Television Reception and Oral Memory: The Evolution of Spanish Emigrant Communities as Television Audiences through their Testimony

Abstract

The communities of Spanish emigrants who established residence in different European countries and in Australia afer departing from Spain in the 1950s and 1960s make up a particular if diverse television audience. Their reception of television products is strongly influenced by common factors that unite them, despite concrete differences (both personal factors including age, education, degree of integration with the receptor society, and general factors including host country contexts and television offerings, with or without special content for immigrants). A complex study of reception requires a flexible methodology that, based on qualitative tools and group interviews, tries to clarify the fundamental lines of evolution of these distant audiences, as well as the television memory that they preserve and construct from their experience. This article offers some of the results of a study that has tried to approach them through the research project Distant Audiences: Television Memory and Comparative Reception Habits of Spanish Emigrants and Foreign European Residents in Spain (Las audiencias lejanas: memoria televisiva y hábitos de recepción comparados de emigrantes españoles y residentes extranjeros europeos - I+D cSo2012-31261), financed by the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness.