Constituting the Techno-Normal: The Practices of Everyday Media Consumption

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Morley, David G.. 2024. Constituting the Techno-Normal: The Practices of Everyday Media Consumption. In: Annette Hill and Peter Lunt, eds. The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 24-35. ISBN 9781032214665 [Book Section]

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What is assumed to be normal in any particular era of media consumption, being taken for granted, is always structured by largely invisible assumptions. In its concern to be “contemporary”, much research focuses principally on that which is new (which is often assumed to have dramatic, if not revolutionary effects). However, “newness” is of course, a historical constant, even if its particular content is always in flux. This chapter considers the history of audience research over the last 50 years through the rear-view mirror, the better to highlight the changes that have occurred in our ideas and assumptions as to what constitutes normality in our media consumption practices (e.g., what constitutes “television viewing”). It explores the achievements, contradictions, and conundrums of this history, including developments such as the growing recognition of the need to study media ensembles and assemblages rather than individual technologies, and it reviews the potential applicability of older theoretical models (e.g., Two Step Flow) to new technological contexts, alongside the curious resurgence of hypodermic “media effects” models in relation to digital media. The chapter explicates the role of the underlying assumptions and material infrastructures that have shaped audience practices in particular eras and settings. In doing so, it also explores how we might place our models of contemporary audience practices in historical and geographical perspective, the better to avoid being trapped within the narrow frame of what the historian Francois Hartog calls “presentist” assumptions.

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Book Section

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https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003268543