Page 40 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 28
virtually ever-present, kaleidoscopic medium: television’s ‘unit of performance’ is not
clear, instead it is characterized by a constant flow of programmes, segments and items
1
(Williams 1974; Ellis 1982). In other words, as a provider of culture television is
increasingly characterized by permanent presence, always available to whoever wants to
watch, at any time. As a result, actual audiences can never be observed in a direct
empirical overview. A photographic image of the total television audience is impossible
to take. This literal invisibility results in a lack of a readily identifiable referent for
knowledge about ‘television audience’.
Statistical figures that give estimates of the size of the audience, as produced by
audience measurement, offer a compensation for this lack of immediate visibility. I have
already hinted at the economic necessity of such information for commercial television.
But the general currency of such figures, also in public service contexts, points to a more
general institutional desire to be able to speak about the television audience as a clearcut,
empirically definable thing. What such figures do then is construct a unified
representation of ‘television audience’ by taking its conceptualization as a taxonomic
collective as a starting point. Such figures produce a sense of concreteness, a sense of
ontological clarity about who or what the television audience is. Mobilized here is an
inherently empiricist epistemology, in that it suggests the ultimate possibility of defining
the audience in its totality, and to empirically delimitate its boundaries—if not directly
(for instance, through photography) then at least indirectly (for instance, through
statistics).
Epistemologically speaking, it is easy to criticize the empiricist dogma of immaculate
perception which lies behind the illusory matter-of-factness of conceptualizing the
television audience taxonomically as the total sum of all viewers. No representation of
‘television audience’, empirical or otherwise, gives us direct access to any actual
audience. Instead, it evokes ‘fictive’ pictures of ‘audience’, fictive not in the sense of
false or untrue, but of fabricated, both made and made up (Clifford 1986). Even our
photographic representation of the football audience, apparently such a perfect imprint of
empirical reality, only gives us an illusion of objective neutrality. In fact, it actively
produces a way of looking at people watching the game as a unified audience, rather than
simply reveals it. Similarly, counting the heads of people watching television and
representing the results in neat and round figures, involves the construction of a certain
way of objectifying a group of people we then call ‘television audience’. In other words,
‘audience’ as it emerges from its taxonomic definition as aggregate of spectators is not
the innocent reflection of a given reality, but a discursive construct which can only be
known and encountered in and through discursive representations such as the air
photograph or, more ubiquitously, the statistical figure.
The issue to explore here, however, is not just the epistemological liabilities of the
taxonomic definition of ‘television audience’ as a body of spectators, but the specific
advantages it provides to the institutions that want to conquer the audience. Put simply,
the abstract and decontextualized definition of ‘television audience’ as a taxonomic
collective may be epistemologically limited, but at the same time it is institutionally
enabling! What should be emphasized, then, is not just that defining ‘television audience’
as a taxonomic collective is not a matter of pure description, but more importantly, that it
occasions the production of strategically useful knowledge. Like every discursive