Page 155 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 143
device for factory production and as a surveillance device in military settings. Furthermore,
the possibilities of two-way television as a replacement for the two-way telephone were
explored by AT&T in the 1920s, while radio amateurs were also enthusiastic about the
interactive potential of television communication. However, these alternative uses were
finally marginalized in favour of a development of television analogous to that of radio
broadcasting. See Allen (1983). For a historical study of the social construction of
television’s place in the (American) home, see Spigel (1988).

3
Audience as taxonomic collective
1 Williams’ (1974) concept of ‘flow’ emphasizes that television output is a continuous stream of
images and sounds rather than a succession of distinct programmes. Ellis (1982) foregrounds
the segmented nature of television’s flow of narratives and mini-narratives. According to
Ellis, this structure of television discourse already reflects the unconcentrated nature of much
home television viewing: it is characterized by the glance rather than the gaze.
2 For some critical assessments of Channel Four, see e.g. Blanchard and Morley (1982);
S.Harvey (1989).

PART II

5
Commercial knowledge: measuring the audience
1 There are dozens of ratings firms operating in the United States, all of them attempting to
compete for a share in the ratings market, not only for television, but also for radio. In the
field of national television ratings, Nielsen has been occupying a hegemonic position since
the early 1950s. However, this is not the case in local television ratings, where Nielsen’s
biggest competitor is the Arbitron Ratings Company. In 1983, a British firm, AGB (Audit of
Great Britain), entered the American television measurement field. AGB played a significant
role in the controversial introduction of so-called ‘people meters’, which (temporarily)
caused a crisis in Nielsen’s hegemony. The European audience measurement scene is
dominated by AGB and the Swiss firm Telecontrol.
2 For example, in January 1984, it was estimated that there were 83,800,000 television
households in the United States. A programme with a rating of 20, then, can be said to have
reached about 16,700,000 households (Beville 1985:295).
3 Other methods are, among others, the telephone coincidental, the telephone recall, and the
personal interview. These methods are generally seen as less accurate or too expensive and
therefore are not much used for the production of television ratings in the United States.
4 It goes without saying that part of the sample will somehow fail to do this. The response rate
for the diary method is consequently rather low: 40 to 50 per cent.
5 A distinction is made, then, between ‘household data’ and ‘people data’. In the first, not
individual people, but households are taken as the basic unit of measurement, as in Nielsen’s
National Television Index (NTI). The electronic setmeter can only supply such household
data, as it only registers whether the set is on and not who is watching. ‘People data’, or so-
called ‘demographics’, have traditionally been collected through the diary method.