Page 74 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 62
than enthusiasm by the networks because they realize that such differentiation will
probably lead to lower ratings (Cook 1988).
Such industry disputes may sound petty and tedious to the outsider, and as all too
blatantly betraying self-serving positions. But the zeal with which industry managers
seem to indulge in these discursive quarrels tells us a great deal about the nervousness
with which the new situation has been encountered. The industry needed to adapt;
advertisers and broadcasters clearly needed to define a new common ground, a formal
agreement about the new technologies’ consequences for the way in which ‘viewing
behaviour’ should be measured. And in order to do so, they needed to know more than
they used to. The knowledge offered by the traditional Nielsen ratings obviously no
longer sufficed.
The new television landscape, then, has wiped out ‘the good old days’ when American
commercial television was a relatively neat and ordered business, which could
complacently believe in and rely on the premise of an easily streamlineable audience.
That premise could no longer be taken for granted. Gone is the consensus over the
information which Nielsen’s ratings discourse had managed to supply, to the satisfaction
of all, for so many years: as nobody was sure any more who is watching what and when
and how, an agitated ferment in the field of audience measurement has sprung,
fundamentally throwing into doubt the accepted map of the streamlined audience. The
industry now insists on knowing not only who’s watching what, but also what which
viewers do with their remote control devices and their VCRs. In other words, what the
industry was bracing for is an ever more meticulous monitoring of the television
audience: more and more differentiations of viewing behaviour began to be considered
relevant for coverage in the enterprise of audience measurement. In the midst of all this
consternation and bewilderment, the people meter was introduced.