fourth chapter. Joanna Thornborrow: Surely the status of these re-run, archive episodes of the soaps depends to a very great extent on whether or not the viewer has actually seen them before. What they mean to us, the kind of object they are to the viewer, will therefore be different, depending on this. It's very much like the relationship we have with old family photos in an albumwe go back and revisit them with hindsight. This experience clearly is not available to people who have not seen these programmes or episodes before. In this context, it would be very interesting to follow up Darek's point about recognising timeframes. How would the first-time viewer of an archive episode of, for instance, Dr Who know that it was an early episode?

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Kay Richardson: This also relates to the dictates of the market. In order for television products to be as marketable and durable as possible, they need to be bound to time and space as little as possible. Being atemporal and a-spatial or a-geographical prolongs their lifespan considerably and thus makes them more profitable to produce. There is also the issue of scarcity value. If there are a limited number of episodes, we can re-watch these time and again and they become something differentmore like, for example, a painting that we can experience in different ways at different times. The status of these series is therefore changingfrom something that we watched every day on 'real' television to something we can watch at different times and to which we can relate differently on these 'non-real' channels. They become timeless, somewhat like museum pieces, almost assuming the qualities of myth. Ulrike Meinhof: The point that Kay was making earlier is, I think, the one we really want to stress: are we framing things as if they matter in terms of temporal reality, or are we framing things as if they do not matter? This is what we are really interested in. It can be argued that this time linkage that soap operas make such a fuss about is just a nice backdrop and is not crucial, a nice extrabut I doubt this. I think it is something more, that there is something experiential in the initial viewing. Of course viewers do see these soap operas as narratives, but it is important to them to view these programmes linearlythey do not want to go back and forth, and I think this says something about how such programmes operate, how they frame time and have meaning within real temporal frameworks. So the substantive issue really is whether or not this linkage is important. Does it provide a set of clusters which gets seriously disturbed by these dislocations and juxtapositions? The substantive study we carried out for our book Worlds in Common showed, for example in the coverage of the beef crisis in Britain, that these linkages were not just coincidental, but were in fact highly intentional and heavily ideological. The fact that the 'here and now' on Sky News was, for instance, very different from the 'here and now' on German news had everything to do with very real ideological differences about what was significant in relation to British beef being banned. If viewers still have that trust that assures them that what they are being given by television is the 'here and now', the real thing, and then they find out that the 'here and now' is simply being constructed for the convenience of the broadcaster, or to fit in with the broadcaster's ideology, then this inevitably unsettles the 'contract' between viewer and broadcaster. Kay Richardson: It is hard to know really whether we are arguing that there was time stability and now, as a result of this multichannel environment, this is gone. Perhaps we are overestimating the fixity of the old era, the second age, so to speak, rather than the novelty of the new era, the third age. Helen Kelly-Holmes: In many ways, though, this happens on an individual basis. Viewers will construct this relationship for themselves. As Joanna said earlier, the new viewer of these re-runs will construct a very different relationship with the episodes than the person watching re-runs, who can relate a particular episode to the reality of their past. For the new viewer, it may well be that the 're-run' forms part of what they will construct as their 'here and now'. The point Darek made earlier about Miami Vice on Polish television is interesting in this

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respect, because presumably this series was not available in the 1980s in Poland, so the viewing experience of people in Poland now would be very different to someone who viewed the series when it was originally broadcast in the 1980s and is now watching it as a re-run. Darek Galasinski: Interestingly, Miami Vice was in fact available in Poland in the 1980s, and I remember watching it! So I think that my experience, if I were to watch the repeats, would be very different to teenagers watching it today. Helen Kelly-Holmes: In a sense, though, why should we be surprised about this? We cannot expect the associations to be the same; the programme belongs to your past and that inevitably leads to certain associations, but for the teenagers you are talking about, that link is not there. Darek Galasinski: Another important point to make, is that if the viewer did not grow up in the particular time and cultural context in which the series was filmed, then it does become atemporal for them. The cultural clues do not work. Ulrike Meinhof: This is why, for instance, home-grown or home-produced soaps always do better than foreign ones. For example, in Kazakhstan, the top soap opera is a locally produced version of the old British soap opera, Crossroads, made with some help from British producers. Number two is the American import Santa Barbara. What this example shows is that viewers must relate to more than the narrative; they want to see their own cultural context reproduced in these series, some temporal and spatial linkage with their own reality. So there must be more to people's relationships with soap operas than simply the narrative level. Natalie Fenton: In terms of these soap operas, are we looking at form or are we looking at content? Localised versions of American soaps now dominate, as was pointed out. These have exactly the same generic format and exactly the same narrative structure, with localised content and characters added. If there is a negative about this multi-channel environment, then it is this flattening of form. What we are getting, rather than greater choice, is stories being told in exactly the same way, but with a slightly different flavour. Pat Odber: I see a parallel here which may not be totally accurate, but which I still think is worth considering. What you describe is very much the process of folklore transmission through fairytales. We have a number of standard 'models' of fairytales which we find all over the world with added local colour. So I do not really see this as all that new or all that negative, but perhaps in a television and media context it is. Kay Richardson: I wonder whether there is also a difference between viewing old episodes of EastEnders, which are set in the 1980s, not in any deliberate way, but simply because that was when they were filmed, and viewing something like Heartbeat, which could be termed nostalgia television, something which is filmed in the 1990s, but is set, very obviously and deliberately in the 1960s. In some ways, something like Heartbeat, which is deliberately framed in a particular time period, is probably more durable and less likely to become stale than EastEnders. All of our relationships with these are up for grabs, so to speak, in this new context: can we tell them apart? Does it matter if we can? Perhaps Heartbeat is in fact,

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recognisable as 1990s pseudo-nostalgic television. All of this has to do with the viewer and how s/he relates to time in these series. Farid Aitsiselmi (University of Bradford): Aren't we really talking about three different aspects of space and time here? If we are talking about the news, for instance, then I have a feeling that this is what real time and space are about, in terms of 'here and now' and 'there and then'. If we are talking about a soap opera, then I think we are referring to a parallel 'here and now'a fictional life of people which runs parallel to our own life and which constructs a different 'here and now', a different 'there and then'. We can also talk about independent episodes of soap operas and series, which may or may not refer to specific time and space, because they do or do not want to be temporally anchored. I'm not sure what time and space we are actually talking about and I think it is important to define these different 'here and nows' in order to compare them. Kay Richardson: This is also a problem with language. When I say 'now' in a sentence, I could mean this second, this minute, this hour, this day, this week, this month, this year, this era etc. It is an ambiguous term in relation to where the speaker is placing boundaries and this is going to be quite different for news, because news has to move on, using a particular kind of casing, as opposed, for example, to the soaps or something that gets updated once a year. Andrew Tolson: Maybe the really interesting point here is that there are different generic timesdifferent times for different genres. We have already raised the very interesting point about 'soap opera time', which is very complicated and peculiar. If we think about the time of news, I think it would be inconceivable to have a cable channel showing repeats of old news. I'm not talking about 24 hour news, which of course repeats itself constantly, but just think of someone broadcasting news from the 1960s and 1970sit's inconceivable, and this tells us something interesting about the different generic times of news and soap operas. Episodes of the news rely, as we said earlier, on the 'here and now' being the 'real' 'here and now'. Ulrike Meinhof: This is exactly the point. The viewer takes this on trust and, therefore, we can surmise that it is unsettling for that viewer to experience for the first time the permanent replay of news items on 24 hour news. When we were doing the research reported in the book, it came as quite a shock to us to see for how long a news item can be recycled continuously, while still using words like 'here' and 'now' and providing 'live' coverage with the appropriate background and scene to prove the 'here and now'. We have learned, as viewers, to take it on trust that when the reporter is standing outside a parliamentary building, for example, saying 'I'm standing here outside . . .', that that is the 'here and now'. When we see this repeated every 15, 30, 60 minutes, then this is unsettling for us. Natalie Fenton: Why should we be shocked by this? This happens all the time on 'real' television anywaythe same news bulletin comes through perhaps ten times a day. This is all fed and recycled through the radio, the newspapers etc. So, this is exactly the same, this is something we are used to. Dennis Smith (Aston University): But not in exactly the same form. In that case, we can see the process of the news shifting between forms and media.

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Kay Richardson: And you can only see this ten times by switching channel not staying on the same one. Helen Kelly-Holmes: There is also a difference between the six o'clock and the nine o'clock news. Natalie Fenton: But only very subtle. Helen Kelly-Holmes: It still feels differentnot simply like a repeat, as it does on these 24-hour channels. There is a deliberate attempt to make it appear as a different episode, a development of what happened earlier. Kay Richardson: Would people agree that, yes, there are these repeats, or almost repeats, that take place at regular intervals throughout the day on, for instance, the BBC, and that these correspond to the periodisation of the day for many peoplelunchtimes, going home, dinner time, going to bed etc.so they are experiential in that sense. They are tied to the meaning of the day. Once this repetition instead happens 'every hour', 'on the hour', by introducing this very mechanical repetition, something happens to this periodisation. Natalie Fenton: Yes, but we already have this on radio. Why is it so problematic on television? Ulrike Meinhof: But radio does not give people the sense of this pretend transparency, the idea that they are actually there. There is nothing to verify this, nothing to ground the experience visually in relation to time and space. To me, there is a very big difference between listening to an item on the radio news, in which I am told about events as they are taking place or as they have taken place and seeing visually a reporter standing at the scene saying, for instance, 'I'm standing outside the European Court, waiting for a decision to be made about banning British beef', and then I switch over to Sky News, for instance, and I am told by a reporter standing outside the European Court that a decision has been taken to ban British beef. This feels odd to me. But the convention and logic of the 24-hour news channels is that items are only updated as and when this is deemed necessary, because that is, in a sense, the trust that the broadcaster has with the audienceif something new and important happens then the viewer gets the next bit of the news, otherwise they just get a repetition of the last bulletin. It is in fact difficult to spot how odd or different that is until one actually carries out a comparative analysis. But the point I wanted to make was that this is an ideological construction. Joanna Thornborrow: This goes back, I think, to the point Kay made earlier about the scope of the 'now'. As was rightly pointed out, 'now' is variable and can mean different things at different times. These 24-hour news channels repeat their news constantly and present this as what is happening 'now', and decide to update this news at a certain 'now', which they deem the relevant point to do so, to update the 'now', so to speak. This is, I think, different to watching or listening to one particular channel and having periodic updates at longer intervals during the day. This whole concept of the 'now' becomes very problematic and interesting in terms of our position in relation to it and what it means for us when it is artificially constructed through the media. Helen Kelly-Holmes: In fact, if we do tune into Sky News, for instance, there is

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quite a sense of disappointment when the next instalment of the news comes, be it 15 minutes or half an hour after the last one, and nothing changes. Although these channels try to portray a sense of 'real time', action, 'here and now', they also point out how slow-moving things are, how little changes. Whereas, as Joanne pointed out, when there is a longer interval between the updates, then we do get the feeling that something has changed. So, in a sense, it is changing our relationship to the 'now'. Kay Richardson: Under those circumstances, it becomes necessary to look into the symbiotic relations between the reporter and the reported. When politicians, institutions, companies and the general public know their national media environment, then it is easy to ensure that a particular speech or a particular announcement is made and that a particular event occurs at the right time so as to be covered by the appropriate news programme and channel. So we have an established relationship between the people who want to be covered 'now' and the people who want to cover 'now'. I am just wondering whether when things become habituated to the 24-hour cycle or when things simply have to be accommodated to this cycle also, will all the known calculations about when to do something in order to be on the six o'clock news, for instance, suddenly become more difficult to make. I think there are difficulties in adjusting to this 24-hour cycle, and I think in Britain, it does not work that way yet and there are still many reasons why not. For lobbyists and politicians, the nine o'clock news is still the place to be reported. Pam Moores: It might be helpful to draw a comparison with 24 hour shopping. People worry quite a bit about what 24 hour shopping is doing and will do, as it becomes more widespread, to our lifestyles. Of course, new possibilities and opportunities are opened up to people by the provision of this service, but it really takes a very long time for people's habits to shift to this 24 hour cycle. Obviously, around the edges, people's habits will and do shift, and there are people who do go to the supermarket at two o'clock in the morning, but there are very few of them. I have the feeling that for most people there will remain a sort of duality between the familiartheir regular schedule of television viewing that is tied to their everyday routine and their here and now, the real televisionand the other, newer, offerings. Kay Richardson: That could well become the new map. If people have gaps in their routine, like, for instance, missing the nine o'clock news, then they will switch to the non-routinised viewing, on a satellite channel perhaps, to catch up. The really interesting issue is of course, what will happen when we have digital television. Pam Moores: I still think people will cling to a routine, to the familiar. For me, as for most people, I think, it is very much linked to my own lifestyle, my routine. The only time I ever watch a great variety of programmes is when I'm abroad in a hotel room, when I have different things available to me from what is available at home, and when I am out of my routine. At home, we all have a pattern that is built up in our familiar environment, so I find it difficult to believe that there won't be some constants that won't change on the one level, while, at the same time, the 24 hour cycle is going on at another, parallel level. It comes back to the

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title of the paper: 'Home and Away'people will have the 'Away', but they will still want the 'Home'. Kay Richardson: But 'Home and Away' might not be the same for everyone, whereas in the second age of television, the attempt was to make this the same for the nation. Helen Kelly-Holmes: I think also the lack of spatial or geographical anchorage with these satellite channels, as implied in the term 'away' means that they inevitably lack credibility. When people want to tune into the real facts, the truth, I think they will still look to the geographic centre, to London and the BBC in the case of Britain. Natalie Fenton: But that is only because of a certain cultural heritage, of having been socialised into the institutions of the BBC. Helen Kelly-Holmes: Yes, but nonetheless, it is the way in which most of us operate. Navigating our Way Through the Multi-channel Environment Farid Aitsiselmi: Why is the number of channels afforded by technological advances such as digital television, such a big problem? Once we have more than one channel, then we inevitably have problems of choice. What is the difference then between having two or 50 channels? In my home country of Algeria, we inherited television from the French in the form of one channel in 1962. I always only watch one channel because we always only had one channelthis is how I was socialised as a television viewer. In Britain, there has always been a choice between two, three or four channelsso why is it suddenly a problem to have 20 or even 500? Looking at it from a mono-channel background, Britain always seems to have been a multi-channel environment. Andrew Tolson: The problem or the difference lies in the nature of the channels. Scannell makes the point in his book that the ethos of public service broadcasting was one of mixed programming, catering to a wide and varied audience. In the satellite and cable environment, it is single genre channels that have appeared and this trend looks likely to intensify with the introduction of digital televisionchannels entirely devoted to news, to sport, to quiz programmes, to cooking, to travel. We have been used to mixed genre television, so how do we countenance the idea of sitting through an evening of single-genre television? Ulrike Meinhof: I think the reason why a multi-channel environment with 500 plus channels, as may be the case with digital television, is problematic as opposed to a multi-channel environment of two, four or five channels, is the question of how we are able to navigate this environment. The Internet is a good analogy: we know there is lots there for us to see and do, but we don't always know how to find these things, we find it very difficult to navigate the Internet. The point made earlier about routine and about having mental maps of our television viewing week is that second age television viewers have a very clear sense of this; for example, which days of the week are more interesting. This is precisely what makes this new environment difficult. Suddenly that set of clear preferences which we have built into our 'home', our preferences, the judgements

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that we make, the routine of our day, whether or not our children are in bedall of these things around which we have constructed our television entertainmentno longer provide guidelines, we have no more guidance like that. So television viewing either becomes work (rather than entertainment), as we try to find something interesting and/or enjoyable, as in the case of the Web, or it becomes random. These are some of the anxieties which we think are worth addressing. Joanna Thornborrow: Do you not think people will simply extend their television watching in the same way that they have, for example, a broad reading pattern? For example, we read a newspaper to fulfil one particular function or pleasure, whereas we read a novel to fulfil a very different kind of function or pleasure. I wonder whether the whole nature of television viewing is moving in that direction because of the existence of these new channels. Maybe it is just a kind of broadening of the way that people watch things and what they watchpeople can do much more than before. I do see the point about disorientation in terms of where viewers are in time and space and I follow the argument about that to a certain extent, but I do think there is this new way of watching television, and that the audience will adapt to this. Kay Richardson: We would certainly not want to close the door on an argument about restabilisationabsolutely not. But I do think it is way too soon to predict what those restabilisations are going to be like and the extent to which they can be socially plotted for a population. There is the very real possibility of greater difference between people and the further fragmentation and segmentation of the audience, the television nation. Joanna Thornborrow: Once people have discovered their television equivalents of website addresses, then they will simply go back to these again and againthat is how they will navigate their way through this multi-channel environment. Helen Kelly-Holmes: In fact, the technology allows for this by having the 'favourite' option on a remote control, which means, in effect, that the viewer only has to encounter a small number of channels on a daily basis. Kay Richardson: We also have a new code developing on these channels to help people with this navigation. We can be sure, for instance, that episodes of, for example, comedy series on Paramount have been shown before on that particular channel, not to mind when and how often they were shown on terrestrial television, because such channels make a big deal about 'new' or 'brand new' episodes, which has come to mean that they have not yet been shown on that channel. If they don't use that formula, even if it's something that has been off the screen for a while, the viewer knows that it will be the old episodes. This is now known to viewers of these channels. Farid Aitsiselmi: I would like to come back to the analogy with books. It strikes me that we are faced with a new situation here and we do not really know how to handle it, and this is really the problem for us. As far as I can see, it's not very different from going into the library or the bookshop and having a whole wall of books that are fiction, another that is made up of history books and so on. The difference is, of course, that we are taught how to use the library, we know how to navigate it. In the case of satellite, cable and eventually digital television, we

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have the same range but nobody has taught us how to use it, how to access what we want, how things are grouped together. Perhaps there is a need for some kind of media-literacy education, in which we teach people how to use multi-channel television, as has been done to a certain extent with the press; how messages are constructed; what is 'reality' and what is not; how to decode the messages; how to use the single genre channels; how to make the most of this; how not to be manipulated. We are in a world where this means of communication has become perhaps the most important and we are not teaching people how to use it in order to extract the information that they need. Helen Kelly-Holmes: I think perhaps we are dealing with a generational problem. I could imagine that the students would be the ones teaching the lecturers. Inevitably, for those growing up today, this environment will be normalthey will simply always have lived with this multi-channel land and will be able to navigate and construct their own routines and realities from it, just as those who grew up with second generation television constructed their 'reality' and routinised their viewing. Darek Galasinski: I still remember when we got the second channel in my home country of Poland. We thought our world had expanded enormously and the biggest decision became whether to watch number one or number two! This is why I find it worrying that we are problematising this multi-channel environment to such a great extent. We seem to be perceiving multichannel viewing as something upsetting and disturbing. Would we perceive 'multi-book reading' as something worrying? I don't think we would. The simple reason being that television is invested with low prestige, with low symbolic capital. I think it is one thing for us to describe what is happening, but it is quite another to put a value judgement on it. Ulrike Meinhof: I think videos are a much more appropriate analogy for books. People build up their own video libraries gradually just as they build up their own personal book libraries and one becomes equally attached to them. So we learn to navigate our way through our own video libraryor the video storein the same way that we learn how to navigate our way through our library, our personal collection of books, or a bookshop. I think that the multi-channel environment is much more similar to what is happening on the Web, where, as with the 500 plus multi-channel environment, the sheer effort of navigation may defeat much of the pleasure normally associated with entertainment or people might restrict their viewing to avoid this stressthese are all possibilities, as can be seen with the case of the Web. I can still physically go into a bookshop or a newsagents or a video storethis is not possible with the Web or with the multi-channel environment: I am not physically anchored. I think this dilemma will really hit us when we have 500 channels plus to negotiate and navigate and also when this in and of itself begins to affect the kind of terrestrial television we are offered. In Germany, for example, the terrestrial channels have started to strip to a greater extent than they used to. So there might come a point when we do need to discuss quality judgements, but that is not something we wanted or intended to address in the paper. Natalie Fenton: I am not particularly worried. People do know how to negotiate

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their way through this; digital television is now, and there are many people who use it very successfully and ably already. And there are maps available. There are guides and listings for satellite, cable and digital television, just as there are for terrestrial televisionit is simply that the scale and range are greater. Pat Odber: I agree that people will learn very quickly how to negotiate this new multi-channel environment. I also think there is a tendency to overestimate the extent to which people will dip in, will participate in this. In this country, for instance, very few people have knowledge of another European language, so there is, automatically, a large range of channels that they will not look at, that they will 'whiz' past and that will be excluded from their programmed 'favourites'. What we haven't yet factored into the equation and what seems to me also to be an important dimension in terms of navigational and temporal issues is the use of the video recorder. People will 'graze' quite happily because they know that they can video the more 'taste-enhanced' programmes, the ones that matter to them, for later consumption. So there are two types of viewing taking place simultaneously within the same living room. Kay Richardson: Yes, and they are both at two different poles of the nature of television viewing. One is incredibly purposive; with the other people do not really care what they are watching. Helen Kelly-Holmes: To me, though, it is not really the technological aspect, the idea of channel hopping that makes the whole experience disorienting or that challenges national collectivities. Instead, it's the taking of programmes, be they news, soap operas, whatever, from their original anchored space and putting them somewhere else. Tara television is a good example here. It's a cable channel aimed at the Irish community in Britain, which uses programmes from the Irish national broadcaster RTE. So in many ways, you would expect this to be something like the experience of watching RTE, but it's not and it doesn't really work, for me anyway. Whether it is the fact that geographically I am in the wrong space when I watch it and that as a result the associations are lost, or the fact that the scheduling is different or whatever. But there is something very disorienting about the fact that these programmes which I associate with my youth, with a particular time and space and geographical area, suddenly appear somewhere between all these other channels. The effect is quite oddit is really a dislocation. One aspect, for instance, is that the appeal to a collectivity in the form of the Republic of Ireland, has been lostwe do not have the overt markers of national identity such as the national anthem at the end of the day's programming. So, to me, it is not the range of channels that is available, but the removal, the cutting and pasting and grafting that takes place between channels, how things are presented, and how the parameters are differentas for example with Euronews. Natalie Fenton: I wonder if our discussion is in danger of simply being a re-run of the optimistic/pessimistic argument about new technology. This has been done so many times that I am sure we really do not want to go over that ground again. Are we saying that this new technology is damaging for society and for television because it is giving us nothing but bland re-runs? Or am I hearing something different, namely that this is good because it is giving us something

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different, a different taste of a different culture and that it may, perhaps, be breaking down the discourse of nationalism which was a feature of first and second generation television? Or are we saying both at the same time? Ulrike Meinhof: We would certainly not want to promote the view that this multi-channel environment is something worrying. To say that something is destabilising and unsettling is not to say that it is badI think that is an important point to make. Joanna Thornborrow: I wonder how much of the unease that circles around debates about the impact of satellite television and the difference between these channels and terrestrial television has to do with the public ethos of television that has been around since its creation, particularly in Britain. Television is seen to have a public role to play and to be an instrument of education, for example. That tradition is still very strong and I think one of the worries about the multi-channel environment is that all that side of television will cease to exist. Dennis Smith: What is really at stake in this discussion? It seems to me that the media have two functions as we have been describing and discussing them here today. One is to respond to demands that come from individual consumers and that appears to me to be facilitated greatly by these new technologies. The second would perhaps be to integrate collectivities, and the key collectivity that the media have been directed towards integrating over the last one hundred years or so has been the nation state. People were wondering where this anxiety about the multi-channel environment is coming from. I actually see that we are perhaps part of that anxiety. It is not just that these new technologies are facilitating greater consumer choicewhich, in principle, we are expected to applaud. However, as academics we see this as threatening, because we, along with other governmental institutions, such as the state education system, have been key in disseminating this downwards in the past. The roles of these elites are threatened by this multi-channel environment. And, it is interesting that already this great 'freedom' which has been afforded to viewers to 'collect' and 'compile' their own libraries of videos via the multi-channel environment is being clamped down on by higher institutions: for example, the BBC audits of what has been recorded for educational usage, the EU Directive 54 on copyright legislation currently being passed. So we are in an in-between state in terms of our relationships with these media and, as academics, this state of flux worries uspartly because of our stake in the status quo. Identities in Multi-channel Land Dennis Smith: Parallel to this erosion of the nation state, one political collectivity that is under construction is the European Union and it would be interesting to see how Euronews contributes to this and how and if this becomes manipulated if control is tightened by Brussels. Farid Aitsiselmi: The paper mentioned how the words 'Europe' and 'Euro' are repeated ad nauseum on Euronews. It seems to me that this is exactly the same as what happened on the Algerian state broadcaster, when the country started building this notion of a national identity. And, I am sure, if I went back to the programmes which were broadcast at the beginning of independence, I would

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find the words 'Algeria', 'nation' etc. repeated thousands of times to build up this feeling of nationality. Ulrike Meinhof: I think this is exactly right and the repetition of 'Europe' and 'Euro' etc. shows up the stress that is associated with these terms. They are not comfortable, accepted, undisputedthe notion of Europe is instead a stress point and this constant repetition proves that. If it was an easy identity, there would be no need for this. Farid Aitsiselmi: The identity does not exist yet, it has to be created. Ulrike Meinhof: That's exactly the point. Farid Aitsiselmi: So, it is destabilising in the sense of national identityas Dennis pointed out earlierand perhaps we are losing something there. We may no longer recognise ourselves in terms of nation states and national solidarity in this multi-channel future, but we are gaining something in terms of a wider sense of identity, be it European or global or whatever. Natalie Fenton: I can accept the idea of national identities being usurped or undermined by individuals being able to tune into other points of view as presented on other channels, but this is only a very small part of where national identity comes from. All the other discourses that are a huge part of what constructs a national identity are still there. So I don't think we should overestimate the importance of this aspect, or the extent to which this is new, or that this 'dislocation' and 'fragmentation' will alter our sense of belonging to a collectivity. Joanna Thornborrow: Something that really interested me in terms of Euronews and the construction of a European identity, is the question of which stories get selected and why? What is the process of selection? Who is doing the selecting? The whole idea of newsworthiness is very culturally, locally, nationally based, and, it seems to me that one of the problems for a channel like Euronews, is what makes something 'Euronews-worthy'? What becomes a Euro-tellable story and why? Then of course there is the whole issue of language and how and in what language people are addressed. Who are the viewers? Who makes up the collectivity, that is, the audience for Euronews? Farid Aitsiselmi: The same thing is also happening with national news. Somebody decides that a particular item is newsworthy for 'the nation', the collectivity. But people in different parts of the country will have different views on this. For example, in France the news is really about what happens in Paris; this is deemed to be national, whereas something that happens in Marseilles is not necessarily seen in the same way and may not be selected. Britain is slightly different in the sense that there has always been regional newsso there are the items that we should watch, that are good for everyone, as part of the nation, then there are the items which are only for one particular part and not for another, for one segment or sub-section of the collectivity, but not for everyone or the collectivity as a whole. Joanna Thornborrow: Who decides what is good news for Europeans? That is a really interesting question.

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Farid Aitsiselmi: At an even more abstract level, who decides what is global news and how? Natalie Fenton: The point was made in the paper about Euronews being different. But the clip that we were shown was immediately identifiable as news. The content may have been different, but the genre is entirely the same. What I would be interested to find out is whether they are using the same definitions of newsworthiness; are they using the same international news agencies. I suspect they are. So, what the viewer is getting, although it may be weighted in a slightly different way, using different criteria to national news, is not really that different. Ulrike Meinhof: It is true that Euronews is identifiable as news, but I would argue that it is very different because it has this collage element. When we turn on the BBC news, the whole frame, the mindcase we are presented with, everything is coming from Britain, looking out to the rest of the world. There is this centre where we are, that is Britain, and there is this sense created by the news of looking out at the world from this centre. So we do not find out what is happening in the Polish health service or the details of what is going on in other European nations. If we look at Euronews, this is just not the case. Every item we are shown has, originally, come from a centre, but it is a centre that is, deictically, originally located within these different countries. It would be impossible to present this in its original form, so the producers of Euronews have to negotiate this 'split' (between the original centre and the Euronews centre) and it was that kind of split that we were talking about in the paper. It is this 'split' that makes Euronews seem so strangewe did not realise why until we started doing the analysis of it: so many words were missing that normally would be there and they had been replaced by these other words, like for instance, Europe. So viewer and presenter are forever locating it. Kay Richardson: It is at the interpersonal rather than the ideational level that Euronews is different. Darek Galasinski: I thought that one of the interesting questions thrown up by the paper was 'What is Europe?'. Recently, having acquired a satellite dish and being tired of the 'Britishness' of British news, I have been tuning into Euronews. And it seems to me that Euronews is basically about the European Union, not Europe in any broader sense than that. For the producers and presenters of Euronews, 'Europe' is simply the European Union. Even where they use the word 'continent', they mean the European Union. People in Eastern Europe are outside Europe, as defined by Euronews, in other words outside the European Union, that collectivity, which is both constructed and assumed by Euronews. In my opinion, one of the problems of Euronews is that it is not in fact European enough. So, instead of a British-centred newsworthiness, we simply have a European Unioncentred newsworthiness. This is also one of the problems of Deutsche Welle, the German version of the BBC World Service. Deutsche Welle is experiencing severe difficulties and the main reason for this is that the content is local to Germany, but it is being broadcast by satellite to a global audienceit is simply not 'globally newsworthy'. Ulrike Meinhof: I agree with this to a certain extent. The channel has a rather funny sense of where it is located. Of course, it is primarily the European Union

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and this is perhaps not surprising since this is how it is funded. But it does try to look east and southto give a sense that, yes, primarily its Europe is grounded within the European Union, but that there is also a wider sense of Europe, which it would like to represent, that it has wider cultural and political concerns. There is a weekly magazine programme entitled Looking East, which seeks to redress this balance. Darek Galasinski: This proves my pointthe fact that there has to be a special programme to cover Eastern Europe, because on the mainstream Euronews, we see the British or Italian prime minister, rather than the Czech prime minister. Politicians and other individuals from Eastern European countries only appear, when the stakes are up, so to speak, when we have a disaster, when there is a threat to the European Union from the eastwe can see this, for instance, in the change in the amount of coverage of the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia etc. Having watched Euronews for about two months, I have found hardly any coverage of Eastern Europe, except in this respect. The European Union perspective is very obvious to me. Natalie Fenton: I think we have to be very careful when we are talking about news, to distinguish different aspects of it. On the one hand, we have the news selection and news gathering process and that incorporates all the ideas of news values and newsworthiness. Most of the research that has been done shows that these are the same the world over. News values are the same, channels use the same international news agencies and Euronews will probably be doing the same as well. But the way this is framed will be different according to national profiles. That seems to me to be the interesting point in relation to a channel like Euronews. But we cannot get away from the fact that what we are actually receiving is still a global monopoly view of what news is, coming from very powerful global outfits, telling us what we should be interested inso we should not lose sight of this, regardless of how this news is framed. Darek Galasinski: I am not sure I agree with this idea about the universality of news values and newsworthiness. I think that if we compare Polish news and British news, we can see the construction of relatively different news values. In a study I carried out with colleagues at the University of Krakow, we discovered that, for example, in newspapers, there is a very great difference between the newsworthiness of business and financial news between Poland and Britain. In Britain, there is a great preponderance of business news, whereas in Poland, there is a great preponderance of political news. Ulrike Meinhof: I agree. In Germany, for instance, a lot of very mundane, day-to-day, routine political happenings are deemed newsworthy, when they would not be in this country. Natalie Fenton: There are of course local differences but still there is a universality that makes the process broadly similar around the world; there may be different emphases, but the reasons for selection of the categories are the same. Ulrike Meinhof: I think most of us are still convinced of Michael Billig's argument and the fact that our news works for us because it is grounded in a national or regional framework. What these other channels put into relief is the fact that they are trying to do something different. We can still think that

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globalisation is an overly exaggerated anxiety or tension or whateverbut the destabilisation and fragmentation argument is something we are going to see more of. Not necessarily because it is going to unsettle our immediate sense of who we are in terms of national identity, but because of the kind of role the media have had in confirming this for us on a daily basis and the fact that this is changing, due to these pan-national channels, like Euronews. Christina Schäffner (Aston University): It strikes me that the use of translation on Euronews also tells us interesting things. It is also very much a part of the selection and slanting process because this channel does not use simultaneous interpretation; instead the text is prepared in advance. Translation is interlingual and intercultural communication and so the translator has to take the cultural context of the audience into account, and where local knowledge is missing, as in the example of the Finnish skier turned MEP, then some information either has to be added or has to be left out. Here, given the 'Euro' setting of the news item, it seems to me that the deletion was probably the best choice, because otherwise all of this would have to be explained by adding to the voice-over or subtitles. Within the medium of television, this is simply not possible due to time constraints. This context of Euronews provides interesting challenges, not just for translation, but also for how translation and intercultural communication in general contribute to the construction of identities. I had the feeling that you were criticising this omission in the paper. Ulrike Meinhof: We weren't criticising it as such. We were instead saying that because this is the problem Euronews has, that is why it seems so bland, precisely because there is no local flavour, because it has to find this common denominator within a European space, in which viewers do not necessarily share the same concerns. What we were trying to point out is the difficulty of the project that is Euronewsthe construction of a European channel, when our space and our concerns are still structured nationally and confirmed nationally, as Billig claims, all the time. I am, of course, exaggerating here to make a point and I am leaving aside regional, local and individual differences. But just for the sake of argument, let's assume that we are still getting the format that we are used to, that is structured and dictated by newsworthiness which, although it is fed through globally, is constructed nationally. We can still understand the value system because it is our perspective, grounded from within our sets of priorities which are confirmed daily by the media and other institutions. Euronews shows the difficulty of trying to do this at a level where this kind of automatic process simply does not exist, yet. What I was saying about the fact that, in my opinion, Euronews is at its most interesting when it shows divergent opinions also has to do with the fact that we see the Italian parliament, we see things which are grounded and to which we can relate. When the channel edits out all this local specificity, when it gets translated into this sort of middle ground, in order to produce a type of soundtrack that suits everyone, we notice something; this is when we lose our grounding, so to speak. Farid Aitsiselmi: At the end of the paper, you say that 'television viewing as an expression of national solidarity is likely to become a characterisation of the past'.

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That suggested to me that you thought national identity was somehow being threatened and that this was something negative. Kay Richardson: It is not that we think that national identity is being directly destabilised by any of the developments we are talking about, but we do think there is a destabilisation of national address, and this is something which clearly plays a role in the construction of national identity. Again, to reiterate, to say something is changing, is destabilising, is not necessarily something negative. It depends on whether or not we see nationally controlled television as the golden agesome people do, others see it as having displayed and reproduced some of the coercive aspects of nationhood and the national project, for example in terms of assumptions about who mattered in the national culture. So we had 'Auntie BBC' presenting a patronising and patriarchal version of the country to the citizens. The project of the commercial channels, when they came along, apart from an obvious financial one, was to destabilise this and they did so successfully. Andrew Tolson: I am quite sceptical about this notion of the three ages of television. Clearly it is a heuristic argument. It doesn't really make sense historically, because many of these phenomena were actually happening simultaneously. By using this framework, you seem to suggest that something is replacing something elsewhereas the reality is much more complicated than that. Kay Richardson: The fact that this thesis was put forward makes it inevitable that our judgement of it now is influenced by what we have seen happening since then. I do agree with you, though, it is much more an extending of layers of possibilities than a simple replacement. We can see this at the moment. There are many different and also related developments happening both within and between satellite, cable and terrestrial. Natalie Fenton: What is interesting is that, on the one hand, we have Euronews which is attempting to destabilise or at least challenge existing constructs, but on the other we have these single genre channels, which are actually reinforcing existing constructs. I am thinking here in particular of satellite sports channels, which reinforce traditional gender roles and notions of nationhood. Andrew Tolson: This is an interesting point, because I have both Eurosport and SkySports available to me and I never watch the former. To me, it is not an attractive channel. SkySports speaks to a coherent national public, Eurosport does not. Farid Aitsiselmi: There is also an argument that within this new context, with this fragmentation of the audience and falling viewing figures for the terrestrial channels, that the national channels will begin to play more of the role of local or regional channels and that 'real television' willcontrary to what we have been saying here todaybe happening on these global and European channels. Ulrike Meinhof: I am not sure I agree. Given the huge range of choice that is now available, it is amazing that terrestrial television in this country and in other European countries still gets the overwhelming share of the market, even if this has fallen. This is the situation at present, but we really do not know how this is going to develop in the future.

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Home and Away: Television Discourse in Transition: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson Paddy Scannell School of Communication, Design and Media, University of Westminster, Wafford Road, Northwick Park, Harrow, HA1 3TP, UK In their recent work Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson have opened up the study of what they call 'third age' broadcasting, the era of multi-channel television and new media which transforms (they claim) television of the second age, characterised by channel scarcity and dominated by national broadcasting systems. They have pioneered the study of some of the forms that new age television takes on cable and satellite services; shopping channels, local cable stations, lonely hearts TV, and European news (Richardson, 1997; Richardson & Meinhof, 1999). In their analysis they develop what they call a 'weak' version of the argument that the new era is characterised by instability, fragmentation and the erosion of national solidarity. They take as point of departure on some of these issues my accounts of the role of broadcasting as working to produce the world as ordinary; a familiar, integral aspect of everyday existence in modern societies (Scannell & Cardiff, 1991; Scannell, 1996). Overall, they wish to argue that the 'ontological security' provided by 'traditional' national television services is destabilised in the new media environment. It is this argument to which I would like, briefly, to respond. In the first place, we can note that the television of the second age has not been displaced by third age television. Ten years ago, when it was all just round the corner, it was assumed that new services would seriously erode the audience base of, for instance, the four national TV channels in this country. The BBC at the end of the eighties assumed that its audience share would slip to below 30%. Ten years later it stands robustly at around 40%, little changed from what it was at the end of the eighties. Thus the new kinds of service discussed by Meinhof and Richardson have clearly not displaced 'traditional' television. They appear rather as 'value-added' options to what we can still properly speak of as 'mainstream television', and we should note that the services discussed by Meinhof and Richardson have tiny audiences compared with the mainstream. Beyond a doubt, the new media environment is rich, diverse and complex compared with what it was 60 or more years ago, but the fundamental programme content and structures of nationally networked radio and television have not radically changed since then. The five national services in the UK continue to produce a content which, in terms of its mix of genres, goes back to the beginnings of broadcasting and which, in terms of programme structures (scheduling), is still attuned to the movement of time through the day and through the days of the weeks and months, the seasons of the year. New services of course do not necessarily reproduce the same mix of programmes or the same programme schedules, but they most certainly have not displaced or undermined

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the forms and content of mainstream 'classic' broadcasting. Rather they sit alongside such services and make sense as more or less motivated departures from the norms that they embody in their form and content. Two points are made about scheduling and programme content by Meinhof and Richardson, one concerns 'stripping', the other the implications of re-run channels that repeat old programme series and serials. Both, they want to argue, undermine the stable temporal structures of mainstream television. What happens, they ask, to the difference between 'now' and 'then' when, for instance, the major contemporary TV 'soaps' are simultaneously being recycled on re-run channels such as UK Gold? This is indeed a fascinating question, but it might be answered otherwise than Meinhof and Richardson's view that the doubled availability of such programmes contributes to 'the general effect of temporal uncertainty to which the new viewing conditions are leading us'. To sustain this view they have to assume that a programme does not disclose its own temporality and that viewers do not know that they are watching repeats. To be fair, they present their argument as highly conjectural: 'there may come a time when all such indexicalities (of time) are discounted; they [broadcasters] may feel their audience figures will be stronger if they leave the temporal status of a programme unclear [emphases added]'. Well, yes, maybe. But meanwhile I think we may assume that viewers have a pretty robust sense of where they are when they watch repeats of old showseven if they are stripped across the week when originally they were broadcast once or at most twice a week. It is surely the case that programmes 'age'; that when you look at something made in the 1970s it has, today, a distinctly 'seventies look', and as for the sixtiesit's in black and white. It is indeed the case that the temporality of some new dedicated channelsthe shopping channel is a good exampleis different from the everydayness of mainstream television whose phenomenal now is always the dynamic intersection of past and future in both an immediate and more long-term sense. Kay Richardson has shown how time on the shopping channel is endlessly looped back upon itself to create a perpetual present, a frozen now, from which there is no escape except death or hitting the off switch. Likewise, scheduling on repeats channels is just one damn thing after another with no sense of the sequence being attuned to the rhythms of the movement of time through the day. Undoubtedly such channels have an 'airless' hermetic quality about them, but again it seems reasonable to suggest that, as such, they run alongside services which massively sustain the routines and rhythms of time in the day, the time of day and time through the day. The new services, it can be reasonably supposed, stand in relation to and as departures from the mainstream. But this does not mean they have displaced, undermined or fragmented them. Likewise, stripping may make all days of the week alikeand to some extent they are!but a sense of the weekend shows up in Channel 5 which recognises the weekend phenomenon of sport on Saturday afternoons. So what is the point at issue here? Additions are not subtractions, might be one way of putting it. It is not necessary to suppose that new programme formats and new scheduling practices undermine or displace older and continuing formats and practices. Rather, we might think that they create a more diverse and richer environment through which viewers pick their way. This point shows up

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most clearly in Meinhof and Richardson's discussion of national broadcasting today in relation to sub-national (local) and supranational (European) services. Again they advance a tentative view that the multi-channel media environment fragments both the mass audience and the experience of viewing itself; 'surfing' and 'grazing' now displacing older habits of attentive concentration on particular programmes. The effect of the former is likely to undermine 'the presence of television as a reassuring national discourse', while the effect of channel hopping is to undermine the deictic stability of terms such as 'here' and 'there' which underpin what they refer to as 'spatio-temporal ''homes'''. These are crucial, complex issues which are beginning to receive the attention which they have long deserved and to which linguists such as Meinhof, Richardson and others (Alan Bell and Stephanie Marriott, for instance) have made an important contribution. What is at issue is the conditions of the intelligibility of what shows up on television and (let me add) radio; that is to say, how what is there to be seen and heard (on any channel any time) makes itself available (or not) so as to be understood (or not) by anyone who cares to watch and listen. Any programme displays its own terms and conditions of recognition and always presupposesinsofar as it is intended to be watched or heard by unknown othersthat it is available to be understood by those for whom it is meant and intendedits audience. It is the last point that is put in question by the kinds of programme discussed by Meinhof and Richardson. To whom does the shopping channel or Euronews speak? More generally who are the new audiences of new age television, and how are they figured in the formats and schedules of the new services? There is an unexamined premise about viewers in Meinhof and Richardson's accounts. If the new environment tends to destabilise and fragment older, more stable media structures is this linked to new forms of subjectivity? Their position has a distinctly post-modern flavour and the rhetoric of fragmentation and destabilisation is one that recurs in debates about identity, hybridity, the de-centred self and so on. In ideological terms it indicates the disintegration of the unity of the subject or, at least, its destabilisation (its 'de-centring', as they say). What do Meinhof and Richardson want to say about this: that the new services themselves destabilise older and more unitary subject-identities, or that they are adaptations to new identities that are themselves already hybrid, de-stabilised and fragmented? I would simply note here that the rhetoric of cultural studies does not sit easily with their pragmatic concern with deixis. They might, I would suggest, focus on the latter and jettison (or, at least, bracket) the former. If we then return to the implications of the deictical components of any programmetime, place and person(s)without any presumptions about fragmentation or whatever, we can focus in again upon what shows up in new channel services. By way of bringing my brief comments to a conclusion, I would like to think again about a core concern of Meinhof and Richardson's paper, namely the meaning of 'home' in respect of programmes, channels and audiences. 'Home' is a word that does not so much indicate a geographical or cultural location. Its force is rather existential or phenomenological; it indicates something like 'where I most fundamentally feel I am and/or come from', my existential situatedness, my being 'at home'. The home(ly) is the familiar, the

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known and the comfortable; the wherein and with which I am at ease with myself and others and the situation. This is what, experientially, the word indicates. Concretely it is linked to place: the place where I was born and grew up; the place in which I livethe house, the street, the neighbourhood, the town, the country. All these are always understood by each of us in respect of our basic sense of our situated being in the world, a being which isin each casemine (deixis always and necessarily presupposes a situated someone sometime somewhere). By contrast the negation of home, is the sense of being away. Being away presupposes a home from which one has departed and to which one may return. The phenomenological force of the 'unhomely' shows up, I think more clearly in the German unheimlich which is often translated into English as the uncanny (the inconnu) with its expressive sense of a vaguely defined but clearly felt sense of estrangement, of being ill at ease. This specific mood (of not being at home in or with the situation) makes sense only in relation to the mood of being-at-home. Now I have certainly tried to show how broadcasting in its first and second ages both recognised its audiences as being at home in respect of their situation as listeners and viewers. Thus they developed modes of address that presumed to speak to audiences in their homes. At the same time they assumed that their audiences were situated in specific locations: urban or rural, north or south and within the clearly defined borders of nation states. All this I think shows up clearly enough in mainstream broadcasting through to the present and remains a matter of concern for broadcasters and audiences especially when the latter feel that the former do not speak to them in relation to where they are and what most nearly concerns them. Terms like 'near' and 'far', 'Home' and 'Away' are always proximal. If I live in Scotland and am Scottish then I very likely do feel that what 'They' (the broadcasters) do in London is a long a way away from my concerns. The very important debates about the role of the BBC in Scotland at this moment only make sense within something like the pragmatic, or phenomenological frame sketched in above. Meinhof and Richardson have shown that the new services tend to lack the human, experiential character of mainstream broadcasting. This does not mean they lack routines, rather that their routines do not connect with 'the characteristics of lived experience'. They are formal, rather than experiential and might be called 'dehumanising'. Indeed. Maybe. But then the question is, in the first place, why are they so? It might be that these new services, in a multi-channel environment cannot presume the renewed and familiar relationship between broadcasters, programmes and audiences which is fundamental to mainstream television and which is inscribed in the forms and formats of programmes and the temporal organisation of the schedules. Their design may be, perhaps, based on the assumption that the viewer's encounter with their service is more likely to be a chance 'hit'the result, indeed, of browsing through the channels in a rather aimless search 'for something interesting'. In which case the service must entice the viewer to linger a moment, and thus be more or less instantly intelligible, without any assumption of familiarity on the part of the viewer. The familiarity of mainstream television, Meinhof and Richardson argue, is an effect of structure, style and modes of address, but not of repetition. But repetition is fundamental to serial production and fixed scheduling. Everything rests upon

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repetition in daily life as in broadcasting. It is not, however, a mechanical repetition of the ever-same. The difference-insameness of everyday life and everyday radio and television is a dynamic process which holds in an always fragile balance the tensions of continuity and change through which the future emerges and the past recedes. It is this kind of temporal dynamic that is absent in new services, and which produces that sense of a perpetual now without a past or future. If this is, indeed, how new services present themselves the task of any pragmatic or phenomenological 1 analysis is to treat this as part of their intentionality or meaning structure and to demonstrate how it is as such in its organising deictic components: its temporal, spatial and social features whose design is oriented to reception by absent, unknown viewers and listeners. We can leave it to others to evaluate this. I have argued that hermeneutic analysis operates at two levels which are often confused: 'the evaluations and assessments of programmes (the opinions we have about them) and the organisation of those programmes in such ways as give rise to the possibility of those opinions' (Scannell, 1996: 3). Programmes show themselves as what they are and intend to be. News shows itself as news. Entertainment shows itself as entertaining. This is the apophantic (manifest) 'as' of things as they are. But how do things appear as such (as what they are)? This is the hermeneutic 'as', which is ontologically prior to the apophantic 'as'.2 It engages with those ways in which the manifest 'as' is organised and produced as such. This is what deixis attends to: how the situation is produced as such, as a self-explicating phenomenon. The situation as shown is what viewers attend to and about which they have views and opinions. Meinhof and Richardson slip back and forth between these two hermeneutic levels. In my view the task of all of us who are fascinated by the rich phenomenology of broadcast (and narrowcast) programmes and programming is to strive steadfastly to give adequate accounts of their care-structures; that is, how they are produced as that which they are meant and intended to be for each and every viewer or listener. What they or, for that matter, academics make of themthe evaluations and assessments of their worth or otherwiseis an important but separate matter that lies outside the immediate concerns of pragmatics and phenomenology. Notes 1. Pragmatics and phenomenology have much in common, but they are by no means interchangeable terms. 2. For this distinction cf. Heidegger (1962: 200-201), and see Kisiel (1995: 401-4) for a discussion of where it comes from. References Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. Kisiel, T. (1995) The Genesis of Heidegger's 'Being and Time'. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Richardson, K. (1997) 21st century commerce: The case of QVC. Text 17 (2). Richardson, K. and Meinhof, U.H. (1999) Worlds in Common? Television Discourses in a Changing Europe. London: Routledge. Scannell, P. and Cardiff, D. (1991) A Social History of British Broadcasting. Serving the Nation, 1923-1939. Oxford: Blackwell. Scannell, P. (1996) Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Where is the Discourse? A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson Ian Hutchby Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK There is a problem at the heart of Meinhof and Richardson's analysis. It is acknowledged by the authors in one sense, when they admit that there is 'little evidence to date that such forms of behaviour [as their article posits] are having radical effects' and that therefore they are forced into an 'a priori conceptual framework [which assumes that] the multi-channel environment is destabilising . . . the parameters of space and time which viewers are called upon to invoke in their construction of textual meaning'. It is well known that such a priori conceptualising is fraught with problems, not the least being the danger that the researcher, having assumed the existence of a phenomenon, is led by that assumption to see evidence for the phenomenon in the data she observes. That Meinhof and Richardson see themselves as being 'driven' into this position is evidence that they may be aware of these pitfalls. Yet I think that this indexes a still deeper problem which stems from their chosen analytic stance. In this response I will address two related dimensions of the problem: the underlying set of assumptions upon which their analysis of television discourse in transition is based; and the empirical lacunae which result from that set of assumptions. Over the last two decades, one of the key problematics in media research has been the question of how audiences 'consume' or 'make sense' of what radio and television present to them. This is different from an older, largely American, tradition which focuses on the 'uses and gratifications' that audiences derive from different kinds of media output (Blumler & Katz, 1974). In the media consumption research model, influences are drawn from literary studies and broadcasts themselves are treated as 'texts' which audience members have to 'read'; however, the 'meanings' that any programme makes available are not fixed and there may be considerable sociological variation in the readings that different audience constituents produce. While initial work in this area concentrated on the interpretative work of the researcher, who would attempt to delineate the possible meanings embedded in a given media text (thereby, it was often claimed, revealing their hidden ideological content), an alternative approach is represented by 'reception research', which tries to find ways of gaining access to the interpretative work of audience constituents themselves. For instance, reception researchers may ask groups of people to watch a particular television programme and then interview them about what they take to be its 'meaning'; though audience interpretations are usually then reinterpreted within the framework of the researcher's own interpretation of the programme, thereby ironicising the whole process (see, for instance, Richardson & Corner, 1986). Meinhof and Richardson's paper is situated within this latter tradition. It is for

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that reason that we find them expressing concern that viewing conditions in the emerging multi-channel environment may take them 'beyond the limits of empirical research techniques'. In other words, it is precisely because they assume that audiences have to read or make sense of programmes as meaningful (or meaning-full) media texts in order to feel secure about what they are watching that the very question of destabilisation, which drives their analysis, arises. Yet they find it difficult to do empirical research into this destabilisation within the reception framework because that approach relies on the idea that audiences treat as their texts whole programmes (for instance, a documentary or an episode of a soap) and not fragments. There are specific empirical consequences of taking this position, particularly in relation to any professed interest in television discourse. Meinhof and Richardson approvingly cite recent work by Scannell (1996) who argues that broadcasting is intimately bound up with the constitution of modern public life and, further, with the experiential constitution (or phenomenology) of societal membership itself. Tellingly, however, they leave out of account earlier (and in my view more significant) contributions by the same author to the rethinking of empirical media research. In his introduction to the pathbreaking collection Broadcast Talk (Scannell, 1991), Scannell criticised the conventional procedures of media analysis for their focus on the mediation of 'messages' between the 'encoding' institutions of broadcasting and the 'decoding' or receiving audience at home; and the associated 'text-reader theory, derived from literary studies of written "texts", [used] to account for the relationship between the products of radio and television and their audiences'. As he points out, although broadcasting is almost entirely centred upon talk, 'the combined effect of these positions is to make it well-nigh impossible to discover talk as an object of study in relation to broadcasting' (Scannell, 1991: 10, emphasis added). Put another way, the text-reader assumptions underpinning Meinhof and Richardson's analysis of television discourse in transition mean that the discourse itself vanishes. What becomes of interest is the watching experience of the viewer, rather than the formal structures of the discursive phenomenon that that experience is an experience of. Scannell's argument drew on a range of research in areas such as conversation analysis (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998), Goffmanian sociology (Goffman, 1981) and Gricean pragmatics (Grice, 1981) to suggest that broadcasting achieves its communicative effects essentially by drawing on, while at the same time systematically transforming, the routines and conventions of everyday face-to-face interaction. Some years previously, Heritage et al. (1988: 79-80) had proposed that: it has become increasingly unrealistic to analyse the structure and content of [media] messages independent of the interactional medium within which they are generated. For, although the medium may not be the message, the interactional structures through which broadcast [talk] is conveyed must necessarily contribute to [its] content and appearance. In short, the discourse of broadcasting has its own frameworks of participation

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and dynamics of address that operate within, and necessarily shape, the transmission that reaches the audience at home. For me, Meinhof and Richardson's move into a priori conceptualisation and their fear of their own possible empirical impotence together indicate that, a decade on, this lesson has still not filtered down into the mainstream of media research. Audiences are still the principal focus of interest; they are still seen as decoders of the media's meanings; and the formal structures of practical action constitutive of broadcast discourse themselves remain largely unanalysed and taken for granted. An empirically grounded alternative is to shift the focus back from audience sense-making to the communicative properties of programmes themselves; though now with the caveat that broadcast discourse should be seen not as a stand-alone 'text' that needs to have its 'sense' extracted by a 'reader', but as a form of talk which actively and appropriately addresses its listeners. For instance, conversation analysts have described the ways in which news interviews, ostensibly a colloquy between two parties in a studio which the audience 'looks in on', are actually designed, carefully, consistently and in close detail, as forms of talk directed specifically towards the audience as ratified overhearers (Heritage, 1985). In one kind of a priori mode of conceptualising, we might posit that audiences would be alienated by the (utterly routine) broadcast form represented by the news interview, precisely because they can only act as overhearers or onlookers. In fact they are not, because the talk is not constructed as a conversation between two participants but as talk which, within its 'conversational' form, actually addresses a range of assumed absent listeners (for a similar argument applied to different contexts see Montgomery (1991) on DJ talk; and Hutchby (1995) on radio phone-ins). In this sense, Meinhof and Richardson's proposal that multi-channel, globalised media may be leading audiences into phenomenological destabilisation seems a strange one to me. It is not, for instance, that broadcasters are beginning to adopt the kind of 'alienation effects' characteristic of German expressionism (save, perhaps, for the occasional advertiser). Rather, as illustrated by recent debates in Britain about television news formats in the wake of ITV's decision to drop its flagship News At Ten, broadcasters are still concerned with how best to design their discourse such that it addresses the listener. Decisions by producers as to whether the news presenter should stand up, sit down, perch on the edge of a desk, or walk about indicate that broadcasting is still firmly pursuing the demotic trajectory outlined by Scannell and Cardiff (1991) in their large-scale history of radio and television: from the abstracted, patriarchal formats of early broadcasting to ever more informal, conversational, interactive forms of address. The empirical task remains to find and document the discursive forms of contemporary broadcasting. These forms simultaneously rely upon, and effect transformations in, the discourse of everyday life. It is by virtue of our membership of the language culture, which itself incorporates the discursive forms of broadcasting, that we are able not just to make sense of, but to sense our involvement in, the broadcasts we listen to and watch.

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References Blumler, J. and Katz, E. (eds) (1974) The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research. Beverly Hills: Sage. Grice, P. (1981) Presupposition and conversational implicature. In P. Cole (ed.) Radical Pragmatics (pp. 183-198). New York: Academic Press. Goffman, E. (1981) Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Heritage, J. (1985) Analyzing news interviews: Aspects of the production of talk for an overhearing audience. In T. van Dijk (ed.) Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 95-119). London: Academic Press. Heritage, J., Clayman, S. and Zimmerman, D. (1988) Discourse and message analysis: The micro-structure of mass media messages. In R.P. Hawkins, J.M. Weiman and S. Pingree (eds) Advancing Communication Sciences: Merging Mass and Interpersonal Processes (pp. 77-109). Newbury Park: Sage. Hutchby, I. (1995) Aspects of recipient design in expert advice-giving on call-in radio. Discourse Processes 19, 219-238. Hutchby, I. and Wooffitt, R. (1998) Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity. Montgomery, M. (1991) Our tune: A study of a discourse genre. In P. Scannell (ed.) Broadcast Talk (pp. 138-177). London: Sage. Richardson, K. and Corner, J. (1986) Reading reception: Mediation and transparency in viewers' accounts of a TV programme. Media, Culture and Society 8, 485-508. Scannell, P. (ed.) (1991) Broadcast Talk. London: Sage. Scannell, P. (1996) Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell. Scannell, P. and Cardiff, D. (1991) A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. 1:1922-1939. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Some Thoughts on Generic Time: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson Andrew Tolson Department of Communication and Information Studies, Queen Margaret University College, Clerwood Terrace, Edinburgh, EH12 8TS, UK For me, one of the most interesting points in the discussion following the paper by Ulrike Meinhof and Kay Richardson, was made by Farid Aitsiselmi. His point addresses the question of temporality in broadcasting and possible differences in the ways deictic references to space and time ('here and now') can be understood. In the course of the discussion, I formulated this as a suggestion about differences of 'generic time' which might have a bearing on the suitability of different genres for the kinds of recycling and repetition discussed in the paper. I would now like to add a few words of written speculation, to try to develop the significance of this point. In essence, the suggestion is that there are different forms of space and time constructed in different genres of broadcasting. At one extreme there is the immediate presence of live broadcasting which is most apparent in broadcast news, though Ulrike Meinhof has shown that what counts as 'live' can vary from channel to channel for, she suggests, ideological reasons. Nevertheless, in this genre the time of the 'here and now' is shared with the audience, offering a simulated co-presence. This has become a familiar point in recent sociological discussions of broadcasting, to which I will return. On the other hand, at the other extreme so to speak, there is fictional time: the 'once upon a time' of most forms of broadcast drama. Here, the co-ordinates of space and time are separate from the immediate situation of the audience, which presumably adapts itself to the fictional temporality of the narrative. And it is this adaptation, as distinct from the necessary co-presence of the news, which means that there is no problem repeating such fictional narratives. This argument surely applies both to a classic Hollywood film and to episodes of drama series such as Miami Vice or Startrek. It is true that from where we sit we can recognise these as old films or episodes, that we can 'date' them in this sense. But this is not an experiential issue with respect to the time of the narrative, and is similar to all the other features of the text in which we would expect to 'suspend disbelief'. It is because broadcast news is anchored in temporal co-presence rather than fictional time, that it does not lend itself to the possibility of this kind of repetition. As I said in the discussion, I cannot imagine a TV channel specialising in repeats of old news. This is not of course to say that old news cannot be re-used, but only in so far as it is re-framed as history, or popular memory, as in a programme title from my youth All Our Yesterdays. Conversely, today's news can only be repeated, as on 24hour news channels, on the condition that it is continuously up-dated, to speak to the immediate 'here and now' of the audience, or their sense of 'dailiness' in Paddy Scannell's terms (Scannell, 1996).

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Now in this context, soap operas (as continuous serials) are somewhat peculiar. They interweave characteristics of both kinds of generic time. They are fictional and thus separate from the audience's immediate situation, but because they are continuously evolving, with no end in sight, they construct what Farid Aitsiselmi calls a 'parallel here and now'. Let us be clear about what this entails. It does not necessarily entail that this 'parallel here and now' directly addresses our sense of 'dailiness' or that it represents the audience's immediate temporal experience. Soap operas can do this of courseas when characters celebrate Christmas at the same time (it is assumed) as the audience. But this is not a defining feature of continuous serials as the British experience of watching Australian soaps, or before that the American serials Dallas and Dynasty, has shown. Indeed Scannell's argument about soap operas quoted in the paper is not only exaggerated; it is also, I think, specific to a particular experience of national broadcasting which ignores the international traffic in soaps which even Wenham's second age of broadcasting has allowed (conversely for instance, Coronation Street has long been available in Australia). What then is the peculiar parallel universe of a continuous serial? I would like to compare it to the activity of church-going, which may be daily or weekly, but where the believer takes a temporary 'time-out' from the routine pace of everyday life. Of course daily routines, and indeed broadcast schedules, need to create spaces for such times, and in that sense they do articulate with 'dailiness'. But the temporality of a continuous serial, like a religious communion, is not mundane, but rather an imaginary parallel time which the devotee can visit for moments of recognition and reflection. This is not as far-fetched as it might sound. There is now a developing body of writing which recognises that soap operas offer opportunities, not just for daily gossip, but for a continuous monitoring of moral codes, which amounts to a 'technology of self-government' in Michael Stewart's terms (Stewart, 1997). And in a fascinating account of the 'devotional viewing' occasioned by the serialisation of the Mahabharata on TV in India, Marie Gillespie confirms the potential of 'sacred soaps' to act as a focus for weekly religious worship (Gillespie, 1995). Can this analogy be pursued any further? I am suggesting that soap operas offer stories which have a similar function to the homilies constructed (in the Christian sermon) from familiar biblical characters and scenarios. The similar function is to provide lessons on life, and these are accessed in this secular genre, on the same kind of regular basis as church-going. Now it is also a characteristic of such stories that their moral force is not compromised, but rather reinforced, by repetition. It is common for church-goers to hear repeated stories for which they can already supply the narrative outcome. 'Time-out' for moral reflection may thus involve a visit to the already-known, from which presumably a certain comfort can be derived. In the academic literature on soap opera, it has long been recognised that the key question posed by such narratives it not 'what will happen next', but rather 'what kind of person is this?' (Brunsdon, 1981). Repeated stories can ask this question just as well as stories which are unfolding for the first time. Over the last decade, some sociologists, as well as Paddy Scannell, have attributed a particular significance to the 'temporal arrangements of broadcast-

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ing'. In this argument the separation of space and time (or time-space 'distantiation') characteristic of modernity, and the temporal dislocations created by electronic globalisation, are compensated for, existentially, by the mediated co-presence offered by radio and TV (for an overview, see Moores, 1995). Broadcasting thus creates opportunities for 'quasi' or 'para-social' interaction, and for the construction of 'imagined communities' of performers and audiences in mediated localities of space and time. The ability to address the 'here and now', to construct a simulated 'liveness' is obviously a key element in this existential scene; but it should not be assumed that broadcasting is reducible to this, or indeed that this is its defining feature. Indeed as Scannell (1988) has argued, broadcasting offers a variety of senses of time, from the immediate here and now, to the annual calendar, to the 'long durée' and memories of a lifetime. It would be useful I think to build on Scannell's observation, to undertake a discourse analysis of the ways different genres speak to these different senses of time, as indeed Stephanie Marriott has begun to do in her work on sports commentary (Marriott, 1996). Meanwhile, as far as the 'third age' of broadcasting is concerned, the really radical development in my view, is that we now have channels which are genre specific. Thus, whereas in the national (British) broadcasting system described by Scannell, all his varieties of time are catered for by the same public service, in the new age of cable and satellite broadcasting these are separated out. We now have some channels devoted entirely to liveness, some devoted entirely to memory, and some devoted entirely to the purely fictional 'once upon a time'. What are the existential consequences of this? It would seem that the sense of imagined community offered by the first two ages of broadcasting is now prone to fragmentation. Equally, however, it seems to me (as a subscriber to cable) that it is impossible to consume third age broadcasting in the way we have consumed previous formsand in particular it is impossible to watch one such channel continuously, on a daily basis. The conditions are thus created for what is perhaps a necessarily more selective, discriminating spectatorship, across the available genres. References Brunsdon, C. (1981) Crossroads: Notes on soap opera. Screen 22 (4). Gillespie, M. (1995) Sacred serials, devotional viewing and domestic worship: A case study of the interpretation of two TV versions in the Mahabharata. In R. Allen (ed.) Soap Operas Around the World. London: Routledge. Marriott, S. (1996) Time and time again: Live television commentary and the construction of replay talk. Media Culture & Society 18 (1). Moores, S. (1995) Media, modernity and lived experience. Journal of Communication Inquiry 19(1). Scannell, P. (1988) Radio Times: The temporal arrangements of broadcasting in the modern world. In P. Drummond and R. Paterson (eds) Television and its Audience. London: BFI. Scannell, P. (1996) Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell. Stewart, M. (1997) Managing ourselves: Young people, soap opera and technologies of self-government. PhD thesis, Open University.

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Reflections on Truth, Reality and Fragmentation in the Third Age of Broadcasting: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson Paul Chilton School of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK TV as Reality The advent of TV is often regarded as a qualitative leap in broadcasting, in the sense that the experience of the 'viewer' (who is also of course a 'listener' or perhaps just a 'hearer') is qualitatively different from the 'listener' to the radio. It has been popular wisdom that TV is somehow more 'real' or creates a more 'real' experience. Richardson and Meinhof believe that this effect does indeed exist and that it is due to a convention: By convention on television, viewers are invited to see depicted entities and scenes as having a reality which is independent of the viewing process. This convention creates for viewers a 'transparency effect'; the sense of watching, not a mediation of reality, but reality itselfhowever much we are told that broadcasters have contrived the images which they present to us as real. It can often take a considerable effort of will to use our knowledge to refuse the experiential effect. This account has some intuitive plausibility as a hypothesis, but certain features need further substantiation. In particular, it has to be established if it is the case that viewers 'are invited' and how this process of invitation is effected. In addition, it has to be established that this process is 'by convention' and how such conventions come to be established. Of course, there is another problem arising from the phenomenological approach adopted in accounts of this kind namely, the claim that individuals in fact perceive TV images as unmediated reality. It is difficult to see how this could be established other than by subjective claims, how it could be established experimentally, for instance. The question of the 'reality' of TV is related to the question of 'truthfulness'. Truth claims appear to be more readily linked to verbal utterances. It makes immediate sense to ask whether someone's statements, or someone's story, is true or not. To ask whether a picture (or sequence of pictures) is 'true' or not is less obviously a natural question. The question somehow seems otiose. There may be some cognitive, or possibly neurological explanation for this: for instance, it may be the visual system has some cognitive primacy. This may have something to do with the prevalence of visual metaphors in languages for knowledge and cognition (seeing is believing, seeing what someone means, etc.). In general, however, it is arguable that the notion of truth claims gives a useful handle on the question of the 'reality' of TV images. It is certainly the case that

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truth claims arise in relation to verbal utterances occurring in TV discourse, perhaps because there is sometimes a discrepancy between what is said and the reality effect. We return to this below. Changes in TV, Changes in Reality? Many media analysts (Scannell, Richardson, Meinhof) adopt what they describe as a phenomenological approach (overtly or not under the shadow of Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and their postmodernist followers). This paradigm permits descriptive claims about the causal effect of changing patterns of TV technology and discourse on group consciousness. The claim that TV causes, or at the least contributes to, 'reality' can give rise to two somewhat different perspectives, involving their own respective sets of claims. In the first perspective, broadcasting is intermeshed with living in a community (Scannell, 1996; Scannell & Cardiff, 1991). It is 'familiar'; it is 'national'; and it has a democratising effect. Public life isselectively, one might noterepresented in broadcasts in the form of public figures, national events, significant national dates. The representations occur 'in real time'; that is, they are synchronised with the lived experience of the community. They introduce a synchronic (rather than a chronicled) window on national public life that was simply not available in the periods prior to radio and television. Critics of this perspective point out that it characterises 'second age' media, and argue that the diversification of transmission technology that emerged in the late 20th century radically alters this account. While it is empirically the case that the technological and economic infrastructure did change, it is more difficult to formulate and substantiate the effects of such changes. In the second perspective the common claim in this frame of thought is the idea that 'reality', that is consciousness of what reality is, can be 'destabilised' by changes in TV technology, or rather by changes in viewing behaviour brought about or facilitated by changes in technology. The essentially spatial, and mechanistic, metaphor of 'destabilisation' is reflected in another concept that is used in this kind of account: 'dislocation'. The notion of 'dislocation' is applied to geographical space, metaphorically to national identity and, again metaphorically, to the experience of time. The first two tend to be lumped together as 'spatiality', the third as 'temporality'. Dislocation in any of these dimensions is said to come about because of the increased availability of many TV channels, the transmission of broadcasts beyond national boundaries, and the repetition of broadcasts outside their original time reference periods. Finally, such phenomena are claimed, additionally, to lead to the 'fragmentation'. This is understood both in the sense of creating a plurality of audiences, where previously (in the 'second age') there was a more or less unified national audience, and also in the metaphorical sense of the 'fragmentation' of consciousness. By the latter is meant the viewing behaviour which switches attention from one channel to another ('channel hopping', 'grazing', 'surfing'). There is also a claim that the 'real' and the 'imaginary' become 'fused'. This is a problematic claim, first because the claimants generally take a constructivist or a phenomenological position on 'reality', which would make it no less 'imaginary' than 'the imaginary', at least given the terms within which they are generally writing. And second it is

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problematic, because, if we grant a distinction between the 'real' and the 'imaginary' (or if necessary between two qualitatively different kinds of consciousness labelled 'the real' and 'the imaginary'), then the evidence that individuals do in fact 'fuse' them is very hard to come by. While Scannell makes claims for the role of broadcasting in the construction of knowledge about a public life, the second perspective on TV and reality is making claims about the effects on private consciousness as well. Methodologically, the second perspective is almost forced into a phenomenological approach, since neither text nor psychological states are inspectable, when it comes to viewers who switch from one channel to another. The different perspectives also take different forms, largely depending on whether authors regard the destabilisation as politically desirable or not desirable. Scannell sees TV 'reality' as a positive force for stabilisation of national society: a conservative perspective. Morley and Robbins (1995) see TV's potential for reality disruption as subversive: perhaps an anarchist perspective. In other words, the theorists of media themselves project their analyses within an ideological framework. Richardson and Meinhof are somewhat anxious about them, apparently on the basis of broad (and unspecified) ethical considerations. A Closer Look at Supposed Destabilising Effects in the New Media Discourse The evidence that people's lived experience is altered in some significant way by changes in broadcasting is not obviously attainable, whether one is talking about the Gutenberg revolution, the supposedly global village or the marketisation of electronic media. This is not to say that the changing technological and economic systems of the media are without social, political and psychological effect, however. Changes in discourse practices (visual as well as verbal) can be described. Likely processing and interpretation by viewers can be speculated about. Do they have some validity on the basis that the discourse analyst him/herself is a social participant? Yes, but if the analyst takes the position that audiences are fragmented indefinitely, group boundaries are fuzzy, and meanings are indeterminate, it is difficult to make generalisations consistently. Any account does indeed become autobiographical phenomenology. This is fine, if one regards one's accounts simply as part of an ongoing shared conversation among subjectivities. But discourse analysts working within the perspectives discussed here have not quite abandoned the desire to do research and give findings. Temporal dislocation A strong argument that perceived reality is somehow changed by new TV practices is the following. TV companies find it profitable to re-broadcast programmes of various genres, including non-fiction programmes originally produced for scheduled broadcasting and containing temporal deictics such as 'tomorrow', 'today', 'yesterday'. If the re-broadcast is presented, framed as such, then viewers simply disregard such expressions. But TV companies may find it advantageous (they may want to pass off old material as new) not to signal that there is a past time-frame. The implication is that viewers' sense of temporal order

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would become 'destabilised'. This is questionable. For a start, it makes the assumption, under the strong hypothesis, that media do in fact construct reality for individuals, in this case their temporal reality. Secondly, it can be argued that the possibility of such 'destabilisation' is what deters the TV companies from removing framing indicators of timepeople would simply not tolerate it and the viewing figures would fall. Thirdly, it is not at all evident that all cues of temporal frame would or could be removed. Reality is not entirely defined by the broadcast genre in question; competing broadcasts would operate according to temporal frames; moreover, so would the non-broadcast discourses of everyday life. Finally, destabilisation could only conceivably occur if viewers positioned themselves subjectively as participants in an interaction in which they were addressees (the ones referred to in 'join us tomorrow') or as co-subjects in 'we expressions ('tomorrow we will look at . . .'). It is not at all clear that this is what viewers do in a multi-channel environment. They may rather simply experience themselves as observers or bystanders. It is here that a significant effect could arise, and which would be in marked contrast to the era of national broadcasting. In a national broadcasting situation, there may be a more extensive sense of participation, though even this is difficult to demonstrate. Richardson and Meinhof argue that soap operas have shifted from being synchronised with viewers' lived time to 'dislocation', both by producing omnibus editions and by repeats. In such repeats a speaker's 'now', for instance, can no longer be interpreted by a viewer as aligned with their own 'now'. First, was it ever really aligned in the same sense as would be the 'now' of someone sitting in the same room as the viewer? Do viewers, or did they, ever regard themselves as participants in a speech event in which they are referred to as 'you' in the same way as they are by the person in the same room? Deictics are after all flexible: 'It was tomorrow that she would confront Fake Jake. It was now at last that she would reveal all'. We can make sense of this in terms of 'mental spaces' (cf. Fauconnier, 1994) Interpreting this sentence involves having a speaker's time space and a past time space triggered by the 'it was' (and preceding narrative text); the 'tomorrow' floats up, so to say, to the speaker's time space. Viewers may be doing something of the sort in watching repeated narratives, if they are not simply disregarding them. This is not exactly analogous to the problem of interpreting 'now' and 'tomorrow' in a soap operaor news narratives, for that matterthat is desynchronised, but it does illustrate the potential for flexible understanding of deictics. Explaining the viewers' processing mechanism rests on the assumption that they know the broadcast in question is a repeat. Richardson and Meinhof are concerned with the situation where viewers do not know. To assume such a situation could arise one has to assume not only that broadcasting companies remove framing devices and indications in printed schedules, but that there are no other cues internal to the broadcast discourse itself. Viewers are not entirely limited by TV, but bring background knowledge to the processing of material. There is a further stage in their argument: because in re-broadcast materials deictics have to be ignored (if they do), then the deitics in synchronised broadcasts may also be ignored. This seems to be tantamount to the familiar argument that news reports, which one might ordinarily assume to be carrying

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truth claims, may become viewed with the same discursive mindset as are soap operas and the like. This raises a serious issuenamely, the issue of truth claims (as opposed to the TV creates reality claim), and I turn to it below. Fragmentation Richardson and Meinhof suggest that the increase in channel choice leads to a 'fragmentation of viewing', which appears to include (1) the tendency of the mass audience to 'fragment into smaller groups, each watching different channels', and (2) 'consuming the merest fragments of ''texts'' across the whole spectrum of channels'. The first kind of fragmentation corresponds to what has been termed 'narrowcasting'. Whether a numerical increase in channels corresponds to a numerical increase in the number of social groups is in part an empirical question. But it should be pointed out that, in principle, the situation can be said to be complex. The fragmentation metaphor can be misleading: fragments (of a broken mass) are discrete splinters. But neither social groups nor individuals can be regarded in this way: social groups overlap, because individuals belong to many groups and have many roles (and 'selves'). It is not clear a priori that an increase in channels could correspond tofar less causefragmentation that is in some sense destabilising. The second kind of 'fragmentation' relates to viewing practices. It seems to have two sub-kinds: 'consuming' fragments and hopping from fragment to fragment on several different channels. While Richardson and Meinhof point out that there is little evidence that this practice is displacing concentrated viewing of single programmes, they do seem concerned that fragmentary channel juxtapositions 'affect phenomenological stability'. What is it that could be found problematic about channel hoping? Apart from the fact that it is difficult, if not impossible, for discourse analysts to research empirically, there may be a question concerning cognitive destabilisation of temporal and spatial sequencing. This seems most unlikely. One form of channel hopping permits one to watch two channels quasi-simultaneously. Viewing (like reading) is an active process involving the use of visual and linguistic clues to reconstruct meaningful structures of meaning, such as narratives. Prototypical narrative schemas stored in memory make it possible for viewers to reconstruct two (or more?) different story-lines. 'Fragments' are all that is needed; the fragments are not consumed discretely. It is difficult not to reconstruct some sort of narrative, or other, structure, however random the incoming chunks of text. Note that the narrative and other schemas that are deployed have a socially shared origin. Of course, one might conceive of individuals amusing themselves with deliberate suppression of meaning schemas and enjoyment of random sensory stimulation, though such an aesthetic might still be socially and culturally embedded. It is far from clear that it is plausible to claim increased psychological fragmentation in the viewing process. What does appear to be significant is much simpler to state and much more widely commented on. First, broadcasting has moved away from the assumption that its audience is an undifferentiated mass; second it has moved away from national discourses; and third it has moved away from synchronising mass national discourse with national ceremonies, festivals, holidays and calendars.

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This is simply a consequence of a change in political and economic conditions. Political control has lessened or disappeared. The multiplicity of channels now technically possible facilitates the shift from a public service conception of broadcasting to a free-market conception. If consumer-viewers create enough demand for synchronous national discourse, someone will manufacture it and they will be able to buy it. The difference will be that it will not be a mass experience, and individuals will not be able to assume that it can form the basis of a common nationally collective conversation in the pubs and drawing rooms of the land, if it ever did. A serious implication of such a change is specifically political. It can be argued that a unitary mass national broadcasting system (or at least one with some low number of channels) can serve diverse political ends, ranging from totalitarian propaganda, through the manufacture of capitalist consensus, to a utopian citizens' participation in democracy. There are two sides to the radical shift from unitary to multiple media. On the one hand, plurality offers, some would argue, a safeguard against totalitarian control, and against elite control in democracies. The diversity and the consumer's right to choose guarantees liberty in this way of thinking. On the other hand, consider the likely situation in which one has to pay to view proceedings in the national (or for that matter supranational) assembly rather than having the right, as a citizen, to access a broadcast of regular, and synchronous, parliamentary debate. In this way of thinking, consumers who cannot pay are not citizens; and perhaps the consumers who can and do pay, do not constitute themselves as citizens either, or, if they do, we have a citizenry in which some have more access to the decision-making process than do others. Spatial destabilisation We are speaking here of theoretical fragmentation of internal national societies. The new technology also extends the erosion of national sovereignty to the extent that viewers can theoretically receive transmissions from any source on the globe's surface. Even before satellite relays, political authority could be undermined by boundary-crossing transmissions, as in the case of the former Bundesrepublik and the DDR. Richardson and Meinhof put forward the idea that the potential for viewers' hopping between channels transmitted from diverse nation states and diverse regions within those states creates yet another level of destabilisation. Two kinds of consideration give rise to concerns on the part of media and discourse analysts. The first has to do with discourse structure, and specifically the use and interpretation of deictic words. Billig (1995) believes that the use of deictic words such as 'here', 'this' (e.g. 'this country'),'we', 'our' play a crucial role in constructing national identity. Identity would thus be closely connected with the location of speakers, location within a bounded territory, speaking moreover the English language. (One has to invent a special context for Nous les habitants de ce pays to be taken to refer to England or Japan.) Richardson and Meinhof speak of 'texts [. . .] constructing spatio-temporal "homes"'. In their view multi-channel transnational media will expose viewers to the experience of 'movement between texts which are constructing different homes', and will cause 'destabilisation'. 1 This claim could refer to some form of generalised cognitive confusion, or to some sort of destabilisation of existing national identities (which

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are also of course cognitive constructs). But there is surely no need to fear any kind of cognitive derangement, whereby viewers would be torn between conflicting references or occurrences of the word 'here'. It is a quite normal experience to encounter someone (say on the telephone) using the word 'here' to refer to their 'here'. Individuals presumably set up a mental space for their own 'here' and a different one for someone else's 'here'. In any case, viewers are unlikely to regard themselves as direct participants in a speech event in which they are directly addressed as 'you'; 'we' in a mediated text probably requires special conditions before it is viewed by the viewer as including viewer (as, say, part of a national 'we'). Moreover, there are strong cues that trigger separate spaces for the viewerin particular, national languages. Consider the sort of case noted above. Suppose an Irish viewer hears (and understands), say, 'in diesem Land haben wir manche Probleme . . .', they are likely to readily interpret the reference of the deictic words as referring to Germany or one of the German Länder. But this leads us to the second consideration, which has to do with a specific kind of access problemlanguage barriers. The supposed destabilising effect of juxtaposed deictic 'homes' must pale into insignificance when language differences are kept in mind. A viewer will only have as many such juxtapositions as they have languages, at least under present conditions in which English is not a universal medium of communication. To consider the situation in which English were the universal medium, political issues of a different order of magnitude present themselves. An alternative scenario in which multiple deictic 'homes' would confront a viewer would be in one in which 'here' was connected to regions speaking the same language or mutually intelligible varieties. This scenario in itself raises the crucial question of the extent to which language difference is constitutive of separate identity, particularly where relatively small units in relatively small geographical areas are concerned. Languages that are actually rather closely related, so much so that they can be seen as variants and are certainly mutually intelligible, may be modified by their speakers to create difference. This has been the case in the Balkans between variants of Serbo-Croat. In such cases media play a crucial role in creating national difference, by establishing discourses as well as linguistic variants that construct a distinct 'here' and a distinct 'we'. But this is not a direct product of satellite, or multi-channel technology, though some components of the technology are exploited, but rather a product of political movements and ideologies. The converse of this situationthe media role in the differentiation of sovereign states under the impulsion of nationalismis supranational integration. Richardson and Meinhof state that nation states are still the reference points for deictic words that occur in the relevant kinds of contextin those contexts, that is, 'we', for example, can be taken to refer to a collective body or 'here' to a territory. The significance of these examples is ambiguous. It is not clear what is the direction of causality, or whether there is a causal phenomenon at all. It is easy for discourse analysts to claim that discourse 'constructs' or 'constitutes' identity. However, it is not at all clear that public discourse can felicitously use 'we' to mean 'Europeans' and 'here' to mean 'Europe'. It appears,

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rather, that media discourse which seeks to 'posit Europe as home' is unable to use deictics in this fashion: instead, 'there is a constant naming of the home, of Europe' (Richardson and Meinhof). If the nation on the other hand can be 'posited as home' in media discourse, this cannot just be because the media discourse uses deictics, and other discourse structures, to 'construct' the nation. The conditions that make it possible for public discourse to felicitously use a collective 'we' and territorial 'here' must be complex. They must involve many social and political institutions, and the interconnecting communicational systems, of which 'the media' are just a part. At the most, the fact that a national collective 'we' and a national territorial 'here' seem natural can be taken as a significant index of current political cultures and their values in the European land mass. Furthermore, if one speculates about the pragmatic conditions under which 'we' and 'here' can be used territorially, the political implications appear problematic. These deictic words are not defined internally. Typically, they come in oppositional pairs: here as opposed to there; we as opposed to you. In western political discourse, and certainly in the discourse of nation-states, self has been defined in relation to other. If political collective and territorial deixis depends on nation state institutions, beliefs and discourse, it may be argued that a collective and territorial European deixis will have to rest on some similar form of (supra)nationalist discourse. In short, 'we (Europeans)' could be rendered natural in a Eurocentric political culture, that foregrounded Europe as opposed to other geopolitical constructs (Africa, Asia, North America, for example). Such a conception of Europe would be questioned by many. TV as Truth The prevailing tendency in media discourse analysis is concerned with the discursive construction of realities and identities, and their possible disruption. To conclude this section we refocus this approach slightly onto the problem of trutha problem that is often avoided under the influence of postmodernist relativism. The theoretical components of this analysis are first the notion of truth claims and the notion of mental spaces. Habermas, and, in a different paradigm, Grice, have argued that any utterance raises validity claims, among which is an implicit claim by the speaker that they are being truthful (Habermas, 1979; Grice, 1989). The notion of mental spaces is used in semantics to analyse the complexities of reference (Fauconnier, 1994) Let us consider a seemingly trivial casethe case of the Vanessa Show (BBC TV). This belongs to the genre 'talk show', in which members of the public reveal personal problems or misdemeanours, exposing themselves to question by the show 'host' or 'hostess' and by a live audience. The British newspaper the Mirror (11/2/99) made the claim that in a certain transmission of the show one of the 'guests' (such terms are part of the genre and arise from the roles assigned to participants in the show's selfconstruction) was an unemployed professional actress masquerading as an 'abused wife' (in effect, another stereotypical role in the show's narrative structure), and that two other women 2 acting the roles of 'sisters locked in a family feud' had also been bogus. It was alleged that the three women had been supplied by a commercial agency in full knowledge of the facts.

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The BBC immediately announced an enquiry. Evidently the belief was that such shows made a claim to truthfulness, or, more precisely, made a claim that the 'guests' made a claim to truthfulness. However, when interviewed by BBC radio journalists two viewers said that it was irrelevant to them whether the 'guests' were telling the truth or not; they apparently also believed that even genuine 'guests' would not necessarily be speaking truthfully. Nonetheless, there are also viewers who would be surprised, and perhaps displeased, as were the BBC managers, to find that the implicit truthfulness claim was flouted. One issue is which viewers, or which viewer groups, take the truthfulness claim seriously and which do not, and whether there is any change in such attitudes that may affect the transmission of reality-congruent discourses such as news reports and documentary. The aim here is not to explore differential patterns of viewing attitudes, but to explore the structures of mediated discourse that may lead to conflicts over representations of reality. The controversial overlap of documentary and fiction genres is part of this broader question. It is not enough to say that absolute truth is dead, and that since all representations of reality are just that, re-presentations, there is no valid distinction between fiction and truth claims. The problem with narrative in everyday conversation is that there is a large overlap between those narratives claiming to be truthful and those claiming to be fictional. Part of the problem is that 'fictional narratives' do not, in fact, claim to be fictionalthey claim to be truthful within an institutional frame that allows them to be interpreted as fictional; and there may of course be features within the narrative texts that elicit such an interpretation (fantastic elements, and the like that conflict with discourses of everyday knowledge). Now the TV talk show has formal similarities to drama and novels and films: there is a physically institutionalised setting within which a narrative takes place. This may encourage viewers to regard the Vanessa show as some species of the genus fiction. It may not be the case that viewers grant truth claims in a straightforward fashion in the case of such programmes. Nonetheless the issue is not clear cut, because a claim to truth was in effect challenged by the Mirror, BBC and others. However, the most serious issue arises from the fact that the basic structure of the talk showa narrative apparently resting on truth claimsis not dissimilar from other TV and radio genres. In particular, despite differences in internal structure, this is the basic structure for news reporting and documentaries. The question thus arises whether viewers accept on trust the truth claims of, say, news programmes, in a way that is different from such programmes as talk shows. The question is an empirical one: discourse analysis of the programme genres themselves may be necessary but it cannot be a sufficient condition for establishing how, to what extent, and among which social groups truth claims are or are not granted. To focus on this question, however, is surely important, since there are further questions lurking behind the empirical ones. If it turned out that some people accepted truth claims uncritically, and that this had some connection with the discursive nature of broadcast genres, then serious ethical issues emerge, and equally serious issues of political control. Since the processing by viewers of TV discourse is a cognitive process,

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application of mental space theory may be illuminating. Although the theory is usually applied to the semantics of sentences, it links meaning to generalised cognitive mechanisms. Here we apply it, speculatively, to the verbal and visual units of TV discourse. Interestingly enough, Fauconnier's theory takes as its point of departure the fact that people can link and separate real spaces and fictional or representational or belief spaces: 'In Len's painting the girl with blue eyes has green eyes'. In this sentence 'the girl with blue eyes' is in the speaker's mental space 'real world' (R) and the 'girl with green eyes' is in the speaker's mental space 'Len's painting' (M). The sentence connects the two spaces by a function that puts them in something like an image-person relationship. Now, extensions of this line of inquiry lead inter alia to problems of existential referenceapproximately what we have referred to earlier as truth claims, and here more specifically truth claims about the existence of such-and-such. The classic presupposition problems can be analysed in terms of mental spaces. Thus 'Luke believes that it is probable that the king of France is bald' has the presupposition 'there exists a present king of France'. Although this assertion is, as it were, embedded in Luke's belief, the sentence still presupposes its truthfulness. The sentence is thus slightly destabilising for some speaker or hearer who knows that there is truly no king of France at the time of utterance. For it not to be cognitively annoying, the presupposition has to be explicitly blocked by adding some extra clause, as in: 'Luke believes that it is probable that the king of France is bald, even though in fact there is no king of France' (Fauconnier, 1994: 101, summarised in Saeed, 1997: 326). (We shall get back to Vanessa shortly). What is going on here? Fauconnier proposes that presuppositions (such as the existential presupposition) 'move' or as he puts it 'float' from one space to another, unless blocked by some contradiction in some mental space into which it floats. What is in the R space creates a discord with the king-of-France presupposition. The significant point is that Fauconnier postulates a general cognitive principle, called 'optimisation'. It can be thought of as a 'laziness principle' (Saeed, 1997: 327). In essence, the principle says that the speaker's R space and any other space M that is set up will be structured as similarly as possible. You will expect your projected space to be like your reality space. In natural language various linguistic elements act as 'space builders', and by analogy we can analyse TV discourse in similar ways. Thus the confessional talk show might be said to have a structure corresponding to: (R (In the show (Vanessa believes that Savanah Davies's husband beats her))). There are two space builders: 'in the show' and 'Vanessa believes', and a presupposition 'Savannah Davies has a husband'. But why is the presupposition not confined to the M space of Vanessa's belief, or to the M space of the show? Presumably, the presupposition floats up to the parent R space by the laziness principle. In that space there is nothing to contradict it and cause cognitive discomfort. For some people, perhaps, there is something that stops the presupposition floating into R. Similarly, the truth claim inherent in 'Vanessa believes' (all the verbal and visual cues that this is the case) float up to R, though

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for some people it might not get past the 'in the show' space builder. The idea may or may not be entertained that Vanessa may be acting belief, or even that Vanessa's beliefs may be mistaken. Analysing the example in this way shows that the natural tendency to accept presuppositions may play an important role. But it can also be noted that the discourse cues of the genre converge with that tendency: the 'show' has none of the conventional cues of the fictional genre and can be interpreted by some viewers as part of their R itself. In the mental space that is set up there is a structure something like: 'X is the beaten wife'. But this is not interpreted as an imaginary space in which X acts a role (X in R is linked with 'beaten wife in M); nor is it interpreted as X being a character in the show space who is a beaten wife. This is a preliminary attempt at describing the cognitive structures that may be involved in the viewing of such genres. It may be that it can be established more precisely that such genres encourage the merging of speakers' assessment of reality with other mental spaces, or that they discourage checking across the spaces. Notes 1. The 'home' metaphor has an interesting precedent in recent history. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev used the 'European house (home)' metaphor in a bid to have the Soviet Union admitted to the West in the 1980s, a bid that caused some conceptual and political consternation. Indeed, his metaphor may be said to have 'destabilised' the prevailing discourse that posited the West and East as separate containing spaces and sealed identities. 2. Described by the paper as 'strippergrams who had only just met'. References Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Fauconnier, G. (1994) Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grice, P. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. (1979) Communication and the Evolution of Society. London: Heinemann. Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995) Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge. Richardson, K. and Meinhof, U.H. (1999) Worlds in Common? Television Discourse in a Changing Europe. London: Routledge. Saeed, J.I. (1997) Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell. Scannnell, P. (1996) Radio, Television and Modern Life. London: Blackwell. Scannell, P. and Cardiff, D. (1991) A Social History of British Broadcasting: Serving the Nation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Legislators and Interpreters in the New Television Age: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson Dennis Smith Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK Ulrike Meinhof and Kay Richardson argue that although television used to be 'regulated, national, routine ... [and] familiar', a new European media environment has been brought about by multi-channelling. Meinhof and Richardson are concerned about the variety of ways in which multi-channelling in European television is altering the conditions under which programmes are produced, transmitted and watched. They identify a number of challenges and dilemmas. For example, producers of broadcasts intended for specific local or regional audiences have to take into account the fact that there may be many 'eavesdroppers' from other localities and regions able to watch their programmes. At the other extreme, a genre of 'European' programming has developed which targets a continent-wide audience that actually consists of an aggregate of national audiences. In this case, the use of European symbols often seems artificial, unrelated to lived experience. Meinhof and Richardson identify two other ways in which multi-channelling imposes new challenges upon viewers. In their view, the fact that viewers have the freedom to pick and choose within an increasingly large number of channels means that they may be continually confronted with unfamiliar contexts of space and time. This happens in two ways. Firstly, they may experience a sense of fragmentation. Meinhof and Richardson do not support a 'strong' version of the fragmentation thesis. In other words, they do not respond in a 'celebratory' way to the dislocating effects produced by multi-channelling. Nor do they believe these effects are particularly serious. In fact, they believe that 'individuals' ability to protect the phenomenological coherence of their world may prove to be rather robust'. They are a little more concerned about another phenomenon which is the increased use of 'stripping' (which makes all days of the week alike) and of the hourly cycle, for example on the 24-hour news channels and shopping channels 1. They argue that this practice subjects viewers to routines that are outside the pattern of their daily lives. They comment: 'It is a formal routine, not an experiential one. It might even be called dehumanising'. The paper illustrates these phenomena in an interesting way, tracing what the authors describe as 'television discourse in transition'. However, the transition is largely taken as given without any sustained analysis of why these changes are occurring and, just as interesting, why they provoke anxiety among the ranks of Europe's intellectuals. My first response is that multi-channelling is not a matter of television leading us into a new age. Instead, television is catching up with an already existing world, a world of 'consumer sovereignty', multi-screen cinemas, 24-hour supermarket shopping, and pick-and-mix international tourism (Thailand at

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Christmas, Miami at Easter, Tuscany in August . . .). For millions of people, the consumer sovereignty they experience in the market place is in sharp contrast with the lack of control they experience in the employment setting, in spite of the rhetoric of 'empowerment'. The mixture of experience provided by television fragmentation interspersed with routineis a reflection of the rest of social life. Dehumanising routines are, in fact, a familiar aspect of the work lives of many television viewers, although in the case of office and factory workers the dehumanisation consists in their being forced by economic necessity to remain tied to the work station or assembly line. In the case of news programmes, at least they have a choice about when to switch on and off. Television is not a cultural trendsetter, in general. It is inherently conservative, an expensive operation averse to risk. For example, in reporting politics and sport, two staples of journalism, television runs alongside, and often follows, the newspapers. This is in spite of the fact that, nearly half a century after the television age began, enough time has passed for even the youngest 'cross-over' recruit from print journalism in the early 1950s to have retired. Print journalism is not the only influence upon television, a medium that has generated its own professional culture of producers, reporters, editors and executives, with its own standards, concerns and anxieties. The interests of share-holders and advertisers is also a powerful consideration, ensuring that programmes follow rather than lead popular taste. I would like to suggest that what disturbs intellectuals about recent trends in television, such as the increase in the number of channels available to viewers, is the fact that the power of choice in respect of cultural consumption is being extended to the people at large. More precisely, the upsetting aspect of this 'downward' extension of choice, as far as traditional academics are concerned, is that the people are being allowed 'unguided' choice. To be even more specific, the guidance they receive is not from the traditional educators but from the advertisers. Intellectuals within Europe's national states have had the power of choice for centuries through their access to libraries, their capacity to travel, and their extensive social networks of colleagues. These same intellectuals have had power and responsibility over popular education. They have taught the people through local and national education systems, initially through the Church and later through state-financed schools. As Zygmunt Bauman puts it, intellectuals have been 'legislators' who looked upon the poverty-stricken masses as 'the dangerous classes', men and women who 'had to be guided and instructed to prevent them from destroying social order' (Bauman, 1987: 58). Schools, prisons, hospitals and welfare services were all part of the realm of authority and control presided over by legislative intellectuals. The argument made by Bauman, for example in his Legislators and Interpreters (Bauman, 1987) is very relevant. 2 He argues that during the past few decades the part played by intellectuals has undergone a profound transformation. Three things have happened. One is that the generalised expertise supplied by intellectuals trained in the Classics, the Humanities and the less technical end of the social sciences has become largely redundant. It has largely been supplanted by more specialised expertise, the kind needed when power is increasingly

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exercised through the 'case conference, diagnostic and allocation board or pre-sentence investigation unit' (Cohen, 1985: 185). Another change is that the market place has become 'the judge, the opinion-maker, the verifier of values' (Bauman, 1987: 124) This has undermined the self-confidence and authority of all intellectuals, specialist or general. Now they only have credibility if their services can be shown to have a market value and can therefore be judged as worthy and useful. Finally, now the old structures of power dominated by legislative intellectuals have been weakened and supplanted, the 'truths' and 'certainties' those intellectuals purveyed have also lost their legitimacy. Culture has become both a playground and a battleground: a playground in which you can choose your style, your persona, your 'truth'; a battleground between warring intellectual tribes each playing its own word game. Intellectuals can no longer 'legislate' for national societies in the way they used to. Instead, they survive the best way they can in this confused arena, offering their services as 'experts' or 'interpreters'. Euronews is a nice example of this interpreting role being enacted. As Meinhof and Richardson point out, 'although a form of Euro-Interlanguage' is sometimes deployed, 'viewers are constantly reminded of the continent's diversity. Europe is not normalised as a pseudo-monolingual space'. The linguistic diversity of Europe means that there is little prospect, in the medium term at least, of a unified European intellectual elite emerging with control over a uniform, continent-wide culture transmitted through a standardised education system. In other words, the intellectual's role as legislator is probably gone forever, in Europe at least. Many people will not regret this but will wonder how 'Enlightenment' values such as freedom, equality, justice and rationality can be supported. The best chance may be for intellectuals to carve niches within the television discourse of the Third age of broadcasting'. This will mean compromising with fragmentation in order to subvert dehumanisation. In a multi-channelled television environment, intellectuals should make sure they are being seen and heard on at least some of the channels. Notes 1. The one-hour cycle is, in fact, a traditional idea, one pioneered by 'news cinemas' which, before the advent of television, showed a sequence of newsreels repeatedly through the day. 2. For a critical assessment of Bauman's approach, see Smith (forthcoming). References Bauman, Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters. Cambridge: Polity. Cohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Cambridge: Polity. Smith, D. (forthcoming) Zygmunt BaumanProphet of Postmodernity. A Critical Appraisal. Cambridge: Polity.

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When Worlds CollideSome Cinematic Afterthoughts on the Televisual Experience in the Third Age of Broadcasting: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson Anne White Department of Modern Languages, University of Bradford, West Yorkshire, BD7 1DP, UK In their book, Worlds in Common? Television Discourse in a Changing Europe (1999), Kay Richardson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof examine how, over the course of the last two decades, technological advances, coupled with economic and political upheavals within Europe, have led to the creation of a new kind of media environment, the so-called 'Third Age of Broadcasting' (Wenham, 1982). In this Third Age, many of those elements of the televisual experience associated with traditional terrestrial broadcasting have begun to disappear. The kind of shared viewing memories which are related in Opening the Box The Popular Experience of Television (Clayton et al., 1995) seem likely to become a thing of the past, with increasing audience fragmentation caused by the arrival of the era of multi-channel television. Today's viewers can not only choose what they want to watch from the range of channels and delivery systems available but also when they want to watch it, thanks to video recorders and channels which show scheduled repeats of films, like Sky Movies, or of old episodes of soaps, like UK Gold. My personal experience of this Third Age of broadcasting comes mainly via frequent visits to our departmental Resources Centre for language learners where many of the positive, and also potentially negative, features of these new television worlds are only too apparent. In 1991, our students of Russian were amongst those 'eyewitnesses viewing history being made', to use MacGregor's phrase (1997: 184), able to watch on live television the storming of the White House in Moscow. This year's cohort can relive that momentous media moment on video if they so choose but they are now more likely to be watching one of the numerous Mexican- or American-made soap operas dubbed into Russian which have become an integral part of that country's programming output. A glance round the monitors in the viewing room often gives one an eerie sense of déjà vu and of dislocation. A quiz show, La famille en or, is being broadcast: Two smiling families try to guess the outcome of surveys carried out among the studio audience, assisted by a charming, smartly-dressed male compère. It is the French version of Family Fortunes, sans Les Dennis, of course, but with the same format. Another French channel is showing a trailer for a new series of Friends, followed by adverts, two of which are instantly familiar to me from UK television. A third monitor presents a talk show. A studio audience watch and occasionally participate as a man and two women engage in animated discussion with each other, in the presence of a female presenter. This might be a live daytime talk

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show on UK terrestrial television or a German show coming live via satellite. It could be a re-broadcast of an American original or perhaps even a video of any of these, recorded some time previously. As an outside observer, in this instance, I can only guess. I also wonder about the student watching the programme. Is she a language student analysing different forms of address or comparing body language codes across cultures? A passionate consumer of daytime talk shows? Or an uninterested eavesdropper, waiting impatiently for the start of the next programme? On another monitor, the hands on the clock show the wrong time (half past eight) followed by the opening sequence for the Televisión Española evening news, complete with the Telediario caption and logo as they appeared in the late eighties. This student is obviously watching an archive tape. However, when the newsreader appears, I am immediately struck by her unconventional appearance and behaviour. She is a white-haired, elderly woman, wearing unflattering thick-rimmed spectacles and a dress which is definitely not designer wear. She has none of the air of detached professionality associated with the television newsreader, as she keeps self-consciously consulting her script and appears to be having problems in deciphering what is written there. For a split second, I am totally bemused until I realise that this is not archival material but a scene from the film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) by the Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar. In this brief sequence, he mischievously subverts the conventions of the television news programme by casting his own mother, who is not a professional actress, in the role of newsreader. All the usual trappings of the news studio set are there, including the imposing desk and the grainy black and white photographic image used to accompany the evening's headline story, but there is also a more unusual addition: a potted plant with brightly coloured flowers is clearly visible on the newsreader's desk. It is a small but significant detail, for it suggests a personal touch and thus acts to subtly undermine the impersonal and supposedly impartial space of the news studio. Like many of the film directors dubbed 'postmodernist' by the critics, Almodóvar is a keen observer of televisual culture and his films are full of references to the all-pervading influence of this popular medium on contemporary society. However, although his work is full of often wickedly humorous parodies and pastiches of television genres, in particular advertising spots, ultimately he maintains an ambivalent attitude towards the medium. In Kika, his tenth feature, he addresses some of the kind of concerns about 'quality' versus 'trash' television which were voiced briefly by those participating in the CILS seminar, concerns which are considered at much greater length in Part III of Richardson and Meinhof's book. In fact, the two genres which Almódovar parodies in Kika appear to epitomise the extremes of the quality-trash spectrum since one is a real-life crime show and the other an arts programme focusing on the literary world. The Worst of the Day (Lo peor del dfa) is hosted by the extravagantly costumed Andrea 'Scarface' Caracortada (Victoria Abril), a psychologist turned predatory television presenter who videos crimes being committed and then interviews, in confrontational mode, not only the criminals but also their victims. In addition,

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she provides a news round-up of the most shocking events of the day together with a slot focusing on video footage of gory religious rituals. The Spanish director thus ridicules the voyeuristic spectacle and exploitative excesses of a genre which like the more controversial US chat shows, is often classed as being 'at the bottom of the television barrel' (Bennett, 1995). However, his parodic treatment of a book review programme with its supposedly lofty cultural ideals, may lead spectators to question exactly how much distance exists between these two genres on the quality-trash spectrum. For all its literary pretensions, Read More (Hay que leer mds), hosted by Doña Paquita, played by Almodóvar's octogenarian mother, is finally exposed to be merely a glorified exercise in book marketing, more QVC than ARTE. 1 Her interviewee is a novelist unashamedly exploiting press speculations about his troubled private life to promote his latest work and there are suggestions that Doña Paquita has herself become something of a celebrity in a culture which celebrates the camp and the kitsch. Beyond this, the programme also seems to be a prime example of 'narrowcasting', having been designed to appeal to a particular segment of the audience in a world where viewers don't have to 'waste time on things that don't interest them or which take them out of their depth' (Richardson & Meinhof, 1999: 87). Unfortunately in this worst-case scenario, it produces a show which is not only devoid of any intellectual content but which is so localised and inward-looking that it is verging on the xenophobic. Thus having wrongly introduced her guest, Doña Paquita explains 'I'm bad at foreign names' ('Los nombres extranjeros se me dan muy mal') and, unperturbed, urges him to try some chorizo, which is a speciality of the local region: just like her, she jokes. In the course of their discussion, when he mentions Burroughs and Althusser, she freely admits she has no idea who they are, adding: 'But then, they're not Spaniards, are they?' ('Tampoco son españoles ¿verdad?'). Her unapologetically nationalistic stance is summed up by her remark that 'There's nothing quite like Spain' ('Es que como España, no hay nada'). Certainly, in this particular part of Almodóvar's imagined televisual universe, viewers would have no problems establishing the boundaries between 'Home' and 'Away'. By far the most fascinating, and also humorous, sustained filmic comment on the destabilising and dislocating effects of the televisual reality of the late 20th century, is to be found in Maurizio Nichetti's The Icicle Thief (I adri di saponette). At the start of the film, a number of clearly delineated and distinct 'worlds' are shown to the spectator, each occupying their own notional space and time. In present day Italy, a television studio is preparing to broadcast a film by a director called Nichetti. The film, a contemporary homage to Italian Neorealist cinema, in particular de Sica's The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette), has been shot in black and white and is set in post-war Italy. To the director's dismay he learns that it will be screened with frequent breaks for advertising slots. We are also shown an Italian family preparing for an evening's TV viewing in their living room. Suddenly, as spectators we are momentarily subjected to what Morley and Robins might refer to as an experience of 'disorientation, dislocation and fragmentation' (1995: 74) as a random selection of images is rapidly presented to us: scenes from a pop promo video, sports coverage, a black and white film and

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an item from a shopping channel. However, it soon becomes apparent that this postmodern collage is being produced by a child with a remote-control who is zapping through the TV channels in search of cartoons, eminently capable of negotiating the disorder created by 'this space of absolute proximity and instantaneity' (Morley & Robins, 1995: 74). 2 This brief episode also foreshadows the momentary confusion which the spectator later experiences when two 'worlds' collide, as the storyline of the black and white film being broadcast is interrupted without warning by a commercial break.3 However, this sensation proves to be a short-lived one for anyone who has ever watched a film shown on a commercial channel because our televisual knowledge allows us to make sense of this rapid shift between textual zones. In the middle of another advertising break, the transmission of the film is temporarily interrupted by a power cut and when this technical hitch has been sorted out, the broadcast resumes but all is not well. For the previously clearly delineated boundaries between the various spatial and temporal 'worlds' represented on the screen have somehow become blurred: the child in the black and white film is heard singing one of the jingles from a spot shown in the commercial break and stares longingly out of the television set at the chocolate bar being eaten by a young boy playing in front of the screen, imitating his chewing. These boundaries finally dissolve completely with hilarious results as characters slip freely from one textual zone to another. Eventually, desperate to try and regain control of his film, the director himself ends up inside these televisual and cinematic worlds, but despite his best efforts, he fails to restore order and is last seen, like one of his own characters, staring out from the television screen, pleading with the family who have been watching his film not to turn off the set. Nichetti's film, like the work of Almodóvar, can be read as a witty comment on the televisual experience in the Third Age of broadcasting, but what makes these filmic fantasies all the more fascinating is that, in today's multi-channel media environment, the truth is indeed stranger than any of the fictional scenarios these film directors invented. News broadcasts on Live TV are accompanied by non-verbal commentary from the News Bunny. The hosts of daytime talk shows interview guests who turn out to be professional actors, merely playing yet another role. Footage of real crimes and accidents taken by police surveillance cameras, security CCTV and the emergency services routinely appears on our television screens. Characters from the BBC EastEnders soap opera who had been 'killed off' are resurrected to appear in a BT advertising campaign shown on ITV. Lesley Grantham alias 'Dirty Den' can currently be seen endorsing a bath foam with the slogan 'Who says there's no life after soap?' It seems particularly apt to end these cinematic afterthoughts on the CILS seminar with a suitably reworked version of the words which signalled the start of a revolution also brought about by technological advances and one which changed forever the medium of film as we know it. For there is no escaping the fact that television discourse is currently in transition and that, for better or for worse, 'You ain't seen nothin' yet . . .'.

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Notes 1. Both the European Shopping Channel, QVC (Quality, Value, Convenience), and the culture channel, ARTE (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne), are analysed by Meinhof and Richardson. 2. Visual effects imitating zapping or channel surfing seem to be finding their way into an increasing amount of television advertising in the nineties, having been used, for example, in a spot for the Toyota RAV 4 where the message seemed to be 'If this kind of thing annoys or confuses you, then this is not the car for you'. 3. When The Icicle Thiefwas transmitted on Channel Four, this effect of worlds in collision was further complicated by the fact that the film was interrupted by a series of real commercial breaks, one of which contained a spot for Fosters lager, parodying the notions of Italianicity typically evoked in film. References Almodóvar, P. (1988) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown). Spain. Almodóvar, P. (1996) Kika. Spain. Bennett, W.J. (1995) Statement by William J Bennett, announcing a public campaign against select day-time television talk shows, 26 October, http://www.heritage.org/empower/pr1026a.html: Bennett. Clayton, I. et al. (eds (1995) Opening the BoxThe Popular of Experience of Television. Bradford: Yorkshire Art Circus/National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. De Sica, V. (1948) Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief). Italy. MacGregor, B. (1997) Live, Direct and Biased: Making News in the Satellite Age. London: Edward Arnold. Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995) Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge. Nichetti, M. (1989) Ladri di saponette (The Icicle Thief). Italy. Richardson, K. and Meinhof, U.H. (1999) Worlds in Common? Television Discourse in a Changing Europe. London, New York: Routledge. Wenham, B. (1982) The Third Age of Broadcasting. London: Faber and Faber.

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Media Literacy in the Third Age of Television: A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson Farid Atsiselmi Department of Modern Languages, University of Bradford, West Yorkshire, BD7 1DP, UK In the introduction to their article, Meinhof and Richardson raise a number of questions about the viewer, 'their behaviours, their cognitions and their experiences' in the age of the multi-channel television of picture reception by satellite, cable or digital transmission. They argue that these questions should be addressed within the framework of 'discourse analysis, confronting the newer kinds of discourses now available on television, but also an imaginative engagement with the conditions of multi-channel viewing itself'. I would like to agree with the authors of the article and suggest that media literacy together with critical discourse analysis can be a useful way of developing the viewers' imaginative engagement. Television occupies a central role in our society. It is more and more obvious that we live in a world which is increasingly dependent upon the televisual media for our entertainment but also for information about our immediate environment and of course about the world as a whole. The implications of the third age of broadcasting, i.e. the era of multi-channel television, are a considerable expansion of the number of channels on offer and with it a 'fragmentation of the audience into smaller viewing groups than those which traditional television could command'. Indeed statistics seem to show that the audience for the mainstream terrestrial channels is fragmenting with the growth of satellite and cable broadcasting. The official ratings figures from the British Audience Research Bureau show that between 1981 and 1998 ITV's audience fell from 49% to 31.5% and BBC1's share fell from 39% to 29.5%. This drop is seen as a point in a downward trend that could take the share of audience for BBC1 to 25% or below within the next five years. BBC2 has maintained the number of its viewers at 12% of the total, with the same figure for satellite and cable channels. The remainder of the audience is shared between Channel 4 (11%) and 4.3% for Channel 5 (Poulter, 1999). However, one can argue that television programmes have always been designed for specific groups of viewers on the basis of social variables such as age, gender, taste, occupation, ethnicity etc. Therefore what Meinhof and Richardson call 'the mass audience' is in fact not a homogenous mass of viewers sharing the same cultural background. According to Lorimer, television audiences are different from cultural groups in that they tend to form around organisational variables of media producers. 'Real social groups do not organise around the programmes they watch, except in the extreme case of fan clubs' (Lorimer, 1994: 278). Another implication of multi-channel television is the loss of viewing as an

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expression of national solidarity as the result of audience fragmentation (Meinhof & Richardson). However, if television viewing is a group experience then one can argue that what is lost on the level of social bonding nationally is gained in terms of global impact. Multi-channel television contributes to the development of what Lorimer (1994:2) refers to as the 'global village' with hundreds of millions of people all over the world sharing the same experience by having simultaneous access to the same event. As the process of globalisation continues, issues concerning the representation of groups that we identify as others on the basis of ethnicity, gender, nationality, region, etc. will become more and more crucial. The multi-channel environment has had an impact not only on the audience as a whole but also on the viewer as an individual. It has 'the power to destabilise the experience of the individual viewer in his/her construction of textual meaning by producing 'juxtapositions which are unplanned in any production process' (Meinhof & Richardson). It has been suggested (Lorimer, 1994: 277) that approaches to the study of audiences and their interaction with the media can be divided into two categories. On the one hand we find a conception of the audiences as passive and 'akin to vessels into which media messages can be poured', and on the other hand there are approaches which consider audiences as active negotiators critically engaged in assessing media messages. On the basis of his analysis of election campaigns, Lorimer argues that in their interaction with the media, members of the public are not passive viewers but 'sophisticated analysts of media presentations who have a developed ability, after several exposures, to separate presentation from reality' (1994: 278). As this ability develops, viewers seem to select media that offer greater variety of information and perspectives. This can explain the success of programmes such as Euronews' Perspective which focuses on differences of national points of view within Europe about international issues. 'It is the Europe of different views and perspectives rather than that of an implied unity which gives the channel some of its most interesting programming' (Meinhof & Richardson). However, according to Kellner, in today's media-saturated world, audiences and particularly 'younger generations are not naturally and truly media literate' (1995: 335). Therefore it is important to provide viewers with the tools that will enable them to make sense of the mass of information that they receive via television. As a result of the two points made above, it seems to me that it is vital to promote media literacy or 'critical media pedagogy' (Kellner, 1995: 335) for two main reasons which are derived from Meinhof and Richardson's article. Firstly, television is an important medium in our lives because of its apparent transparency or what the authors describe as 'the sense that the viewers have of watching not a mediation of reality but reality itself'. Audiences seem to interact differently with the printed and the visual media. The credibility of newspaper stories is always challenged but because viewers have seen rather than read a television programme they tend to trust its truthfulness. Moreover, producers try to increase their programme credibility by choosing formats that look real to us. Some go as far as fraud, as the following recent cases have shown. For example

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celebrities who participate in quiz shows are not as clever as they appear to be. Channel 4's quiz programme, Countdown has admitted that thanks to a discreet earphone, celebrity guests are prompted by experts to come up with longer wordsmade from a random selection of nine lettersthan the contestants (Midgley, 1999). Chat shows frequently fall victim to hoaxers who pretend to be someone they are not. But it has emerged recently that a number of confessional chat programmes resort to show business agencies to provide them with guests with fabricated identities to discuss their personal problems in front of a studio audience. In a recent case concerning Vanessa Feltz's daytime chat show on BBC1, it appeared that four guests were fakes. An unmarried actress claimed to be a battered wife and two strippers who had never met before pretended to be feuding sisters. Their mother who was in fact the parent of one of them, her only child, invented stories about their earlier lives. The BBC admitted that the programme had defrauded viewers and launched an inquiry saying that 'audiences must be able to believe in the integrity of programmes' (Gibson, 1999). The second reason concerns the possibility that with the availability of multi-channel television, the individual viewer will channel hop more frequently, thus consuming fragments of texts across the whole spectrum of channels. Television programmes are not different from written texts: both are constructed and their components manipulated to establish a dialogue between the producer and the reader/viewer. Many viewers are unaware of the conventions, formats, symbols and narrative structures which cue the audience to meaning. It is certainly even more difficult to deal with fragmented meaning created by chance. It is therefore crucial that viewers are equipped to make sense of the various texts to which they will be exposed. They should develop the skills that are necessary to make more sense of increasingly complex television images by accessing not only their denotative meaning but their connotative meaning as well. Media literacy can be defined as the ability to read, analyse and evaluate communication via the mass media, especially television. It involves knowledge of how media work and how they construct meaning. Traditional literacy associated with the skills needed to decode and read the printed word has always been well established in schools, and by using print texts, pupils are taught to identify utterances that express facts, opinions or fiction. But although television is nowadays a major source of information about the world, little work is done on the media to raise awareness of how televisual meanings communicate themselves. Television programmes are forms of writing with their own perspectives and their own codes and rules to communicate meaning. When writing texts, writers manipulate the lexicon, syntax and paragraphs in such a way as to produce the meaning they want to convey to their readers. In the same manner, television producers construct messages through language but also via the organisation of visual images and the presence or absence of sounds. Thus media literacy requires a multi-disciplinary approach including print literacy skills as well as skills to decode visual and aural messages. This ability to analyse the multilayered verbal and non-verbal aspects of discourse is referred to as critical discourse analysis by Wodak. She defines CDA as the analysis of linguistic and semiotic

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aspects of social processes and problems, highlighting the discursive nature of social relations of power in contemporary societies and focusing on context since discourse is not produced and cannot be understood without taking context into consideration (Wodak, 1996:17-19). Media literacy is still a subject that needs to be developed in educational circles. This lack of interest in television literacy may be due to the perception of the general publicand above all parentsthat media literacy can be developed individually without formal training. Parents feel that their children spend a lot of time already watching television at home and that the school's objective should be to promote print literacy and to encourage pupils to use written texts. Therefore for them, there is no need to spend time on television watching when there are so many 'important' subjects, such as maths or science, to learn. This lack of interest may also be explained by a wider neglect of cultural politics by critical cultural and communications studies which Kellner sees as 'sign of the depoliticalization of intellectual life in the present moment' (1995: 340). Education needs to foster a variety of new types of literacy to empower students to deal with televisual meaning since television is a primary medium in today's world. It plays a central part in our understanding of the world and the way we see it. Knowledge of the constructed nature of the television message and the way in which pictures are used selectively should be the common stock of every person's knowledge. Therefore it would be useful if media literacy was introduced at an early age and was continued alongside print literacy. Students should be taught to analyse media texts in the same manner as they are taught print literacy. This will allow them develop the skills to interpret messages on the ideological level and to be aware of preconceived notions, individual agendas and personal biases in television programmes Another reason for the absence of media studies in educational programmes is that there does not seem to be a clear theoretical framework in media pedagogy accepted by all educational experts. According to Kellner: 'many dominant schools of contemporary theory such as the Frankfurt School, cultural studies and most postmodern theory have failed to develop a critical media pedagogy' (1995: 338). As a discipline, media studies has the important task of developing a sound framework to be used at all levels in the educational system. Critical discourse analysis seems to provide a framework to account for the complex interaction between the producer's encoding of reality and the receivers' attempts to interpret the text on the basis of the sociocultural values, beliefs and conventions that are shared by the group to which they belong. It will provide viewers with the tools to decode television messages both planned by the producer and those created as the result of their hopping. Critical media pedagogy is concerned, among other things, with training students to develop an informed and critical understanding of the mass media and the techniques they use to produce meaning and to construct reality. Critical does not mean negative. It involves a recognition of the role played by audiences in making sense of television messages and the ability of individuals 'to analyse them criticallyor dissect themto avoid manipulations and to produce their own identities' (Kellner, 1995: 10). Within this framework students can be taught the skills that they need in order

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to become active rather than passive viewers to be able to cope with the continual flow of information communicated to us via television. These skills will enable them to make sense of the newer kinds of television discourse available to us at the present time and those which will be on offer in the future after the transition from the second to the third age of broadcasting is completed. References Gibson, J. (1999) Talk shows were faked. Guardian, 12 February. Kellner, D. (1995) Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern. London: Routledge. Lorimer, R. (1994) Mass Communications: A Comparative Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Midgley, C. (1999) TV Countdown's guilt secret is out at last. The Times, 19 February. Poulter, S. (1999) BBC crisis as millions change TV channel. Daily Mail, 14 January. Wodak, R. (1996) Disorders of Discourse. London: Longman.

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Unsettling Accounts: The Discourse of Disorientation. A Response to Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Kay Richardson Tony Weymouth 3 The Square (West), Burton-in-Kendal, Carnforth, Lancashire, LA6 1LX UK Claire Wieclawska 2 Stoneycroft, Warton, Nr Camforth, Lancashire, LA5 9PX UK Meinhof and Richardson in this account of the current and future delivery of television programmes, and their interpretation by viewers in the 'third age' of broadcasting, make some perceptive, and, in many ways, indisputable points relating to the changing national and international broadcasting landscapes. The sociocultural space of the 'third' age is occupied by more fragmented social groupings and is served by an ever-increasing number and variety of broadcasters whose programming and discourse styles are significantly different from those of the pre1980s. Wenham's salient quotation draws attention to the potency of the changes which now face us and prompts us to examine again the now widely acknowledged transformation surrounding the identity of the viewer. During the first and second 'ages' of broadcasting, the viewer was indeed perceived as a passive agent, receiving a small and fixed number of channels and broadcasts operating within an ordered and structured arena of discursive practices. Within this context, the settled relationship between the traditional orders of television discourse (entertainment/politics/everyday life) encouraged viewers to perceive television as a coherent whole and provided a shared intertextual background which, as Scannell proposes, has contributed to the shaping of their social and cultural identities. More recently, in this third age of broadcasting, the combination of technological progress and the progressive involvement of commercial broadcasters in the sector, has constructed a new social identity for the viewer, namely that of consumer. Although this perceived new identity is commonplace in media circles, it remains an important one in the exploration of the new television environment. Viewers are now being actively encouraged to make more consumer choices and, by so doing, construct their own television experiences. As Meinhof and Richardson point out, the broadcasting of many repeats and archive episodes of soaps means that viewers can now choose to take planned, labyrinthine journeys through these texts, encountering en route unplanned juxtapositions from which new connections may be forged. Such expeditions into the domains of 'stripped' programming may well lead to the creation of hybrid forms of knowledge as they suggest (for example, an awareness of the personal histories of certain soap characters as revealed by the repeats of former episodes). The consequences of such new readings of texts, dislocated in time and space, as the authors rightly point out, can only be guessed at by a process of 'imaginative engagement with the conditions of multi-channel viewing'. We would speculate that, in some cases, new competences will develop in the reading of these

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'accidental' juxtapositions of texts. The time that viewers will spend developing these competences at the expense of other, more traditional kinds (i.e. those outlined by Scannell) is an important question although the answer to it is also a matter of speculation. As Meinhof and Richardson point out, one cause, at least, of the 'dislocation effect' is when certain 'sense-making' discoursal conventions are flouted by the producers, as in the cases cited of loss of temporal congruity (i.e. a Neighbours' Christmas in July or a 1986 re-run of EastEnders in 1999). Yet another convention, in interviews and documentaries, is the presumed reality (the 'what I see is real') of the transmitted image. Recently a number of television programmes have been accused of falsification. In May 1998, the Guardian newspaper revealed that a Carlton documentary which purported to film 'real' heroin smugglers bringing drugs into Britain was a fake (Ahmed et al., 1998). More recently still, the magazine programme Vanessa (BBC1) was accused of presenting actors-in-role as 'real' members of the public. The flouting of the reality convention is potentially more serious than the flouting of the temporal one. However, fortunately, we may be raising a nonissue here. Whilst the breaking of temporal conventions apparently falls within the boundaries of admissible broadcasting, despite any concern this may cause, the breaking of the reality conventions has been condemned by both the BBC and ITC. The motive behind such falsification would seem to be that of enhancing the entertainment value of the programme, but the fracturing of the boundaries between fact and fiction, within the conventions of a documentary or of a live talk show, clearly represents a site of dislocation for viewers, which is less detectable, and which undermines their ability to make sense of the text and destabilises their television experience. One acknowledged condition of multi-channel viewing is indeed the increasing possibility for viewers to avoid the traditional vehicles of public service information: news and current affairs programmes. The importance of these programmes in the second age of broadcasting, as suggested by their positions in the schedules, was paramount in the old BBC/ITV duopoly. The recent diaspora of The News at Ten to both earlier and later slots, in an attempt to consolidate a fragmenting audience with alternative programming, is a clear signal of the changing times. The dramatic increase in ITV's ratings in the first week, reported as rising to 72% of viewers on the first night (Kirsty Wark, Newsnight, BBC2: 12.3.99), may indeed be ascribed to a temporary curiosity on the viewers' part and not be sustainable as a share of the market. However, the emphasis placed by the new schedule upon soaps and the massively successful Who Wants to be a Millionaire? is of interest, not just for the particular nature of its content. It can be perceived as the pragmatic acknowledgement, on the part of one terrestrial broadcaster, of an inevitable need: the move away from information in prime time slots in public service broadcasting, caused by competition from cable and satellite channels. How long the BBC can sustain the Nine o'clock News in the changed television landscape of March 1999 will be interesting to see. The relevance of this somewhat gloomy perception on our part of this change at ITV for the arguments put forward by Meinhof and Richardson is that the ITV model may indeed be a practical response for survival in the third age of broadcasting. The status of the news in the new ITV schedule seems to be

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down-graded and this will have knock-on effects beyond the broadcasting sector. If the 'communicative ethos' is changing along the lines suggested by Meinhof and Richardson, then there would be a need to reassess the role of broadcasters within a wider media context. Until recently, television was considered to be a comforting, countervailing force to the distortions, omissions and partiality of some sections of the written press. If the BBC and ITV shift their ground, against a future background of similar press performance and an increasing dislocation of discourse elsewhere in the television sector, then the communicative ethos of the whole of the media would require a re-examination. Meinhof and Richardson in the final section of their paper conclude (rightly in our view) that the wider diversification of programming of the kind they have described, and some aspects of which we have commented on here, could lead to a poorer assimilation of information by the public and to further fragmentation of national solidarity. However, on a more up-beat note, relating to the textual status of Euronews, we might speculate upon at least one virtuous scenario to add to the (accidental?) plurality of European voices, views and perspectives mentioned by Meinhof and Richardson as a feature of its news presentation. Driven by the need to traverse the boundaries of nationhood, the emergence of a deixis-free discourse which uses 'Europe' as the referent for where we live, however flat and centreless the effect, could be viewed positively as a discourse proto-type: a first step towards a more unified European discourse. If this is the case, then the discursive space to watch for the first signs of a European deixis could well be in the aftermath of a confrontation between the European Union and some external Other such as the United States, of the kind provoked by the recent war-of-words over the banana trade. In such future discoursal confrontations, the 'Europe' of today could well become the 'we' and the 'over here' of tomorrow. Reference Ahmed, K., Gillard, M.S. and Flynn, L. (1998) Inquiry ordered into faked TV programme. Guardian, 7 May.

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