Page 59 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In search of the audience commodity 47
ratings could become a lucrative business venture. But a strictly political economic
approach fails to account for the symbolic effectivity of the knowledge-producing
endeavour that is implied in audience measurement as a discursive practice. Ratings are
so important for the industry because they articulate the economic and the symbolic, the
institutional and the discursive, power and knowledge.
It is through ratings discourse that the social world of actual audiences is incorporated
in the complex system of production and exchange that keeps the industry going. The
system performs a double objectification of actual audiences: by turning ‘television
audience’ into an object of knowledge, ratings discourse simultaneously enables the
making of ‘television audience’ as an object of economic exchange. This makes audience
measurement a clear instance of what Foucault (1980b) has called a technology of power,
in which the wish to exert control over people is connected to and articulated in the
institutionalized production of knowledge about them.
Ratings proved to be so useful that the operation of commercial television without the
intermediary role of audience measurement as a management tool would be unthinkable
today. Its mechanism of permanent registration and delivery of audience information is
attractive because it holds the promise of solving the industry’s basic uncertainty about
the audience. Therefore, ratings have become more than just a currency for transaction:
they have become a central focus in the day-to-day concerns and problems facing the
industry. The obsession with ratings among network managers has to do with the
reassurance offered by ratings. As a CBS executive has put it: ‘We get a daily report card.
This is one of the few businesses in the world I know where a guy comes to work every
morning and looks to see how he did the day before’ (in Gitlin 1983:48).
But unfortunately ratings do not give perfect and uncontested ‘report cards’. On the
contrary, since the days of its original conception, the practice of audience measurement
has encountered many real and perceived imperfections. These imperfections have
created tensions within the industry, which have not only led to continuing competition
between ratings firms, but also, often enough, to skirmishes between advertisers and
networks over the right measurement standards. Given the enormous financial
consequences of every variation in the outcome of the measurements, such concern is not
at all surprising. In fact, the desire to have a better and better measurement service in
industry circles has spurred the development of ever more sophisticated measurement
procedures, which are hoped to deliver more accurate, detailed and useful official
descriptions of ‘television audience’. The growing emphasis on demographic
information, for example, was a direct consequence of the advertisers’ wish to advertise
their products to specific market segments (such as ‘young urban adults’) rather than to
the general ‘mass’ audience—a development which had a major impact on American
network television since the late 1960s (Brown 1971; Barnouw 1978; Feuer 1984). And,
as I will show at length in Chapters 8, 9 and 10, the emergence of VCRs, cable and other
new communication technologies have made the industry very nervous about the
adequacy of the figures provided by the ratings services. In the industry’s feverish
attempts to adapt its official description of ‘television audience’ to the new television
landscape, audience measurement becomes a prime focus of concern.
The concern is typically cast in terms of the need for more ‘correct measurement’, but
it is generally motivated by divergences of interest within and among diverse branches in
the television industrial complex. As we shall see, the present turmoil in the audience