Page 18 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 6
This suggests that if television institutions need to know the audience in order to
establish and maintain a relationship with it, they are generally not interested in getting to
know what real people think and feel and do in their everyday dealings with television.
Indeed, institutional knowledge about the television audience inevitably abstracts from
the messy and confusing social world of actual audiences because this world is irritating
for the institutions, whose first and foremost concern is to seize control over their own
conditions of existence. As I hope to clarify throughout this book, a too-detailed
familiarity with the everyday engagements of actual audiences—that is, knowledge that
takes into account the full complexity of the everyday realities of television
audiencehood—would only be counterproductive in this respect. Institutional knowledge
is driven toward making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions to
increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under control, and this can
only be done by symbolically constructing ‘television audience’ as an objectified
category of others that can be controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a
predetermined institutional goal.

CONTROL THROUGH KNOWLEDGE

The practice of audience measurement provides a clear example of what this process of
control through knowledge entails. Like retail statistics, opinion surveys, box office
figures and other types of market research, audience measurement is an instance of what
James Beniger (1986) has called ‘market feedback technologies’, that were developed in
the first decades of the twentieth century as a response to the increasing demand for
rationalized control of mass consumption in the United States. Beniger’s characterization
of these forms of research as technologies of control is illuminating, because it refuses to
see them as neutral instruments but situates them in a larger social arena in which
relations of power are at stake. Following this perspective, audience measurement can be
seen as a central site where the television industry enacts its power to gain control over
the audience.
In his discussion of the rise of the technologies of control Beniger adopts a macro-
sociological perspective that he calls the Control Revolution, which leads him to
foreground their status as sure agents of a major historical transformation towards today’s
‘information society’. Important as this telescopic historical perspective is, however, it
does not allow for an examination of exactly how control is exerted by these
technologies. In this book, I take up a more microscopic stance and will try to highlight
the process by which audience measurement performs its controlling task within
television institutions. This emphasis on process will make clear that the control made
possible by audience measurement is inevitably precarious and provisional. This is
obvious, because the fundamental mechanism by which control through audience
measurement is implemented is of a discursive rather than a material nature; it works
through the production of knowledge rather than through direct domination. Audience
measurement, after all, is a form of research, whose manifest aim is to accumulate
information about the television audience. But ironically, as I will describe in Part II, the
information provided by audience measurement, while intended to solve the American
television industry’s problem of control, has itself become a problem. The information is