Page 83 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience 71
visibility of people-watching-television achieved by audience measurement is not linked
up with the organization of direct behavioural control: observation and regulation of
bodies do not go together here. In other words, audience measurement is an incomplete
panoptic arrangement: the power/knowledge linkage is, in a sense, rather precarious. This
does not mean that there is no power and control involved in the set-up of audience
measurement; it does mean, however, that the production of ever more refined knowledge
as such becomes a rather autonomous pursuit: stripped of a direct material effect on its
object of scrutiny, audience measurement is carried out in the tacit belief that the
production of knowledge as such—that is, the construction of a streamlined map of
‘television audience’—must somehow automatically lead to control over actual
audiences. To put it in a different way, even if audience measurement cannot be seen as a
true panoptic technology, panopticism is inscribed in it insofar as the whole project is
inspired by the ideal of such a form of control, and driven by the constant theoretical and
practical search for the best mechanisms to do so. We will see, however, that the project
has quite contradictory effects, not at all uniformly leading to the desired increased
control.
To be sure, the technologies of audience measurement—meter, diary, telephone
interview, people meter—do involve actual entry in the living rooms of (a small number
of) actual viewers, in order to put them under constant examination. These technologies
indicate that audience measurement is basically an ingenious means for the industry to
obliquely penetrate people’s private spaces, in order to make ‘visible’, in a roundabout
way, what would otherwise take place out of sight (and therefore beyond control). But,
unfortunately for the industry, the ratings firms can only incorporate families and
households in their samples (and intrude in their homes) when they agree to it. While
people’s freedom to reject their subjection to surveillance is something to be respected in
a free society, it is also unwittingly perceived as an unfortunate circumstance, an
inconvenience: think of the concern about ‘the non-co-operation problem’, the suspense
around ‘compliance rates’.
The problem has become all the more pronounced with the launch of the people meter
technology. The futuristic passive people meter, in particular, comes dangerously close to
a literal materialization of panoptic mechanisms: with the (passive) people meter, the
process of subjection to the examining apparatus is becoming all too obvious. And
indeed, this theme is well reflected in the public controversy around the people meter.
With the introduction of the people meter, audience measurement is becoming too
explicit and palpable an instance of monitoring viewers. Thus, the people meter has
repetitiously been given a bad press as a ‘manifestation of Big Brother’: observers note
‘the new technology’s spooky Orwellian overtones’ (Waters and Uehling 1985) (is it
mere coincidence that public debate on the people meter started in 1984?), while one
industry official expressed his personal doubts about the passive people meter as follows:
’My concern is more from the big-brother standpoint. If somehow, somewhere a
computer knows this massive weight is a 53-year-old male, that scares me. What else
does it know about me?’ (in Broadcasting 5 January 1987:63).
But this kind of moral concern about the people meter, cast as it is in the liberal
discourse of intrusion of privacy, overlooks the less conspicuously obtrusive, but more
structural ‘rationality’ of the very practice of audience measurement. Not only the people
meter, but all audience measurement technologies in principle depend on the propriety of