Wilson, Toni. The Playful Audience: From Talk Show Viewers to Internet Users.

Bosshart, Louis

Wilson, Toni. The Playful Audience: From Talk Show Viewers to Internet Users. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press Inc.: 2004. Pp. xiii, 333. ISBN 1-57273-528-7 (pb.) $29.95.

The key message of this book is clear and precise: "Everywhere, people use television, regarding it as pleasurably relevant in satisfying their desire to be distracted and entertained, educated and informed" (p. 5). And they do it in a very similar way, i.e., with ludic responses to television, "continually playful processing meaning" (ibid.). In the context of this book play means at first the creative freedom of decoding texts (constructing meaning), the pleasurable experience of playful identification and involvement. In addition to that, the author is able to show that there is "a cultural pluralism of enjoyment" that can be provided by "many varied interactions between audiences and people on television" (p. 10). Hypertexts on the Internet on the other side offer by definition a huge variety of personal interpretations and points of view. They are unique examples of openness. Following the author, interactive computer-mediated communication can be studied analogously to "similarly dialogical exchanges between television's talk show presenters and their audiences" (p. 197). Internet use is seen as play-full as watching television.

This is in short the message of the book on the playful audience. It is in accordance with findings that understand watching television and Internet use as playful experiences. Beside this, the book is quite descriptive, anecdotal, and redundant. It is a collection of various statements and quotes that are pitched at the reader like a piece of "staccato" music. It looks as if somebody had turned a file-card box upside down in a hurry. The average length of a paragraph is around 10 lines. A good bad example can be taken from the pages 237 and 238. There are 14 paragraphs of an average length of six lines, every paragraph paraphrasing at least one author, 19 altogether. A similar experience can be made on the pages 233 and 234. Two pages for 13 paragraphs and 14 references. An alternative to the stringing together of quotes is to cite single witnesses: "One male Malay student noted ..." (p. 54); "One Chinese student conveyed her mystification, ..." (p. 37); "For one Malay woman, ..." (p. 44); "One male Indian undergraduate had difficulties in ..." (p. 39).

The book has been published in the year 2004. The most recent reference (S. Livingstone), just one, dates from 2002. Personally, I learned one basic lesson: Ethnographic hermeneutics and research will have a tough time to be accepted by the mainstream communication research. There is a demand for research questions, theories, hypothesis, qualitative or quantitative methods and findings, for reliable and valid empirical research.

--Louis Bosshart

Fribourg--Freiburg (Switzerland)