Page 70 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 58
context-bound cultural practices that are not translatable in figures and statistics.
Therefore, they have to be suppressed from the measurement system. Ratings discourse,
as we have seen, is not about the social world of actual audiences, but about ‘viewing
behaviour’. Nevertheless, the potential of distorted ratings as a consequence of strictly
behavioural ‘flaws’ has been quite clearly documented in empirical terms. Evidence was
mounted, for example, that certain groups, such as children, teenagers and young males,
tend to underreport themselves in diary data. Also, a tendency to report programmes that
are usually seen rather than are actually watched in the particular week was discovered—
a tendency which militates against less well-known and familiar programmes (such as
those of the new cable channels) because people tend to forget about them more easily
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when they fill out their diaries at the end of the week. Still, the diary was the most
widely used technique in television audience measurement: for decades, its weaknesses
were tolerated because it is a relatively simple and inexpensive method, even though, as
Beville (1985:112) admits, ‘for all household members to keep an accurate record of
viewing on several television sets is a challenging task indeed’.
The proliferation of cable channels, however, acutely dramatized the problems
inherent in the diary technique. Suddenly its lack of accuracy mattered, because it tended
to result in statistics disadvantageous for the cable companies. All of a sudden, then, the
built-in subjective (and thus ‘unreliable’) element of the diary technique was perceived as
an unacceptable deficiency. For example, officials of the pop music channel MTV
complained that their target audience, young people between 12 and 24, consistently
comes off badly in the demographic data produced through diaries, because ‘younger
viewers…tend not to be as diligent in filling out diaries as older household members’
(Livingston 1986:130). Ratings specialists have come to talk about this issue as the ‘non-
co-operation problem’: the fact that some groups of the audience are not so easily
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mobilized to keep diaries. And there is no way to force them to do so…
But the new multi-channel environment has also in a more general sense unsettled the
relatively uncomplicated assumptions about watching television that have been the
traditional basis for audience measurement. Now that viewers have so many channels to
choose from, they have the opportunity to switch around from channel to channel more—
a type of conduct which was greatly facilitated by the remote control device, enabling
viewers to swiftly ‘zap’ through all the channels without having to leave their couch. This
practice of ‘channel switching’ presumably makes for rather chaotic and erratic scenes in
front of the TV sets. And in this situation the diary problem became so urgent that it
could no longer be ignored. Agreement grew that the diary had now become an obsolete
measurement tool. In the words of David Poltrack, CBS vice president of research:

It used to be easy. You watched M*A*S*H on Monday night and you’d
put that in the diary. Now, if you have 30 channels on cable you watch
one channel, switch to a movie, watch a little MTV, then another program,
and the next morning with all that switching all over the place you can’t
remember what you watched.
(In Bedell Smith 1985: H23)

Some irony: the more ‘freedom of movement’ viewers have, the more intricate and
perplexing the situation for the industry becomes. The map of the streamlined audience is