Page 42 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 30
The average citizen may have different imputed characteristics than the average
consumer, but they are both merely exemplary, prototypical audience members
constructed from the perspective of the institutions concerned.
As members of a taxonomic collective audience members—whether defined as
consumers or as citizens—are extremely depersonalized. They are not seen as individual
persons or social subjects with their own particularities, but are given the status of
serialized parts of an objectified whole (market or public). As Aaron Cicourel (1981:64)
has noted, ‘When we aggregate across individual responses…we are forced to restrict
severely if not eliminate the local and larger contextual conditions that could clarify the
respondent’s perspective. The aggregation is a summarization process that obscures our
thinking of the way local context and individual responses contributed to the larger
picture.’ Thus, conceiving ‘television audience’ as a taxonomic collective implies a
denial of the messy social world of actual audiences: the fact that television viewing is
done by living people, in concrete locations, in real times. But this denial is not to be seen
as a failure. On the contrary, it should be regarded as an accomplishment for institutional
knowledge. It is what it needs to achieve, in order to be able to construct ‘television
audience’ as object to be conquered.
The predilection within television institutions, commercial or public service, to think
about audiences in this way cannot be overestimated. For instance, it frames the
experiences of John Ellis (1983), a critical television theorist who became a programme
2
maker for the British Channel Four in the early 1980s. Disenchanted with the promise
that the newly-founded channel had posed as a place for ‘innovation and experiment in
form and content’, he came to the conclusion that it is exactly the evacuation of concrete
viewers from the institution’s perceptual horizon, and its commitment to an abstracted,
taxonomic idea of audience, that structurally impedes radical televisual innovation:

For ‘audience’ is a profoundly ideological concept, that has very little to
do with what viewers are doing or how they are interpellated.
Broadcasting institutions are not concerned with ‘viewers’, but they are
with ‘audience’. Viewers are individuals, people who use TV within their
domestic and group social contexts. Viewers are the few people who ring
in to the duty officer, or write to the broadcasters or to newspapers,
expressing their opinions. Viewers record programmes on VCRs and use
them later, pausing or replaying when attention wanders, shuttling
forward when interest fades. Audiences, however, do not have these
irritating characteristics. Audiences are bulk agglomerations created by
statistical research. They have no voices and the most basic of
characteristics, they ‘belong’ to income groups and are endowed with a
few broad educational and cultural features. Audiences do not use TV,
they watch it and consume it. Broadcasting institutions do not seek
viewers, they seek audiences.
(Ellis 1983:49)