Page 127 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

14
Repairing the loss: the desire for audience
information

The hard, economic need for ratings data is missing in television systems that are not
dependent on competition for advertiser investments. Still, audience measurement has
become a large-scale enterprise in many public broadcasting institutions, including the
BBC and VARA. How did this happen? And to what effect?
Anthony Smith, former director of the British Film Institute and a leading proponent
of public service broadcasting, gave vent to the ambivalence typical in European views
on audience measurement:

The measurements have the same kind of precision as pre-election
polling. Better methods are constantly being devised and tried out and
complex though interesting technical arguments take place concerning the
comparative reliability of methods. Happily, we have never chosen to use
these systems to replace elections in the political sphere. It is one thing to
sample an electorate and enquire about preferences in politics in a given
week. It is quite another to sample television receivers, which may be
switched on without anyone being in the room, or with people in the room
who are not actually watching, who may be asleep or playing cards or
listening to music on headphones. It is fortunate that in Britain the
measuring of audiences has been carried out not to decide the levels of
revenue for any system, but merely to satisfy curiosity and to feed
institutional rivalries. In a truly competitive commercial system the
measurement of audiences through crude methods of sampling is
paramount; programmes, channels, whole companies even, can be swept
away through the presence of unknown statistical bugs. In America vast
quantities of investment in pilot programmes are regularly junked on the
basis of ratings divergences well within the margins of statistical error. It
is the extension of roulette into culture.
(Smith 1986:7; emphasis added)

Smith’s observations are interesting, particularly in their omissions. Can the existence of
such an expensive endeavour as audience measurement really be explained as mere
curiosity? And if so, why should this curiosity be satisfied precisely by measuring
audiences?
While European and American measurement practices have become more and more
similar in their epistemological and methodological assumptions, the motives for
embarking upon the research enterprise as such were rather different. As we have seen in
Chapter 12, it is the perceived structural isolation of the broadcaster from the invisible