Page 62 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 50
or competence invests the concept of ‘television audience’ with human qualities,
although strictly speaking ‘television audience’, being a category that owes its existence
to its position as ‘passive’ target of corporate practices, cannot want or understand
something. Only people, invested with subjectivity, can. The ‘slip of the tongue’ is not
meaningless. It indicates that however object-ified ‘television audience’ as a categorical
entity is, its construction is related to the subjective moment of actual people watching
television.
The notion that the television audience is a taxonomic collective in which viewers are
aggregated undergirds ratings discourse. This notion brings together the idea of the whole
(television audience) and that of separate units (audience members) which make up that
whole. Thus, ‘television audience’ as constructed in audience measurement is an object
that is made up of subjects. This leads to a fundamental instability of the category. As an
object made up of subjects, ‘television audience’ is not a static, stone-like object whose
characteristics can be described once and for all, but is a continually changing, dynamic
object that always seems to elude definitive description. The fact that the production of
ratings is an ongoing, never-ending practice testifies to this slipperiness: even the most
factual, objective characteristics of ‘television audience’, its size and its composition,
cannot be assumed constant, and have to be re-established again and again, day after day.
Ratings are very fleeting products: they become obsolete almost instantly.
As has been remarked before, individuals watching television (gathered in households)
are taken to be the basic units of audience measurement data. But individuals are concrete
social subjects and because they are situated in concrete everyday contexts and
circumstances, the way they watch television will be subjective too, formed by and
associated with those concrete contexts and circumstances. However, taking this into
account would make the production of ratings, which seeks to arrive at a generalized
construct of ‘television audience’, utterly unmanageable. Therefore audience
measurement, as is the general rule in quantifying social science, tends to abstract from
the detailed singularities in experience and practice. In other words, in order to construct
an object-ive ‘television audience’, it has to mould the subject-ive into wieldy,
measurable forms. As a result, the subjective practices and experiences of actual
audiences are objectified in audience measurement in the easily identifiable and
verifiable concept of ‘viewing behaviour’.
Behaviourism marks the convenient marriage between the objective and the subjective
in ratings discourse: individual television viewers are typically ‘captured’ and measured
in ratings discourse in terms of their externally observable behaviour, excluding more
intractable subjective dimensions such as the psychical (e.g. viewers’ internal, mental
states or orientations), or the cultural (e.g. the specific social uses people make of
television in various contexts, or the various ways in which viewers interpret television
material). In short, the subjective is ‘domesticated’ and ‘purified’ in ratings discourse by
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breaking it down to measurable behavioural variables.
The technologies of audience measurement testify to this tendency toward reductionist
behaviourism. For example, the electronic setmeter can register nothing more than
whether the set is on or off. In this case, viewing behaviour is defined as a simple, one-
dimensional, and purely mechanical act. As Gitlin (1983:54) has rightly remarked, ‘the
numbers only sample sets tuned in, not necessarily shows watched, let alone grasped,
remembered, loved, learned from, deeply anticipated, or mildly tolerated’. Thus, what