Studying Audiences

<p><em>Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real</em> provides a critical overview of cultural studies research into the television audience. With the development of ethnographic research methods, hailed by Stuart Hall as `a new and exciting phase' in audience research, researchers turned their critical attention to groups of `ordinary people' watching television, combining interviews and participant observation with textual analysis of television programmes. This early research attempted to document the premises of theories of spectatorship and reception.<br> In a comprehensive analysis of the origins and achievements of the `cultural studies audience experiment', Virginia Nightingale evaluates five projects which helped to shape the field of television audience research, including Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley's work on <em>Nationwide</em>, Ien Ang's <em>Watching Dallas</em> and David Buckingham's study of <em>EastEnders</em> and its audience.<br> Nightingale traces how central tenets within audience studies have been challenged by discourses of post-colonialism, fan activism and new theories of writing, arguing that audience research is necessarily a multi-faceted activity.</p>