Page 89 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience 77
It is only ironic, then, that the evolution of television bears some striking resemblances
to that of radio, the medium that suffered so much from television’s growth from the
early 1950s onwards. The radio audience became increasingly unmeasurable with the
introduction of car radios and transportable battery radios, as well as the proliferation of
stations and programmes. In the words of one network researcher, the industry faced a
paradox in ‘that all the attributes which were assuring radio’s survival in a television
world—radio’s compactness, its mobility, economy, ubiquity, and diversity—these were
the very factors that were progressively making the radio medium a nightmare to
measure’ (in Beville 1985:42, emphasis added). In a similar vein, we can see the
increasing sophistication of television audience measurement as a stubbornly persistent
attempt to catch up with the increasing unpredicability of ‘viewing behaviour’ enabled by
the new television landscape. The underlying rationale seems to be: if it is not possible to
constrain people’s freedom to watch television the way they choose to, then one should at
least keep track of them—as unrelentingly and painstakingly as possible. Hence, there is
now concern over the growing number of portable hand-held TV sets that ‘goes
unmeasured’ (Friedman 1989), as well as all the TV sets in sportsbars, hotel rooms,
hospitals, laundrettes, campuses, restaurants, and work spaces (Van der Gaag 1989).
It remains to be seen, however, whether the abundance of new data will ever lead to a
renewed streamlined map of ‘television audience’. Will it be possible, with a further
sophistication of audience measurement technologies, to come to a new consensus over
such a map, or will the increasingly microscopic technological gaze on people watching
television only lead to an ever greater elusiveness of the ‘viewing behaviour’ audience
measurement is presumed to measure? The ‘revolt of the viewer’ may have resulted in a
permanent disruption of the streamlined audience: perhaps the proliferation of viewer
activities will increasingly resist being straitjacketed in a unified discursive construct.
The ‘revolt of the viewer’, then, is an idea that emerges as a result of the (fearful)
perception of the increasing ‘unmeasurability’ of the television audience. In other words,
the ‘revolt of the viewer’ is a symbolic resistance—intended by nobody but the inevitable
outcome of real developments and real practices—against the industry’s attempts to bring
order in the chaos of the social world of actual audiences.
Here the unfulfilled promise of audience measurement as a panoptic arrangement
becomes fully clear. Contrary to the panopticist ideal, the subjection of people cannot be
guaranteed here, because ultimately no monitoring technology can regulate people’s
behaviour in a direct, material sense—it can only observe and registrate it. Stronger still,
it may well be that the more advanced audience measurement becomes, the less
streamlineable the information assembled will be. The more it sees, the less it can get to
grips with what it sees, as it were. The calculable audience member tends to dissipate
before the ever more sensitive microscope of audience measurement, and increasingly
regains his or her status of active subject. Audience measurement, in short, is an example
of how the practice of panoptic examination, when severed from the attendant power of
disciplining behaviour, turns out to have a contradictory outcome: rather than facilitating
control, it makes it more difficult!
Of course we should not diminish ratings discourse’s continuing power either. As I
have indicated before, the commercial television industry has matched its own map of the
streamlined audience with equally streamlined programming and scheduling strategies.
As a result, ratings discourse ‘controls’ actual audiences by limiting the range and