Page 20 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 8
institutions in the world is only one indication for the heightened status of scientifically-
based rhetoric in the pursuit of knowledge about the audience within media industries (cf.
Tunstall 1977).
In Part III, I will describe how this development was triggered by the perceived
ineffectiveness of other, more philosophically-based authoritative discourses in
producing knowledge that is able to perform the task of control within public service
institutions. In fact, for a long time research such as audience measurement was not at all
seen as necessary in public service contexts; as we will see, there was enough confidence
among public broadcasters in the truth value of the non-empirical knowledge engendered
by the philosophical assumptions of public service broadcasting’s purpose—a purpose
that prescribed a normatively-defined relationship with the audience. In other words, to
have control over the audience public service institutions in Europe did not always see
the need to know the audience in empirical terms, because there was a strong a priori,
normative conviction about how the audience should be addressed. It is the cracking of
this conviction that led these institutions to embrace forms of knowledge modelled after
the discourse of empirical science. Reliance on research, and particularly audience
measurement, has now become an integral part of the way public service institutions try
to get control over the audience. Again an ironical occurrence, given the imperfections
that this form of knowledge proves to display as a tool of control in the American
context, as I have already pointed out.
I do not want to imply here that research that familiarizes us with the audience in
empirical terms is illusory and of no use. But what should be stressed is that the move
towards more scientific ways of knowing the audience within television institutions is not
simply a sign of progress from ignorance to knowledge, from speculation to fact, from
belief to truth. Rather, what is at stake here is a politics of knowledge. In the way
television institutions know the audience, epistemological issues are instrumental to
political ones: empirical information about the audience such as delivered by audience
measurement could become so important only because it produces a kind of truth that is
more suitable to meet a basic need of the institutions: the need to control. Empirical
science, or better, the knowledge emanating from it, brings about a regime of truth that is
in principle more flexible and conditional—and thus more practical—than the absolutist
truth characteristic for philosophical knowledge, precisely because it purports to
incorporate elements of the social world of actual audiences into its discursive realm of
visibility. It thus brings institution and audience closer together, as it were. However, this
incorporation cannot go beyond the horizon of the institutional point of view, from which
‘television audience’ must be constructed as an objectified category of others to be
controlled.

THE PREDICAMENT OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE

The institutional point of view constrains and sets limits to the substance and modalities
of knowledge that television institutions produce about the audience. But the influence of
the institutional point of view stretches beyond the immediate discursive domain of the
television institutions themselves. As I have suggested at the beginning of this
introduction, our understanding of television audiencehood has been thoroughly