Core Post 5

David Morley’s article “Where the Global Meets the Local: Notes from the Sitting Room” introduces a new paradigm of audience studies. He tries to break down the constraint of the Birmingham School's macroanalysis, which focuses on social class, gender, and nation, to combine domestic empirical microanalysis. I totally agree with Morley’s research perspective. However, this article is just like an introduction to a research study. The article pieces together many opinions and points out the deficiencies in others' research, but it lacks convincing supporting arguments.

At the beginning of the article, the author reviews others’ research about the consumption of television in culture studies (e.g., research by Murdock, Morris, and Willemen) to challenge the “banally” traditional audience study and reconstruct the concept of “audience.” He emphasizes “a ‘double focus’ on television viewing,” the ideology of media content, and the cultural code of audiences, and he claims that the objective is “the production of analyses of the specific relationships of particular audiences to particular types of media content which are located within the broader framework of an analysis of media consumption and domestic ritual” (5). In the second section, he introduced John Ern and Herman Bausinger’s opinion to discuss the effect of media technology on the transformation of the television audience and talk about “the question of how these technologies are integrated into the structure and routines of domestic life” (6). Meanwhile, he quotes Marshall McLuhan and Meyrowitz's opinion that “the effect of television and computer technology was to erase time-space differences” (7), which redefines the concept of “community,” that is, “a 'psychological neighborhood' or a 'personal community' as a network of (often non-local) ties” (8). Meanwhile, he adds the social and cultural factors to the technologically determinist discourses to return to the sociology. As Henry Jenkins mentioned in the article, “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,” he presents the concept of the “information gap” that “the mechanism of communication produces inequalities of access among social and economic groups “（11). At last, he moves back to the initial discussion in “the relation of micro- and macro analyses and the status of small-scale ethnographic studies of media consumption in the analysis of macro-issues of power and politics.”  To be specific, one of the most important functions of broadcasting is to create a bridge between the public and the private, which reconstitutes the concept of time, space, and community, so that “the global meets local.”