Page 55 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Commercial knowledge: measuring the audience 43
and its audiences is constantly being fought out, but never absolutely won or lost. I will
expound upon this battle by tracing the constitutive role and significance of audience
measurement in the American television industry—the pre-eminent commercial system.
As I have already indicated in Part I, audience measurement has also come to occupy an
important place in European public service broadcasting. In that context its history and
role differ, however, as will become clear in Part III. While in Europe ratings have never
lost a somewhat suspect reputation, even within the broadcasting organizations
themselves who tend to consider too much reliance on ratings inappropriate, the almost
shameless and completely taken for granted prominence of ratings in the operations of
American commercial television offers a fascinating panorama on the multiple
ramifications of audience measurement as a guiding practice in broadcast television—
ramifications which, as we will see, do not only entail structural rewards, but also
engender continuing discontent within the industry.
Throughout the history of commercial broadcasting, ratings firms have always been
pressured to develop better measurement instruments, better sampling techniques, more
advanced statistical analyses, and so on—an emphasis on ‘progress’ which in itself
indicates that the current measurement system is perceived as less than perfect. Since the
late 1970s, especially, the established ratings services are under severe pressure due to
the changing television landscape—a terrain that has been invaded by new phenomena
such as video cassette recorders, video rental stores, cable, satellites, videotex, teletext,
computer games, and so on (e.g. Rubens 1984). In the United States, major changes in the
ratings business have reached a momentary climax with the introduction of the ‘people
meter’ in September 1987, marking a significant change in the technology of audience
measurement. The debates and controversies around the people meter are particularly
suitable for examining how the struggle over ratings represents a crisis of the relationship
between industry and audience—a crisis which, as I will try to show, has to do with the
increasing difficulty of constructing a coherent and encompassing discourse on
‘television audience’ in an increasingly multi-faceted and chaotic television environment
(Chapters 8 and 9).
Before delving into these stirring contemporary developments, however, I will first
explore in greater detail the historical and structural forces that have determined the
importance of audience measurement in commercial television institutions (Chapter 6), in
order to better understand the discursive process through which power and knowledge are
intertwined in the construction of ‘television audience’ through ratings discourse. This
process is a process of ‘streamlining’ (Chapter 7). The problems faced by audience
measurement are in fact symptomatic of a more fundamental, and ultimately unsolvable,
institutional problem: the profound, structural uncertainty about the audience which is the
core predicament of the television industry. We will see that ratings discourse, while
providing the industry with a comforting sense of knowing the audience, cannot proffer a
definitive solution to this structural predicament, not only because of current
shortcomings of the measurement technology, but more fundamentally because
‘television audience’ as such turns out to be a category that cannot be contained in ratings
discourse, no matter how sophisticated and detailed the measurement procedures. In
short, the television institutions are faced with the problem that ‘television audience’ is a
fictional construct that will always refuse definitive representation (Chapter 10).