Page 54 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 42
industry. In this sense, ratings are a solution for the most fundamental problem that the
industry is preoccupied with: the need to know the audience.
But in this complex circulation of corporate needs, wishes and preoccupations, ratings
perform more than just a ‘scientific’, instrumental function. Todd Gitlin (1983:53), for
example, has dubbed the obsession of the networks with ratings ‘the fetish of immediate
numerical gratification’. Network managers, he observed, generally disregard the
‘scientific’, technical-methodological criteria by which ratings data should be evaluated:

In the tumult of everyday figuring and judging, network executives, even
research specialists, often commit the standard occupational error of
unwarranted precision. When Nielsen publishes its figures every two
weeks, it reminds subscribers of the standard errors, but executives
functionally forget what they were taught in elementary statistics: that all
survey statistics are valid only within predictable margins of error. For
example, the 1981–82 series rankings showed Dynasty in twentieth place
with a 20.4 season rating and Hill Street Blues in twenty-ninth place with
18.6. But statistically there was a 10 percent chance the two shows
actually drew the same size audience. Once managers agree to accept a
measure, they act as if it is precise. They ‘know’ there are standard
errors—but what a nuisance it would be to act on that knowledge. And so
the number system has an impetus of its own.
(Gitlin 1983:53)

This suggests that ratings do more than just offer hard, factual information. Rather, the
recurrent and institutionalized use of ratings in industry circles has ritualistic and
rhetorical dimensions. What ratings primarily seem to achieve is a sense of control over
the audience, a control however that is not ‘real’, but symbolic. What audience
measurement produces is a discursive framework—what I will call ratings discourse—
which enables the industry to know its relationship to the audience in terms of
frequencies, percentages and averages. But this discourse does not provide the industry
with ‘feedback’ from actual audiences, as Beville and others would have it. Ratings
discourse does not just consist of factual, objective, and more or less accurate
descriptions about the audience; it should be considered, as has been suggested by
Donald Hurwitz (1984:207), as ‘a symbolic form and activity with profound expressive
and strategic components’. It is in this sense that Beville’s (1985) characterization of
ratings as the ‘nerve system’ of broadcasting bears some truth. Through the symbolic
world created by ratings, a world inhabited not by actual audiences but by a discursively
constructed ‘television audience’, the industry has armed itself with a guiding principle
for solving the multiple dilemmas, problems and disputes which the gigantic enterprise of
commercial broadcasting entails (Pekurny 1982; Gitlin 1983).
But this ingenious ‘nerve system’ is not exempt from any hitches and complications.
On the contrary, rather than seeing audience measurement as a perfect machine that keeps
the organism of the television industry running smoothly, as Beville’s ‘nerve system’
metaphor insinuates, I would like to evoke, not only for drama’s sake, a less polished and
more agitated scenery. Here, ratings form a focal site of the inherently contentious
relationship between industry and audience, a site in which a battle between television