Page 139 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Conclusions 127
insight into the concrete practices and experiences of television audiencehood; it is also
ultimately unable to supply the institutions with the definitive guarantee of control they
so eagerly seek.
In Part III, I have traced the tendency toward increasing rationalization of institutional
knowledge about the audience within European public service broadcasting
organizations. It is a tendency characterized by a change in emphasis from ideological,
normative and philosophical knowledge, in which ‘television audience’ is defined in
terms of ‘what it needs’, to empiricist, factual and informational modalities of
knowledge, pre-eminently demonstrated by the mounting prominence of audience
research, and audience measurement in particular. This change signifies an eclipse of the
classic idea of ‘serving the public’ in favour of a more market-oriented approach, in
which ‘television audience’ is defined in terms of ‘what it wants’. Public service
institutions no longer address the television audience as ‘citizens’, but as ‘consumers’—at
least at a general, organizational level.
In Part II, however, we have seen that the taxonomic construction of ‘television
audience’ (or segments of it) along the purely objective axis of size in order to come to a
streamlined empirical map of it is less unproblematic than it seems: as the pre-eminent
form of institutional knowledge in commercial television institutions, ratings discourse is
too replete with ambiguities and contradictions to function as the perfect mechanism to
regulate the unstable institution-audience relationship. Epistemologically, the whole
controversy around the people meter suggests one thing: namely, that in the end the
boundaries of ‘television audience’, even in the most simple, one dimensional terms, are
impossible to determine. Those boundaries are blurred rather than sharply demarcated,
precarious rather than absolute.
This dissolution of ‘television audience’ as a solid entity became historically urgent
when ‘anarchic’ viewer practices such as zapping and zipping became visible, when
viewing contexts and preferences began to multiply, in short when the industry, because
of the diversification of its economic interests, had to come to terms with the irrevocably
changeable and capricious nature of ‘watching television’ as an activity. However, from
the institutional point of view this proliferation and dispersal of forms of television
audiencehood can only be seen as a problem, because it only makes it more difficult for
the television institutions to bring their relationship to the audience under control.
Therefore, television institutions can only be reluctant to give up their calculated
ignorance of the dynamic complexity of the social world of actual audiences. Instead,
they are likely to continue to quest for encompassing, objectified constructions of
‘television audience’—as the continued search for the perfect audience measurement
technology suggests.
If we abandon the institutional point of view, however, the current disruption brought
about by the changing television landscape becomes the historical backdrop that provides
us with an excellent opportunity finally to take seriously the challenge of developing
understandings that can do justice to the differentiated subtleties of television
audiencehood. In order to do this, we must resist the temptation to speak about the
television audience as if it were an ontologically stable universe that can be known as
such; instead, our starting point must be the acknowledgement that the social world of
actual audiences consists of an infinite and ever expanding myriad of dispersed practices
and experiences that can never be, and should not be, contained in any one total system of