Page 84 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 72
having people submit themselves to permanent monitoring. From this point of view, the
people meter is not a qualitative break, but merely represents one more step in the
technological sophistication of the enterprise: the old setmeter and the paper-and-pencil
diary are simply somewhat more ‘primitive’ devices (‘little big brothers’ as it were)
3
whose operation is similarly based upon the principle of control through visibility.
Rather than raising the ethical problems surrounding the people meter, then, it may be
more insightful to try to unravel the implications of technological progress in audience
measurement procedures for the exercise of control over the television audience which is
their very purpose. And in this respect, I would suggest that the introduction of ever more
intricate measurement methods may not simply lead to ever-increasing control, but on the
contrary to less control—or better, a less tight link between power and knowledge.
The relentless search for technological sophistication can easily be explained as being
incited by ordinary competition between ratings producers, in their commercial attempts
to cater for the proliferating industry demands for more accurate ratings. But at a more
theoretical level this very call for more accurate ratings also betrays a sense of
desperation over the very possibility of designing a proper map of the streamlined
audience in the crowded and chaotic television landscape of the late twentieth century. As
I have discussed in Chapter 7, ratings discourse acquires its symbolic effectivity when it
succeeds in constructing such a map. But this can only take place when it is utterly
unambiguous how audience size should be determined, and this in turn can only be done
when there is a consensus within the industry about what the object of measurement is,
how ‘viewing behaviour’ should be operationalized. However, it is precisely this
consensus which has now dissolved. Conflicting interests among different branches of the
industry have multiplied, leading to intensified competition between networks, cable and
satellite channels, independent stations, video rental stores and so on, while advertisers
are faced with growing uncertainty about the effectiveness of the different media to reach
their potential consumers.
In these delicate circumstances, the very currency upon which negotiations within the
industry are conducted—the audience commodity as defined by ratings discourse—has
inevitably become a central focus of contestation. Thus, while until the mid-1970s there
was no real dissension about the assumption that the Nielsen statistics truly represent the
‘viewing behaviour’ of the television audience, recent industry debates about audience
measurement have been, as we have seen, replete with discontent and distrust about their
‘reality value’. Note, for example, the dramatic assessment of the situation as given by
Nicholas Schiavone, NBC’s Vice President for Radio Research, in whose view electronic
media research is ‘out of control’:

Now, the thoughtful person will understand that if business is to succeed
in the long term, then trust must be established between buyer and seller.
In media, this trust is based in part upon the accuracy and reliability of the
estimates…. But when ignorance prevails and trust is betrayed, when
numbers lose their meaning, then the marketplace ceases to function
efficiently. Advertisers and media no longer relate in a systematic way.
The result is chaos. While plenty of money may be changing hands,
without good numbers it’s hard to tell just what that money is doing.
(Schiavone 1988: RC13)