Page 71 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The streamlined audience disrupted: impact of the new technologies 59
under pressure! Behind the controversy over the diary technique lurks a great suspicion
of the capriciousness of the new viewing behaviour brought about by the sheer increase
of channels and encouraged by the remote control device. Viewers could no longer be
trusted to report their viewing with sufficient accuracy: they lack perfect memory, they
may be too careless. In short, their subjectivity has become too problematic!
In this situation, feeling thrived that a better method to obtain ratings data should be
developed. And better means: more ‘objective’, that is, less dependent on the fallibilities
of viewers in the sample—a method that erases all traces of unreliable subjectivity. The
electronic setmeter, the other technique through which Nielsen produced its ratings
figures, is such an objective method, but it only measures viewing per household and
cannot capture viewing by individual audience members, for which the diary technique
was used in the first place. Demographic data, which have become more and more
important for the industry, could only be acquired through those wretched diaries.
Confronted with this predicament, the ratings business came up with a new,
technologically advanced instrument to measure the television audience: the people
meter. The people meter is supposed to combine the virtues of the traditional setmeter
and the diary: it is an electronic device that measures individual viewing rather than
household viewing. Although currently operative versions of the people meter are still
vulnerable because they need the co-operation of the viewers at home, the instrument was
welcomed by the industry as a first step in the direction of a more appropriate
measurement technology—a possible solution to the problems haunting the industry
(Stoddard 1988). But before continuing to go into the vicissitudes of the people meter, let
us have a look at another ‘new technology’ that has thrown the audience measurement
field into turmoil: the video cassette recorder.
The VCR has also played a major destabilizing role in disrupting the streamlined
‘television audience’. By 1986 the new machine, which only became available for
domestic use in 1975, could already be found as part of the household equipment in about
half of all American homes, while optimistic estimates place VCRs in up to 85 per cent
of households by 1995 (Potter et al. 1988). It is clear that the VCR has helped to enlarge
the usage possibilities of the television set. All sorts of viewer practices have flourished
as a consequence of the VCR. Rentals of prerecorded tapes, for example, have proven to
be an increasingly significant use of the VCR (Potter et al. 1988; Henke and Donehue
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1989). When watching these tapes, however, viewers simply cease to be members of the
broadcast (or cable) television audience. Confronted with this practice of what has been
called ‘source shifting’ by actual audiences, the industry laments in nostalgia over the
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‘loss’.
But the VCR also enables ‘time shifting’: a desired programme is recorded while the
viewer is watching another channel or is out or is otherwise occupied, with the intention
of playing it back at a later time. It is this application of the VCR which has caused the
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most commotion in industry circles. Time shifting may be a welcome new option for
viewers because it makes watching television a more flexible practice, but for the
industry it brings about all sorts of troublesome complications. Time shifting is obviously
changing the way in which people relate to television, although it remains to be seen
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exactly how, and to what extent. But as the industry cannot live with too much
uncertainty, demand for measurement of the VCR audience has been the not so surprising
response to the problem. How often is the VCR used? How can the VCR audience be