Page 64 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 52
subjectivities, formalized in so-called ‘psychographics’. For example, in The World
According to Nielsen’ the viewing habits of a typical member of the ‘Men 55+‘category,
‘George’, are described:

Over the years George’s tastes have grown oddly similar to Ruth’s [his
wife]. He still likes sports (though now he prefers golf to football), but he
can no longer watch without flinching those death ‘n destruction shows
like A Team…. Nowadays he sits around with Ruth to watch the likes of
Dallas…. Perhaps he’s surrendering his own fantasies for his wife’s.
(Traub 1985:71)

In this portrait, ‘George’ is a type, an exemplar of ‘later-middle-aged, married men’, not a
personalized, situated individual. In such psychographic profiles ratings data are
combined with projections about the category’s typical ‘life style’, as a result of which it
is possible to ‘freeze’ the viewing practices of later-middle-aged married men into some
fixed habits, even comprising some peculiar psychological and behavioural inclinations.
As Traub sums up, ‘older men are in the living room more, but they get tired early’.
Of course, users of demographic and psychographic information know perfectly well
that such descriptions are generalizations and that all statistical generalizations are
conditional, but the patterns emerging from that information still enable broadcasters and
advertisers to develop simple practical truths, such as that women 18 to 49 (one of the
most desirable demographic segments for advertisers) are more changeable than over-50
viewers and thus more easily introduced to new programmes, that women aged 18 to 35
are in their early married years and like to try out all kinds of new products and make
major purchasing decisions on home furnishings and appliances, and so on (Tyler
Eastman et al. 1981). Such profiles provide an extreme example of what streamlining the
audience amounts to: in the end, it conjures up the Utopia of a neatly ordered world
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inhabited by perfectly predictable people.
Again, the streamlined audience is not a false representation of people’s concrete ways
of relating to television, but rather a certain structuring mould imposed upon the
multifaceted activities of television viewers. As a result, whatever contingent routines
actual audiences create in their everyday engagements with television cannot be expected
to coincide with the predictable ‘viewing habits’ invented by audience measurement. The
latter are conceivable only because ratings discourse describes individual viewers, and
the differences between and among them, exclusively in terms of a small number of
generalized and standardized viewing behaviour variables. All other bases of identity and
difference are considered irrelevant and are therefore deliberately ignored.
Streamlining, then, is a discursive procedure that results in the construction of a
representation of ‘television audience’ consisting of a finite and limited set of parameters.
This mapping of the virtual ‘audience field’ leads to the establishment of a more or less
comprehensive classificatory system over which all viewers (as projected from the
sample) can be distributed and arranged. However, this cannot be known once and for all:
the mapping has to be repeated every day, because it is not certain how viewers will
actually respond to the television programmes which are intended to attract them. That is,
every day the viewing behaviour of each viewer (or his or her representative in the
sample) needs to be regauged: this is the one element that ratings discourse cannot