Page 135 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Repairing the loss: the desire for audience information 123
stuck with the meter as a means of measuring TV audiences and no-one believes we can
survive without it’ (Billet 1989:20).
It is significant to see then that there is little active resistance against this trend in
public service broadcasting circles. If criticism is expressed at all, it is mostly cast in
subjective not structural terms. In 1983, for example, an internal inquiry within the BBC
revealed widespread dissatisfaction about the people meter figures delivered by BARB
(the Broadcaster’s Audience Research Board), but at the same time the broadcasters
proved to be thoroughly dependent on the confirmations the figures provide (Madge
1989:93–5).
This situation, I suggest, decisively marks the crisis of imagination in which public
service broadcasting finds itself today. The current prominence of ratings can be read as a
way of solving public broadcasting’s crisis, which is fundamentally a cultural crisis, by
turning it into a crisis of information. In the words of Lawrence Grossberg, in such a
perspective
the crisis is not located in the social changes that have taken place but
rather, in our failure to respond properly to these changes. To know what
would constitute a proper response, one must have accurate, descriptive
information about the world. Thus, the crisis is located in our inadequate
knowledge and in those attitudes which interfere with the acquisition of
this information.
(Grossberg 1979:57)

Hence, the solution is sought in the accumulation of even more information.
But what do public service broadcasting institutions really gain from all the
information now available to them on their on-line computer terminals? Already in 1977,
even before the introduction of the people meter which churns out vastly more data, the
Annan Committee observed that the BBC researchers are ‘swamped by their collection of
so many facts and figures about the ratings’ and unable ‘to find time to stand back from
the information they collect, critically to evaluate it and to detect trends’ (Home Office
1977:452–3). In the Netherlands too a sense of information overload is clearly felt. Thus,
recently NOS (the Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation, of which the Audience
Research Department is a division) has sought the advice of two external communication
research experts to find new ways to apply the information:

NOS wishes a theoretical deepening of viewing and listening research. By
accompanying the collection of data with theorizing we hope to enlarge
the meaning of these data. A better understanding of viewing and listening
behaviour will enable a better explanation and prediction of audience
responses to radio and TV programmes. In some cases this will also
render unnecessary the collection of new data, in other cases it will
influence the way in which data are collected.
(Letter NOS, 24 Dec 1987; quoted in Van Cuilenburg and McQuail
1988:2)