Page 61 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Streamlining ‘television audience’

Ratings discourse’s object of knowledge, ‘television audience’, is not the transparent
representation of pregiven actual audiences. In and through the descriptions made by
ratings discourse a certain profile of ‘television audience’ takes shape—a profile that
does not exist outside or beyond those descriptions but is produced by them. In this sense,
‘television audience’, as it is constructed in ratings discourse, is a fictive entity. This does
not mean, of course, that ratings dream the audience into existence. They are based on
actual data on how many and who are watching what. The knowledge produced by
ratings is therefore neither false nor untrue. On the contrary, ratings are powerful
precisely because of their ability to define a certain field of empirical truth. That regime
of truth is fictive, however, because the very terms with which it covers empirical reality
inevitably result in a description of the audience that foregrounds certain characteristics
but suppresses others. As I have indicated in Chapter 3, the category of ‘television
audience’ as such already implies a highly selective delineation of the real, and the very
fact that we tend to regard ‘television audience’ as a taxonomic collective having a
definite and defineable size and composition is a ‘reality effect’ of ratings discourse (Hall
1982).
For one thing, to perceive the audience as something that can be measured is already a
rather peculiar move. It is an assumption originating in the general idea of the
‘measurability of markets’ quintessential to the parameters of marketing thought as it
began to be developed in the early 1920s (Beniger 1986). The emphasis on size leads to a
representation of the audience as a calculable entity, a taxonomic collective consisting of
the sum of individual, serialized units, defined as households or persons. The attention
given to demographic composition of the audience does not alter this in any essential
sense: it only breaks down the total audience into separate slices of audience that are,
each of them, in turn imagined as countable entities (often called segments). The units of
those entities only matter insofar as they can be added up: in the imagination of ratings
discourse, all households of the total audience are, by projection, principally the same; all
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people belonging to one demographic segment basically equivalent and equal. In other
words, in ratings discourse the individual units of the audience, the ‘audience members’,
are ultimately devoid of personal identity and history, of idiosyncratic subjectivity.
But ‘television audience’ as constructed by ratings discourse is not only characterized
by objective, thing-like figures such as size and composition. A subjective, human
dimension is inevitably comprised in it, simply because ratings are assumed to measure
something done by human beings. Awareness of this subjective dimension can be found
in a certain ambivalence within everyday industry language: although the role of the
audience in the institutional set-up of the television industry is structurally that of
commodified object, it is often spoken about as if it were a huge, living subject. Industry
people are often heard saying things like, ‘the audience wants comedy’, ‘the audience
won’t understand this show’, or ‘they don’t like soap ads’. Such attribution of preference