Beyond the audience: Teletubbies, play and parenthood

Abstract

This article considers the place of the ‘everyday’ and ‘practice’ in media ethnography and audience research in cultural and media studies as well as this tradition’s relationship to textual analysis. Drawing on an auto-ethnographic study of the author’s family, the research considers the way in which they made meanings with the preschool children’s television programme Teletubbies. The analysis considers how television viewing is regulated discursively across a number of different sites that constitute ‘parenthood’. In this respect, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ is developed to account for the ways in which the textual and discursive address articulates with, develops and reproduces the family’s childcare practices. The research also presents a method of analysis that explores the micro-example to ‘write singularity’ and suggests the benefits of exploring the ways in which meanings are made beyond the moment of reception. As such, a case is made for the need to move beyond conceptualizations of ‘the audience’.