Page 88 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 76
Bechtel et al.’s study was certainly ahead of its time, and its radical consequences
were left aside within the industry, because they were utterly unbearable in their
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impracticality. Instead, the passive people meter is stubbornly seen as the best hope to
get to know the real ‘viewing behaviour’ of individual audience members. But as we
have seen, recent initiatives in the research field have already resulted in the
destabilization of ratings discourse’s basic assumption, namely, that watching television
is a simple type of behaviour. In the end, the introduction of more and more viewer
variables—such as in single-source research and in qualitative ratings—may lead to the
inevitable conclusion that the way people relate to television is too capricious and
heterogeneous to be reduced to an exhaustive list of measurable units. In fact, Leo
Bogart, the prominent market researcher and sociologist and author of the classic
overview of ‘viewing habits and the impact of television on American life’, The Age of
Television (1956) has repetitively criticized the emphasis on measurement of the
audience. ‘Improving the quality of our measurements is a meaningless exercise if the
measurements themselves lack meaning’, he states (Bogart 1986:15). Such warnings
notwithstanding, however, the call for more, more detailed, and more accurate
measurement is the order of the day.
What appears to take place, then, is a ‘revolt of the viewer’ against the powerful
disciplinary machinery of American audience measurement. A revolt, however, that does
not have anything to do with conscious resistance, with active sabotage of the operation
of audience measurement practices (although this is done by the sizeable group of people
that refuses to co-operate). The revolt we are faced with here is both more fundamental
and more inevitable: it is an epistemological revolt, which simply has to do with the fact
that what actual audiences do with television is ultimately in excess of uniform,
objectifying quantification, categorization, and representation. The streamlined
‘television audience’ only exists in discursive form: it is nothing more than a statistical
construct, which does not reflect a pre-existent, real entity, but evokes it. And while this
has always been the case, for a long time the conditions were met for the industry to
believe in the ‘realism’ of ratings discourse. If the streamlined audience were a fiction,
then it was a functional fiction—an usable map all the players in the game agreed to
believe in. But now that convenient illusion has been shattered by the ‘revolt of the
viewer’.
This whole turn of events, and the crisis in audience measurement it has generated,
coincides, as we have seen, with the proliferation of options in the television landscape.
The ‘revolt of the viewer’, then, is not some sort of romantic eruption of viewers’
rebellion on the basis of their ‘authentic’ needs and desires, but is brought to the surface
by the very technological changes introduced by the television business itself. Viewers
have always already ‘revolted’ by being physically or mentally absent at any time they
choose to, but the VCR, the remote control and the multiplication of channels have
intensified the opportunities to do so (Sepstrup 1986). These new opportunities have led
to a decentralization of the conditions of watching television, just as, as Simon Frith
(1987) has noted, cassette recorders have decentralized music making and listening. The
television industrial complex is unable to control the uses of its own technological
inventions: as a matter of paradox, the strategy of making watching television more
attractive by offering new technological devices to do so, only leads to less and less
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control over audience activity!