Page 79 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The people meter 'solution' 67
If most of these ideas seem as yet to be no more than the products of science fiction-like
fantasizing, experiments on the technological feasability of a passive people meter are
one of the top priorities in the audience measurement field. Initiatives abound (e.g. Lu
and Kiewit 1987). Thus, one research firm, Seattle-based R.D.Percy & Co, has
experimented with a local ratings service in New York since 1987, using a heat sensor
that presumably can discern how many household members are watching television
without them having to push any buttons, although apparently it has remained unclear
how the sensor differentiates between a person and a large pet, such as a big dog
5
(E.Jensen 1986; Kneale 1988). And in June 1989 Nielsen disclosed a plan, developed
together with the David Sarnoff Research Center at Princeton University, for a rather
sophisticated passive people meter system, consisting of an image-recognition technique
capable of identifying the faces of those in the room. The system then decides first if it is
a face it recognizes, and then if that face is directed toward the set (unfamiliar faces and
even possibly the dog will be recorded as ‘visitors’). If tested successfully, this system
could replace the imperfect, push-button people meter by the mid-1990s, so Nielsen
6
executives expect (San Francisco Chronicle 1 June 1989; Friedman 1989).
These dazzling developments indicate the sheer attractiveness of the idea of a perfect
measurement technology in industry circles: so pressing is the felt need for a more
precise map of ‘television audience’. But at the same time the whole commotion about
the people meter reveals the more general political issue involved in the audience
measurement project as such. The frenzy around people meters clearly suggests that there
is more at stake than just a desire for methodological improvement: at stake is the
problem of control.
Now that the industry as a whole is confronted with a more competitive and hectic
television landscape, a loss of manageability of ‘television audience’—a streamlined
audience, one that can be commodified and objectified, exchanged and acted upon—is
threatening to take place, fuelling ‘our worst fears’, as one advertiser put it, ‘that people
aren’t sitting as they did 25 years ago, eyes transfixed to the tube, watching everything
that comes across’ (in Kneale 1988:27). The remedy, embodied in ever more
sophisticated versions of the people meter, is being sought in more and faster finely-tuned
information, allowing for more microscopic differentiations and characterizations in
audience measurement data. More detailed ratings, so the implicit philosophy goes, will
supply the industry with new symbolic means to regain its lost consensus over what
constitutes the correct description of the audience. In other words, the people meter was
welcomed because it promised to put the streamline back into the map of ‘television
audience’.
In practice, the people meter has now, for better or worse, become the new standard of
empirical truth that the industry has to live by. But the general idea behind it can be seen
to play an extended political role: it symbolizes the desire for having ever more complete,
objective, accurate, in short, more ‘realistic’ knowledge on people’s viewing behaviour,
minute by minute, all year long—knowledge that is somehow expected to solve the