Page 28 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 16
and informal knowledge about the audience is constantly operative in the complex
decision-making procedures which determine the shape and content of television’s daily
output of programmes. ’Know the audience’ is the first basic principle every handbook
for commercial broadcasting teaches the would-be television programmer (e.g. Howard
and Kievman 1983; Tyler Eastman et al. 1985). The production of this knowledge does
not only take place in the specialized, knowledge-producing activity of ‘audience
research’; it also emerges and comes into circulation more or less spontaneously through
a whole range of concrete discursive practices—board meetings, informal conversation
and interviews, discussions about programme ideas, scheduling principles, policy
statements, research reports, and so on; practices that, in one way or another, ultimately
revolve around one main objective: to come to terms with television’s invisible
addressee.
One such discursive practice is the ‘story conference’, a key event, in American
commercial television at least, in which producers, writers, and other creative personnel
(story editors, directors and so on) gather together to come to a shared understanding of
what the television programme they are creating should look like. Paul Espinosa’s (1982)
analysis of a number of typical story conferences indicates that their unfolding is
governed by the implicit application of a number of rules of thumb that articulate
institutional perceptions about the audience. In the course of such story conferences the
participants tend to display an intense preoccupation with the need to engage the
audience, to consider the audience’s presumed knowledge of the world, to meet the
audience’s expectations for the programme, and not to ‘divide’ the audience. Statements
made during a story conference such as ‘America has to embrace your characters’ and ‘I
think we have to keep this non-racial’ evince the sense producers have of what viewers
will or will not accept. According to Espinosa (ibid.: 84), such ‘perceptions of the
audience function as an internalized, restraining mechanism which [the producers] bring
into play at appropriate moments in the story conference’. How these perceptions come
into being, however, is a rather elusive question. As he notes,

these images [of audience] are the subjective, intuitive beliefs of
producers. These images are not empirically generated by market research
or any formal quantitative method. Rather the ‘audience’ is a cultural
category for producers, a category which they form from a number of
sources, including their experiences with audiences from previous
programs, their personal projections about who their audience is, and their
knowledge of the industry they work in.
(ibid.: 85)

Despite their ‘unscientific’ nature, however, these images and perceptions serve as true
knowledge for the producers because they empower them to reduce the extreme
complexity of the process which the making of a programme entails: they are discursive
tools that enable them to make choices, evaluate proposals, and so on.
Espinosa’s study refers to the central role of informal, if not speculative knowledges
about the audience in the creative sector of institutional activity, where development of
programmes is the main task (Pekurny 1982; Newcomb and Alley 1983). But producers
do not have the power to decide whether their productions will be put on the air; that