Page 39 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Television audience as taxonomic collective

In enabling television institutions to see their task as that of conquering the audience,
institutional knowledge must first of all constitute ‘television audience’ as a manifest,
nameable object. Apparently, this is not so difficult to do. In our everyday language we
are used to saying that one can draw or attract an audience; one can move, grip, or stir an
audience; an audience can be responsive, enthusiastic, unsympathetic and so on. In all
these cases, the audience is implicitly granted an autonomous, supra-individual existence.
In common sense language, then, the object-ive status of audience is treated as self-
evident; audience is assumed to be a given category. However, our ability to speak so
confidently and taken-for-grantedly about audience in this way does not come naturally;
rather, it is a matter of discursive effectivity, conditioned by the taking up—as the
etymology of the word ‘audience’ suggests—of the performer’s perspective in a theatre.
An exploration of some of the basic assumptions and consequences of the general
tendency to speak about audience as a given category can illuminate the objectifying
mechanisms and operations performed by institutional knowledge.
Due to the messy status of the notion of audience in everyday language, an audience is
routinely defined in terms of its most obvious empirical manifestation, i.e. a collection of
spectators, a group of individuals who are gathered together to attend a performance and
‘receive’ a message ‘sent’ by another. An audience would then be synonymous with the
total sum of people that are part of it, pure and simple. In other words, it would be what
Rom Harré (1981) has called a ‘taxonomic collective’: an entity of serialized, in principle
unrelated individuals who form a group solely because each member has a
characteristic—in our case, spectatorship—that is like that of each other member.
This straightforward, taxonomic definition of audience as aggregate of attenders can
be readily applied to audiences for football matches in a sports stadium—to name but one
obvious example. In this case spectators have to be bodily present at a central location at
a certain time, in order to be part of the audience. Apparently it is perfectly clear here
who the audience is: those who are inside the stadium are, those outside it are not part of
it. One could, in a manner of speaking, take an air photograph of the stadium during a
match, and so get a sense of direct knowledge about the actual audience of this match.
The stadium audience, so it seems, is characterized by immediate visibility, and as such it
furnishes the certainty of an empirical referent for knowledge about the football audience:
its object is clear, and clearly there.
The stadium audience bears many characteristics of the prototypical, pre-media
audience idea. Unfortunately, however, the audience for the mass media, starting with the
historical rise of the reading public in relation with the mass production of print in the
eighteenth century, is a much more elusive phenomenon, and this is certainly the case for
the television audience (McQuail 1987). The television audience is typically
characterized by geographical dispersedness: television spectatorship takes place in
millions of private homes. Furthermore, as a cultural form television is typically a