As TV news is also part of the everyday because they generate systematic format qualities which could then be seen to be incorporated through more practical or mundane attittudes and behaviours into the daily round17 : “That engagement might be weak or strong, positive or negative in its implications. But it is, in the sense in which I have identified it, always dynamic, and dynamic in the specifical sociological sense of agency. We engage with television through the same practices that define our involvement with the rest of everyday life, practices that are themselves contained by, but also constitutive of, the basic symbolic, material and political structures which make any and every social action possible.” (Silverstone,1994:170)
But it is not possible to understand television’s role as a bearer of news in isolation, then we need to look at the way the whole of its output. Reception research which has focused on audience interpretations of specific texts or genres has had to ignore the fact that programmes and genres are parts of the much larger signifying process as focus on entertainment or phenomena like infofiction.
The wide transformation of mediation has consequences about the future of democracy and it demands the reinvention of politics and public communication. To abandon this whole responsability, it means forgetting audiences back with sensational and dramatic overviews. Posing this deep reconfiguration, it involves the return of media power to the discourses about audiences in a different global scale, for a different generation of citizens, and in new terms of emotional solutions for the management of intimacy, as Giddens indicates (1992), although being unable to do it with the integrated incorporation of mediation processes18 .
Searching for authenticity in TV audiences today implies a personal reconfiguration resulting from a process of subjectivation inside cultural, political and social fields. Subjectivity is a useful term to capture the relationship between who and where we are.
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“The spoken and displayed narratives of television have their equivalent and their extension in the lived narratives of daily life, and of course both gain their meaning precisely through this constant juxtaposition.” (Silverstone,1994:167) 18
“Narrating personal identity requires us constantly to monitor our routine activities and to reflect on various lifestyles options. Indeed, modernity is characterized by a distinctive type of institutional reflexivity –where the knowledge produced about social life becomes a constitutive element in its organization and transformation. For instance, we might consider how information circulated in the public domain concerning global ecological issues can impact on the local purchasing decisions of private individuals who revise their day-to-day practices in the light of this flow of communication. The same goes for knowledge or advice -distributed via the broadcast media- about health matters or else how to cope with moral dilemmas and emotional problems. These television and radio discourses are selectively and reflexively appropiated by viewers and listeners as they monitor their lifestyles or interpersonal relationships.” (Moores,1997:240)
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