Page 60 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 48
measurement enterprise is directly related to a growing lack of consensus within the
industry as a whole about what represents correct measurement. At a more fundamental
level, however, the continuing struggle over ratings also reveals a more structural and
profound predicament of audience measurement—a predicament that forms the
epistemological ground for the pragmatic and self-serving debates over correct
measurement fought out within the industry. Mal Beville, the ratings expert, voices this
predicament in stating that ‘there is no perfect or ideal way to measure electronic media
audiences, nor will there ever be’ (1985:128). But this impossibility is not just a matter of
unsolvable technical insufficiencies, as Beville implicitly suggests. It is, in fact,
implicated in the epistemological foundations of audience measurement as such.
To understand this, we have to remember that watching television is an ongoing, day-
to-day cultural practice engaged in by millions of people. To capture and encompass the
viewing practices of all these people in a singular, object-ified, streamlined construct of
‘television audience’ is a very ambitious project indeed, but exactly this is what ratings
discourse basically sets out to do. I will go into the details of this streamlining process in
the next chapter. For the moment, it is enough to say that although the streamlined
‘television audience’ is a source of control for the industry, it also carries the explanation
of why in the end audience measurement, apparently such an ingenious technology of
power, can never be the perfect and definitive solution to the industry’s uncertainty about
the audience: by definition, streamlining is a never-ending discursive process. In short,
the streamlined audience is the Utopian symbolic object that will never be realized, but
which audience measurement perpetually strives to approximate.
This is the central predicament of audience measurement, the drama of its unfulfilled
promise, as it were: the constant search for improvement of measurement technology is
pursued in the belief that it will provide more and more ‘correct’ information about, and
thus more control over, the audience. But unfortunately this only tends to aggravate the
industry’s problems. As Hurwitz (1984:212) has argued, the growing technical
sophistication of audience measurement ‘only increased the abstractness of the broadcast
situation that the introduction of reseach was intended to resolve in the first place’. In
other words, the more information the ratings services try to accumulate in their
measurement endeavours, the more problematic the object-ification of actual audiences
into ‘television audience’ tends to become: the procedure of streamlining becomes more
and more complicated. The stormy recent developments in audience measurement can be
understood in this light. Before laying out the scenario of this contemporary drama,
however, we must explore in greater detail the way in which ratings discourse constructs
a streamlined ‘television audience’.