Page 82 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 70
never actually constructed, the mechanisms exemplified by it serve as the perfect
paradigm for disciplinary technology, efficient in its operation, flexible in its
applications. As Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (1982:189) have remarked,
‘whenever the imperative is to set individuals or populations in a grid where they can be
made productive and observable, then Panoptic technology can be used’.
I am reminded of these insights of Foucault in trying to make sense of the
developments in audience measurement practices that I have been discussing here. In
fact, the principles of panopticism are central to the technological operation of audience
measurement: its core mechanism, and ultimate ambition, is control through visibility.
Audience measurement too is a form of examination: its aim is to put television viewers
under constant scrutiny, to describe their behaviour so as to turn them into suitable
objects in and for industry practices, to judge their viewing habits in terms of their
productivity for advertisers and broadcasters alike. What audience measurement
accomplishes is the production of a discourse which ‘formalizes’ and reduces the viewer
into a calculable audience member, someone whose behaviour can be objectively
determined and neatly categorized. As we have seen, this discursive streamlining of
‘television audience’ is extremely useful for the industry: it effectuates a comforting
sense of predictability and controllability in an uncertain environment.
However, it would be misleading to see audience measurement as a regular instance of
the disciplinary arrangements Foucault talks about. Television viewers cannot be
subjected to officially sanctioned disciplinary control such as is the case with
schoolchildren or prisoners. In these institutions disciplinary techniques are aimed at
transforming people through punishment, through training and correction. The living
room however is emphatically not a classroom or a prison cell, nor is television a
‘carceral’ institution. After all, watching television takes place in the context of domestic
leisure, under the banner of the hedonism of consumer society, in which the idea of
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audience freedom forms a prominent ideological value. Therefore the commercial
television industry cannot have the power to effectuate the conversion of viewers into
what Foucault (1979) has termed ‘docile bodies’, implying total behavioural control over
them—that is, the ability to force them to adopt the ‘ideal’ viewing behaviour (for
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example, watch all the commercials attentively).
This ‘problem’—that is, the problem that viewers are not prisoners but ‘free’
consumers—accounts for the limits of audience measurement as a practice of control.
Indeed, it would even be ideologically impossible to officially present it as a practice of
control: instead it is called, as we have seen, a practice of creating ‘feedback’. The
importance given to methodological accuracy and objectivity in discussions about
audience measurement may be understood against this background: emphasizing that
audience measurement is a matter of research not control increases its credibility and
legitimacy and reduces distrust against it. All this amounts to the fact that audience
measurement can only be an indirect means of disciplining the television audience: it is
through symbolic, not literal objectification and subjection that ratings discourse, by
streamlining ‘television audience’, performs its controlling function. It does not effect the
actual discipline of television viewers, it only conjures it up in its imagination. This leads
to a fundamental contradiction in the very motif of audience measurement. Just as the
disciplinary technologies described by Foucault, ratings services put viewers under
constant examination. But contrary to what happens, for example, in the prison, the