Page 160 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 148
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Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience
1 However, the idea of the living room as a kind of classroom does play a role in the reformist
context of public service broadcasting, as we will see in Part III.
2 Besides, in the competitive world of the television industry there cannot possibly be a
consensus about what ‘ideal’ viewing habits are: what is ‘ideal’ for (one of) the networks
may be not so ‘ideal’ for the advertisers, or for the cable companies, and so on.
3 That anxiety over the Big Brother threat should have become particularly prominent in
relation to the people meter, may be explained by the system’s greater emphasis on
observation of the individual human body, the sacred site of self in Western culture.
4 While the practice of media and marketing research was quite ‘neat, tidy and
compartmentalized’ in the 1960s and 1970s, recent developments in the research industry are
said to be stormy. A host of new data-delivery systems are now being developed, all made
possible (as is the case with the people meter) by the current availability of computerized,
electronic measurement technology. See McKenna (1988:RC3).
5 The ScanAmerica system was not introduced as a national service until early 1989. It has been
tested in 600 homes in Denver since April 1987.
6 As we will see in Part III, however, ‘audience appreciation’ has been included as a variable in
European public service audience measurement services from very early on.
7 Papazian (1986) offers an overview of the then available empirical data on demographic and
programmatic differentiations in level of attentiveness (however measured). For example,
findings suggest that during prime time, only about 70 per cent of all viewers watch
television with full attention (during other parts of the day this is far less), while men are
consistently more attentive than women. Moreover, all surveys have established a significant
drop of attentiveness during commercial breaks.
8 The study was part of the huge Report to the Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory
Committee on Television and Social Behavior, which was commissioned to establish facts
about the effects of television violence. Even in that context, however, Bechtel et al.’s
project was marginalized. As Willard Rowland (1983:155) has noted, ‘as provocative as this
research was, its design violated so many of the normal science requirements for acceptable
survey research that it had little impact on the major directions taken by the overall advisory
committee program. Indeed this study was permitted only as a way of testing the validity of
survey questionnaires. The somewhat radical theoretical implications of its findings were
largely overlooked at all levels of review in the project.’
9 How far this paradoxical development can go is suggested by the introduction of SmarTV, a
system that consists of a combo VCR, personal computer and artificial intelligence
technology. One of the key features of the controversial system, developed by San
Francisco-based Metaview Corporation, is that it can automatically delete all commercials if
that is what the user wants. (Variety 14 March 1989) Such clashes of interest between
hardware and software industry branches are similar to those in the music industry, where
the unrelenting progress in music recording devices (for example, the DAT recorder and
Tandy’s THOR recorder, which both enable the consumer to record and rerecord music at
compact disc quality) has led the software industries to fight back by taking a hard line over
the issue of copyright. In the video business, a similar battle is going on over the issue of
what is called ‘video piracy’. See also Lardner (1987).
10 Discussion about the ‘quality’ of contemporary network television is now taking place in the
context of growing competition from the cable industry. For example, in the 1988 season
network television was perceived to be relying on more explicit sex in its programmes in
order to recapture the audience it lost, as well as on reality-based ‘tabloid TV’—
developments criticized for their lowering standards of quality. See e.g. Cobb (1989).