Page 63 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Streamlining 'television audience' 51
audience measurement tends to erase from its field of discernment is any specific
consideration of the meanings, saliences or impacts of television for people, the ‘lived
reality behind the ratings’ (Jensen 1987:25). In standard ratings discourse watching
television is reduced to the observable behaviour of having the TV set on: it is done by
subjects but is devoid of subjective dimensions. Human subjects here are thus merely
relevant for their bodies: strictly speaking, they appear in the logic of ratings discourse
only in so far as they are agents of the physical act of tuning-in. As a result, the problem
for the industry facing the subjectivity of viewers is funneled into one simple but
obsessive question: how do we get them tuned in?
It would make no sense to simply condemn this lack of sensitivity for the subjective
dimension of viewer practices in audience measurement. Nor is it to the point to criticize
it for its faulty epistemology, in terms of lack of conceptual validity or methodological
adequacy. After all, audience measurement is not social science, but social technology:
its purpose is the systematic accumulation of strategic knowledge. Knowledge about the
audience is only interesting for the industry when it is useful for their commercial
purposes, and too much awareness about the heterogeneous and contradictory responses
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of actual audiences to television is just not practical for the industry. Industry people
need a kind of knowledge that allows them to act, not paralyze them—a convenient kind
of knowledge that enables the industry to concoct its relation to the audience in a simple,
clear-cut, and manageable way. Ratings discourse offers this knowledge because it puts
together a streamlined map of ‘television audience’.
The streamlined audience is a ‘disciplined’ audience. It is constructed by ratings
discourse through a smoothening out of problematic subjectivity and translating it into
ordered and regular instances of viewing behaviour. This is achieved through the
quantifying perspective of audience measurement, which inevitably leads to emphasizing
averages, regularities and generalizable patterns rather than idiosyncracies and surprising
exceptions (cf. Anderson 1987). As a result, a streamlined profile of ‘television audience’
comes into being that reduces the individual viewer to a ‘typical’ audience member who
can be objectively classified. In the discursive map of the streamlined audience, each
viewer can ideally be assigned an exact place in a comprehensive table of knowledge,
formed by the central axes of size and demographic composition on the one hand, and the
variables of ‘viewing behaviour’ on the other hand.
This procedure of streamlining can be clarified by having a closer look at the logic of
demographics. The matching of factors such as age, sex, race, income, occupation,
education and area of residence with viewing behaviour variables (e.g. amount of
viewing and programme choice) results in the statistical determination of relatively stable
‘viewing habits’—a set of imputed behavioural routines that form a perfect merger of the
objective and the subjective. Thus, in an article aptly entitled ‘The World According to
Nielsen’, it is observed that ‘[V]iewing may vary by age, sex, region, and income, but
within those categories the vast TV audience has surprisingly predictable habits’ (Traub
1985:26). This, then, is the streamlined audience: an objectified category in which the
stable is foregrounded over the erratic, the likely over the extraordinary, the consistent
over the inconsistent. Through demographics ‘television audience’ is streamlined by
neatly slicing it up in substantive ‘segments’, each of which consists of presumably well-
organized, serialized viewers displaying dependable viewing behaviour. Sometimes,
typical characteristics are assigned to each segment which conjure up nicely contained