Page 68 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 56
music channel MTV and CNN (Cable News Network). An entirely different television
landscape unfolds before viewers’ eyes these days, one characterized by abundance rather
than scarcity. And viewers seem to have responded by eagerly altering their viewing
habits, and multiplying the range of their viewing activities. ‘After years of submitting
passively to the tyranny of [network] television programmers, viewers are taking charge’,
comments Sally Bedell Smith (1985:H21) in the New York Times.
Are viewers really ‘taking charge’? And if so, exactly what are they taking charge of,
what does it mean, and what implications does it have? From the industry’s perspective,
what is going on is very confusing indeed. Both for the networks, who see their
established, virtually monopolistic position threatened, and for the advertisers, who are
now faced with doubts about the effectivity of their current strategies of communicating
to their potential consumers, the old certainties have begun to crumble: they feel that they
are losing their steady grip on the audience. The advertisers’ basic worry, of course, is
whether network television is still the best medium to reach their intended audience with
their commercials, while the networks are confronted with a heightened necessity to
develop ever more effective programming and marketing strategies in an increasingly
competitive environment. And in this new and chaotic situation, audience measurement
has become a central focus of concern, the site on which the uncertainties and worries are
expressed and articulated. As the representative of a large advertiser, quoted by Bedell
Smith (1985:H23), notes: There is no question that the new electronic media are
rendering a lot of the traditional ways we measure audiences old-fashioned.’
The problematic nature of the new state of affairs is succinctly articulated in the title
of Bedell Smith’s article, ‘Who’s watching TV? It’s getting hard to tell’. But why, and
for whom, should it be a problem that it is getting hard to tell who’s watching television?
The fact that we tend to accept that we are naturally dealing with a problem here—a
problem of want of knowledge—only brings to light the industry’s power to impose its
own institutional point of view on what is going on: the proliferation of viewing options
presents a problem because they threaten to destroy the dependable overview of the
audience that the industry presumably used to have. What we witness here then is the
industry’s anxiety and uneasiness about the growing unpredictability of viewing habits as
a consequence of the fragmentation of the electronic media landscape. In short, what is at
stake is a disruption of the map of the streamlined ‘television audience’.
As a result, pressure on the ratings services to adjust their measurement procedures to
the new situation became stronger and stronger: not only the advertisers and networks,
but also the newcomers (such as the cable networks and the growing number of
independent stations, who are in the business of snatching shares of audience away from
the networks) were insistent on getting a more finely tuned map of the audience—so
insistent, that the ratings services are said to be under greater pressure to innovate than
they ever have been (Broadcasting 26 December 1988). The research firms feverishly
began to search for technologically feasible answers to the new demands of the industry.
And the expectations are high. Debates about the issue have been replete with dramatic
terms such as ‘revolutionary’, ‘sea change’, and so on. As one industry official put it,
‘It’s possible that we may see more changes in the ratings in the next five years than we
have seen in the previous twenty’ (in Bedell Smith 1985:H23).
The emergence of cable television posed the first challenge to the existing order of
things in the industry. Although cable was initially envisioned by its adherents as a