Page 131 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Repairing the loss: the desire for audience information 119
programme on the three Dutch channels, a request is made of panel members to rate their
appreciation by pushing certain buttons on their people meter key pads (Saarloos 1989;
NOS 1989). As a result, Dutch audience measurement now proudly delivers a
meticulously streamlined map of ‘television audience’ consisting of minute-by-minute
ratings and appreciation scores for all domestic programmes, divided up into up to eighty
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demographic categories (Bekkers 1988).
The appreciation index is a kind of fetish for public service audience measurement: it
is seen as the key difference between public service and commercial research. But the
privileging of ‘appreciation’ as the preeminent variable to capture viewers’ subjective
responses to television also presents problems, signifying an unprompted, contradictory
capitulation to the logic of the market after all. First of all, it has already been said that
what is exactly measured here is not particularly clear: many varieties of ‘appreciation’
are lumped together into a one-dimensional scale of something like ‘general satisfaction’.
The researchers themselves are quite aware of this shortcoming. For example, the Dutch
did attempt to develop a multidimensional measurement instrument, breaking down
‘appreciation’ into ‘informational value’, ‘entertainment value’, and ‘effort required by
the viewer’. However, this experiment did not lead to changes in the regular
measurement practice because of high costs and stated difficulties in interpreting the
findings (De Bock 1974; Bekkers 1988). As a result, ‘work on audience appreciation is
too broad in sweep’, as the Annan committee put it with regard to the British situation
(Home Office 1977:455).
More fundamental than the problem of methodological validity, however, are the
implicit assumptions about the value of the information imparted by the appreciation
indices. Of course it is true that more dimensions of audience activity than merely
watching/non-watching should be relevant to the project of public service broadcasting.
After all, it is nothing less than communication effectiveness, i.e. the effect of
programmes on viewers’ tastes, preferences, interests, knowledge, and so on, which
underlies the classic mission of public service broadcasting. Inscribed in public service
philosophy then is a critical, self-reflective perspective on its own performance, and in
theory research could play an important role in giving a clue about the extent to which its
normative goals are achieved. However, measurement of appreciation does nothing other
than register the volume of applause, and as a form of information applause generally
tends to be particularly meaningful from the narcissistic perspective of the institutions
themselves: in a sense, the subjective feelings of viewers about programmes are
mobilized and quantified in the service of institutional self-confidence. Seen in this way,
addition of the appreciation index to that of plain measures of audience size does not in
itself represent a fundamental departure from the objectivist epistemology of ratings
discourse: it is merely a more sophisticated version of it, providing the institution with a
measure of its own performance without having to consider the truly qualitative, specific
and probably complex and contradictory responses of actual audiences. The audience
remains an abstracted, objectified other.
The knowledge provided by audience measurement then does little justice to the
official ambitions of public service broadcasting. This is not to be blamed on the
individual researchers working within the audience research departments, but on the
structural constraints imposed on the uses and applications of research. It is significant,
for example, that little interest is displayed by the broadcasting institutions for research