Tamar Liebes: A scholar extraordinaire of audiences as citizens in public and private spaces

摘要

In researching this short piece, Sonia contacted Elihu Katz, long-time coauthor of Tamar Liebes, who mentioned that one of Tamar's persistent ideas had been to compare the personal diaries of correspondents during the 1948 War of Independence (of which she had collected a few) with the dispatches they sent to their overseas readers. This reflects a running argument Sonia had with Tamar in which Tamar wanted to overhear casual conversations among the public waiting at bus stops, to learn what they spontaneously discussed about media, to see how these compared with what they told us in research interviews, but which Sonia thought was potentially unethical, although certainly intriguing.1 And, in turn, it reflects her work with Rivka Ribak comparing the political arguments in the domestic living room, especially between parents and children in front of the television news, as the former sought (or fought!) to socialize the latter into their political world-view, with the public opinion as revealed in opinion polls. As Liebes and Ribak found, one reason that Hawkish views seem to win in the polls is that their discursive features fit better in the cut and thrust of the parent/child argument at home (while the more nuanced and contextualized views of dovish liberals are hard to convey convincingly within a family argument).2 This fascination with naturally occurring discourse also reflects Tamar's intellectual origins in ordinary language philosophy and her engagement with pragmatics, especially Jakobson. In The Export of Meaning, she and Elihu Katz used focus groups composed of people known to each other and in their domestic contexts as the closest proxy they could manage for everyday conversation. And they drew on Jakobson in contrasting "referential" and "metalinguistic" (or critical, in the sense of literary critical rather than politically critical) readings of Dallas, on the part of the audience-a distinction that has proved insightful to many researchers in the years since in theorizing the nature of audiences' interpretive "activities."