Page 87 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience 75
ratings do not represent an objective recording of ‘what took place’. In fact, what has
become increasingly uncertain in the new television landscape is exactly ‘what takes
place’ in the homes of people when they watch television. No longer can it be
conveniently assumed—as traditional ratings discourse does—that having the TV set on
equals watching, that watching means paying attention to the screen, that watching a
programme implies watching the commercials inserted in it, that watching the
commercials leads to actually buying the products being advertised…. Thus, ‘viewing
behaviour’ loses its convenient one-dimensionality: measuring ‘it’ can never be the same
anymore.
Of course, the industry already ‘knew’ for a long time that its decisions and
negotiations were based on fictive footings. After all, it has been established more than
once through research, academic and commercial, that watching television is very often
done with less than full attention, accompanied by many other activities, from chatting to
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reading to love making (Papazian 1986; Collett and Lamb 1986). But this widespread
occurrence of inattentive and discontinuous viewing was repressed in the ratings
discourse of the old days. Now that the formerly-repressed has returned: too many
conflicting interests have made such a manœuvre of ‘calculated ignorance’ impossible to
sustain. As one advertising researcher exclaims: To put it bluntly, most of the audience is
zapping us. It’s nothing new. But what could be new is that we face up to the problem
and address it squarely. How do we unzap the viewer…?’ (in Davis 1986:52). It is
against the background of this problem of control that the feverish search for ever more
detailed data about ‘real viewers’ attains it full significance.
But all this data-gathering, all this preoccupation with better measure-ment
technologies and procedures, may contain its own paradox. It could well be that the more
microscopic the panoptic gaze on the viewer becomes, the more elusive ‘viewing
behaviour’ turns out to be, and the more difficult it will become for ratings discourse to
draw a streamlined map of ‘television audience’.
The problem I refer to here is foreshadowed by a classic study by Robert Bechtel et al.
(1972), who observed a small sample of families in their homes over a five-day period.
Ironically, the method they used is very similar to that of the passive people meter. The
families were observed by video cameras whose operation, so the reseachers state, was
made as unobtrusive as possible: ‘There was no way to tell [for the family members]
whether the camera was operating or not. The camera did not click or hum or in any way
reveal whether it was functioning’ (ibid.: 277). More important however were the insights
the researchers gained from these naturalistic observations. Their findings were
provocative and even put into question the very possibility of describing and delineating
‘watching television’ in any simple sense as ‘a behavior in its own right’: they asserted
that their ‘data point to an inseparable mixture of watching and nonwatching as a general
style of viewing behavior’, and that ‘television viewing is a complex and various form of
behavior intricately interwoven with many other kinds of behavior’ (ibid.: 298–9).
Logically, this insight should lead to the far-reaching conclusion that having people fill
out diaries or, for that matter, push buttons to demarcate the times that they watch
television is principally nonsensical because there seems to be no such thing as ‘watching
television’ as a separate activity. If it is almost impossible to differentiate between
viewers and non-viewers and if, as a consequence, the boundaries of ‘television audience’
are so blurred, how could it possibly be measured?