Page 66 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 54
smooth flow—these are all strategies developed by the networks to match the streamlined
audience with an equally streamlined television ‘supertext’ (Browne 1984).
The idea of ‘prime time’, for example, is essentially a construct of the regularity that
was found in the fluctuations of audience size evening after evening: continuous audience
measurement has demonstrated that as a rule it is between 8.00 p.m. and 11.00 pm that
the number of households having their television sets on is the largest. Now the concept
of prime time has acquired an entrenched, institutionalized status within the industry:
programming and scheduling are geared to it; advertising rates are determined
accordingly.
To sum up, we can conclude that audience measurement’s discursive object-ification
of ‘television audience’ necessarily involves the serialization of television viewers as
‘audience members’. But actual television viewers are always more than just audience
members; their identities as television viewers is more complex than their being part of
the audience. In other words, when people watch television they of course inevitably
occupy the position of audience members, but they also simultaneously inhabit a myriad
of other subject positions such as parent, critic, fan, democrat, cook or whatever—
culturally specific subject positions whose interdependent meanings elude the symbolic
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world constructed by ratings discourse. As a consequence ratings discourse, and the
audience facts mapped by it, always inevitably stand in a strained relationship with what
actual audiences are up to. The mould never quite fits, as it were.
By itself, however, this epistemological gap between the map of the streamlined
audience and the world of actual audiences does not constitute a problem for the industry.
As long as the map works, the industry will not bother to look for more ‘realistic’ maps.
In other words, the concrete practices and experiences of actual audiences are irrelevant
for the industry so long as the information delivered by audience measurement is
uncontested and perceived to be adequate. Therefore, the gap will only be problematized
when the streamlining process tends to slacken; that is, when it no longer seems possible
to establish fixed viewing habits, unambiguous behavioural variables, and so on, by
which viewers can be unproblematically typified and classified. At such moments, the
existing streamlining procedures themselves will be questioned, and a lack of validity or
reliability in the ratings services will be perceived in industry circles. Suddenly, elements
of the subjective world of actual audiences do matter and help to disturb the consensus
over the existing map of the streamlined audience. Then, a reconstruction of the
streamlining process is called for in order to come to a new, more satisfying map: a
struggle over the very question of how to streamline the audience will be fought out.
Then, audience measurement is in crisis. In fact, such a crisis has been unfolding in the
American television industry throughout the 1980s. It is to this historical episode that I
will turn in the remaining chapters of part II.