Preface: emotion, engagements and orientation

Summary

My interest in television, meaning and emotion began when I was thinking about how emotion could be understood as an aesthetic quality that made for good television (Gorton 2006). Initially this question led me to research within anthropology of the media – in particular to S. Elizabeth Bird's The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World (2003). Bird's work was influential for many reasons: her conceptualisation of the audience as active and passive enables us to think more practically about the ways people encounter television in their everyday lives; she remind us that ‘The images and messages wash over us, but most leave little trace, unless they resonate, even for a moment, with something in our personal or cultural experience’ (2003: 2). Most of our television watching experience is spent unmarked. However, as Bird points out, there are moments which resonate either with personal or cultural experiences, and which therefore stand out and are imprinted in our memories. One person I interviewed, for instance, vividly remembers the episode of Neighbours when Madge, a long-term character, dies. She describes watching a programme of ‘important moments in television’ and having to turn away from the screen when this moment was aired. She explains, ‘I can't look because it brings back that moment when it actually happened, and I'm like “Oh, Madge is dying all over again, and I don't want to see it”’ (Interview 13/2/8).