Page 27 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Institutional knowledge: the need to control 15
and press interviews with TV personalities, as well as previews of forthcoming
programmes during an evening’s flow, the use of teasing jingles, logos and so on, testify
to the enormous amount of money and energy being spent to reinforce and update
people’s desire to watch television (Ellis 1982; Ang 1985b). The very fact that these
strategic institutional activities are of a continuous, never-ending character indicates that
television networks and broadcasting organizations know that they cannot take the
existence of an audience for granted: they can try to influence potential audience
members, but they cannot control them in any direct manner.
A constant sense of uncertainty thus haunts television’s persistence and continuity as
an institution. The audience, sine qua non for both television’s economic viability and
cultural legitimacy, forms its ultimate insecurity factor because in principle there is no
way to know in advance whether the audience will tune in and stay tuned. It is not
surprising then that a constant need is felt within the institution to ‘catch’, ‘capture’ or
‘lay hold of’ the audience. Audiences must constantly be seduced, attracted, lured. How-
to-get-an-audience is, willy-nilly, the institution’s key predicament, even though this is
not always acknowledged as such.
The seriousness of this predicament is deeply ingrained in the very structure in which
television as an institution is formally organized in our societies. Television’s dominant
institutional arrangement is embodied within the framework of broadcasting, a
framework whose basic configuration has been extended, without any radical changes, to
cable and satellite television. According to Raymond Williams (1974:30), the
broadcasting framework is characterized by a ‘deep contradiction between centralized
transmission and privatized reception’. This ‘deep contradiction’ refers to the
circumstance that while television is generally seen as a form of ‘mass communication’,
no true communication—in the ‘ritual’ sense of that word: exchange of meanings that is
both collective and interactive (Carey 1989)—between the television institution and the
television audience generally takes place. Broadcast television transmission is both
adamantly intentional and resolutely non-interactive: the diffuse and dispersed television
audience, locked in its condition of privatised reception, is an invisible and mysterious
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interlocutor. This makes the task of how-to-get-an-audience a particularly difficult one
for television institutions (Gans 1957; McQuail 1969; Hirsch 1972; Elliott 1972, 1977;
Cantor 1980; Ettema et al. 1987).
Over the years, a range of risk-reducing techniques and strategies of regulating
television programming such as serial production, usage of fixed formats and genres,
spin-offs, horizontal scheduling, and so on, have been developed (Ellis 1982; Gitlin
1983). These strategies do not only serve as a way to facilitate the organization and co-
ordination of the industry’s production practices, but are also aimed at the codification,
routinization and synchronization of the audiences’ viewing practices, to make them less
capricious and more predictable (cf. Rojek 1985:154–5). But all these strategies can only
help to manage, not remove the basic uncertainty with which the television institution has
to live. There are no guarantees that actual audiences will comply to the codes, routines
and synchronities of viewing behaviour as designed by the institutions. Ultimately, then,
the problem of (lack of) control amounts to one thing: the impossibility of knowing the
audience—in the sense of knowing ahead of time exactly how to ‘get’ it.
This does not mean that no knowledge about the audience is produced in the multi-
layered organizational process of television broadcasting. On the contrary, both formal