Page 130 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 118
measurement is now a fully integrated practice in the broadcasting machinery. As the
Annan Committee for the future of broadcasting in Britain observed in 1977, ‘the [BBC
Audience Research] department often seems to have to function like an overworked
market research firm, hurriedly assembling studies with no time to bring to bear a broader
perspective’ (Home Office 1977:451). And while the logic behind the audience
measurement routine cannot be explained by the need to have ‘hard facts’ to bring back
to the advertiser, the very availability of viewing figures for every programme, every day,
has created for public broadcasters an opportunity to satisfy their curiosity in a way
which, as we shall see, is neither innocent nor inconsequential. The integration of
continuous audience measurement data in the operation of broadcasting organizations
such as the BBC and VARA signifies a general shift in the prevailing discursive modality
of knowledge about the audience within public service broadcasting: more philosophical,
normative knowledge about how the audience should be conceived tends to be replaced
by a reliance upon aggregated empirical information about existing audience formations.
Of course, there are differences between commercial and public service audience
research, not only in function but also in form. The most significant difference is the
importance granted in European audience measurement to the variable of ‘audience
appreciation’. Silvey started to think about this during the Second World War, because in
his view ‘knowing the size of a programme’s audience told one nothing about the nature
of that audience’s listening experience, what it was about the programme that they had
liked or not liked or why they felt about it as they did’ (Silvey 1974:113).
In a sense, this kind of consideration does echo the normative aims of public service
broadcasting, where subjective reactions of viewers to programmes are by definition
more important than for commercial broadcasting. Not surprisingly, measuring audience
appreciation was, from the very beginning, justified against this background. Silvey
(ibid.) felt that what marks ‘a properly balanced audience research service’ is the
combination of a continuous measurement of audience size with a continuous assessment
of audience reaction. In the Dutch case too measuring appreciation was advocated
because it was presumed to provide qualitative information about viewers’ judgements of
programmes (e.g. Bekkers 1988).
In both the BBC and the Dutch systems ‘appreciation’ has been operationalized in a
linear scale (a five point scale in the BBC’s case and a ten point scale in the Dutch case),
resulting in a very rough index indeed. But it is not without its pragmatic merits, because
it allows for the construction of facts not possible with purely quantitative ratings. For
example, the acquired data can be used to detect programmes with low ratings but high
appreciation scores, to compare different programmes within one genre in terms of their
appreciation scores, and to compare the reaction of different segments of the audience to
the same programme—all forms of factual information which could in principle be
applied in decision-making processes about programming and scheduling in ways that
escape the gross verdict of audience maximization, although it remains unclear to what
extent and how such use is actually made in practice (Silvey 1974:113–9; Bekkers 1988).
Registration of audience appreciation has been considered so important that a unique,
ultra-sophisticated version of the people meter was introduced in the Netherlands in the
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summer of 1987, containing the possibility of electronic measurement, within the same
sample, of both audience size and audience appreciation. Thus, every time a viewer
‘signs off or switches channels, when the set is turned off, and at the end of each