Page 140 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 128
knowledge. To round off this book, then, I shall explore the epistemological and political
consequences of such an acknowledgement.

THE ACADEMIC CONNECTION

Academic mass communication researchers, I noted in the Introduction, have often all too
easily complied to the institutional point of view in their attempts to know the television
audience, not necessarily in a political sense, but all the more in an epistemological sense.
This is a bold statement that needs to be substantiated. Perhaps I can best do this by
pointing at the cognitive authority inhabited by ratings discourse, not only within
television institutions, but also within the academic communication research community.
If ratings discourse derives its effectivity from its assumption that ‘television
audience’ is a taxonomic collective consisting of the sum of audience members defined
exclusively in terms of their measurable ‘viewing behaviour’, this very assumption has
also predominated in the search for knowledge about the television audience in academic
discourse. For instance, in their prestigious overview of social scientific television
research, Television and Human Behavior, Comstock et al., to come to a ‘depiction of the
audience’, have decided to draw heavily on data from the A.C.Nielsen company ‘because
of their freshness and comprehensiveness’ (1978:86). The chapter concerned goes on to
extrapolate ‘trends and patterns’ from the data, which are taken to ‘reflect the social
phenomena of time use and taste’. Through an array of impressive-looking charts,
figures, tables, and graphics, representing things like average hours of viewing per week
or by time of day, for different demographic groups, for different types of programmes,
and so on, a sense of total overview of ‘television audience’ is created—a comprehensive
map on which all important ‘facts’ are systematically identified and classified.
In a book simply and revealingly entitled The Television Audience: Patterns of
Viewing, Goodhart et al. have carried out an even more sophisticated discursive
streamlining of ‘television audience’. It is based upon (mainly British) audience
measurement data and is, again, presented as a systematic study of ‘how the viewer
actually behaves’ (1975: vii, italics in original). Applying advanced statistical techniques,
the authors have managed to construct a dazzling range of curious forms of aggregated
audience behaviour, such as ‘audience flow’ (the extent to which the same audience
watches subsequent television programmes), ‘repeat-viewing’ (the extent to which the
same people view different episodes of the same programme), and ‘channel loyalty’ (the
extent to which viewers show a consistent preference for one channel over another).
Their mathematical tour de force leads the authors to conclude that ‘instead of being
complex…viewing behaviour and audience appreciation appear to follow a few general
and simple patterns operating right across the board’ (Goodhardt et al. 1975:127). As a
result, Goodhardt et al. claim to be capable of mapping audience behaviour with all but
law-like precision. For example, what they call the ‘duplication of viewing law’ signifies
that for any two programmes the level of ‘duplication’ or overlap in their audiences can
be predicted on the basis of the ratings of the programmes, and not on their content:
‘people who watch one particular western are no more likely to watch other westerns than
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are other viewers’ (ibid.: 129). A statistically constructed, objective ‘fact’ about viewing
behaviour is thus established without any reference to the subjectivity of viewers. In this