Page 10 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Preface and acknowledgements

In the autumn of 1986 in New York, I had an informal lunch meeting with Jo Holz, then a
researcher for the News Department of National Broadcasting Company (NBC), one of
the three major networks of American commercial television. I was interested in how
people inside the television industry look at the television audience, and we were talking
about the kind of research in which she and her colleagues were engaged. She said
earnestly and straightforwardly that, without doubt, all the research they do is in the
interest of ‘delivering audiences to the advertisers’. I was accustomed to hearing this
expression being used in an ironical, if not cynical fashion by critical scholars and
journalists who wanted to stress the perversity of the objectifying, commodifying logic
that governs commercial television. But Holz made it clear that there’s nothing ironical
about it within the industry. Irony is an unfit attitude in an enterprise whose very
economic base depends upon its success in ‘delivering audiences to advertisers’. Industry
people take this task very seriously—and for granted. This illustrates the importance of
institutional setting in shaping the way in which the audience is perceived and assessed,
problematized and conceived. ‘In fact’, Holz continued, giving a new twist to our
conversation, ‘industry people are much more inclined to see the audience as active than
critics who worry so much about the effects of television from an outside perspective. We
just can’t afford to sit back and think of the audience as a passive bunch that takes
anything they’re served.’ I found her remarks to be an insightful account of institutional
self-consciousness. Her observations point to the argument that I will make in this book:
that despite television’s apparently steady success in absorbing people’s attention,
television audiences remain extremely difficult to define, attract and keep. The
institutions must forever ‘desperately seek the audience’.
This book’s main purpose is to deconstruct this process of ‘desperately seeking the
audience’ by rearticulating and contextualizing institutional discourses on the television
audience so that they are robbed of their naturalness—so that the irony is put back in, as
it were. It turns out that the audience so desperately sought does not exist, at least not in
the unified and controllable mode in which it is generally envisioned.
But there were also other reasons for writing this book. First, having been interested as
a researcher into the cultural details of how people deal with popular television in the
realm of everyday life—details that generally remain private and discreet—I wanted to
examine how this realm was accounted for, or rather accounted away, by those ‘on the
other side’: the television professionals. Furthermore, I wanted to compare different,
ostensibly contradictory institutional arrangements of television broadcasting—American
style commercial television and West-European style public service broadcasting—
because I believe that such a juxtaposition can highlight some general strategies of
‘desperately seeking the audience’ that remain unexplored when the systems are
considered separately. It is in the common practice of audience measurement that those
strategies are most clearly revealed. The comparative perspective offered here can