Page 136 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 124
In response the outside consultants, professors Jan van Cuilenburg and Denis McQuail of
the Netherlands Press Foundation, have suggested the development of a TV programme
databank, essentially based upon statistical, multivariate correlations between programme
variables and viewer variables, in such way that in the long run it will be possible to
predict audience response (a set of dependent variables) for certain programmes with
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specified characteristics (a set of independent variables). Imagined here is the prospect
of a computerized information processing instrument for programming policy which no
longer has to depend upon past ratings as information, but has the power of forecasting
future ratings!
The Audience Research Department took this suggestion seriously and has attempted
to implement it (Bekkers 1988). However, this has run into problems, not least because
those within the broadcasting organizations who are directly responsible for the making
of programmes seem to be unable and reluctant to transform the ingredients of their
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programmes into formalized, measurable variables. The discourse of the professional
programme maker—creativity, intuition, talent, Fingerspitzengefühl, professionalism!—
rebels against the rigorous hypothetico-deductive discourse implied in computerized
prediction. Whether or not it will ever be realized, then, the idea of the programme
databank represents a desire to rationalize programming policy so that it becomes a
manageable process whose outcome is, ideally, known in advance, or at least controllable
to a considerable extent. Disappeared from this Utopian dream (or megalomanic fantasy),
however, is any consideration for the living, qualitative, meaningful, truly cultural
relationship with the audience—which, it should be remembered, was the very raison
d’être of public service broadcasting.
This example indicates how far audience research has been removed from the purpose
originally claimed for it, namely to enhance communication with the audience, to
alleviate the lack of insight broadcasters felt into the social and cultural impact of their
work. Empirical knowledge could in principle contribute to develop that insight.
However, the evolution of audience research in the direction of large-scale measurement
has tended to emphasize technical rationality rather than understanding, aimed at
producing statisticized, taxonomized and objectified audience information rather than
attempting to gain insight into the complex world of actual, flesh-and-blood audiences.
According to John Durham Peters (1988:15), ‘information is a form of knowledge that
rearranges the significance of everyday realities, sapping them from substance’. He refers
in this respect to population statistics, whose production dates back to the rise of
bureaucracy, enabling the modern state to know a population’s behaviours—birth,
marriage, death, crime and so on—in a single, cross-sectional glimpse, a disembodied
form of knowledge that provides a panoramic vision of the entire nation but is beyond the
range of experience: ‘One can quite accurately predict, statistically, that about 150 people
will die on American roads this day. But the meaning of death as a structuring principle
of those lives as the people experienced them falls through the cracks of the statistical
model’ (ibid.). The same can be said about audience measurement statistics: it makes us
know the audience in terms of patterns of a limited number of behavioural displays, but it
remains silent about the ways in which television becomes meaningful and has an impact
in people’s everyday lives and the larger culture.
That empirical knowledge can potentially serve as a tool of communication as well as
a tool of control, however, is suggested by reactions of programme makers to focus group