Page 90 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 78
surprises of programmes that they get to see on their TV sets: the streamlined audience
and streamlined programming tend to reinforce each other in their predictability. It
remains to be seen whether the contemporary disruption of the streamlined audience will
lead to dramatic changes in American commercial television’s programming philosophy,
although it should be noted that the transition to the people meter was accompanied by
heavy speculation about its possible impact on future programme development
(Broadcasting 7 September 1987).
For example, the general prospect that certain demographic categories would gain and
others lose in the people meter’s version of the ratings, inevitably led to considerations
about preferred kinds of programmes to be produced. For instance, test results indicated
that male audiences would gain in size in people meter ratings (presumably because men
are better button-pushers). In response, CBS decided to programme a flourish of new
male-oriented shows during prime time in the first season of the people meter.
Incidentally, without success: according to the 1987/ 1988 Nielsen people meter ratings,
CBS was the least successful of the three networks in that season and the male-oriented
shows it introduced (such as Crime Story) were no ratings successes at all (Ross 1988).
Which brings us to the more general sense of loss within the networks, testified fully by
Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s President of Entertainment:

Lucille Ball said that television changed with the invention of the remote
control device. As soon as a guy doesn’t have to get up from his chair to
switch the channel, television becomes a new ball game. Viewer inertia,
which supported many an uninspired show, has given way to viewer
impatience.
(In Levinson and Link 1986:263)

Of course, viewer inertia was only a true fact within the symbolic world of ratings
discourse. The ‘inert viewer’ was the fictional prototype of the streamlined audience
member complacently and arrogantly indulged in by the industry. As of viewer
impatience, it may be the new fictional construct by which the industry seeks to combat
its uncertainty about the television audience—a construct which, if anything, betrays a
declining sense of confidence over the power of the medium. Whether the shows will
cease to be ‘uninspired’, however, remains to be seen. Will there be a ‘move towards
originality’, as the buzzword seems to be in some industry circles (Broadcasting 12
October 1987)? Only the future can tell whether the new television landscape, with its
promise of increased choice, will result in a permanent betterment for actual audiences in
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terms of programme quality and diversity.
Apart from this practical issue of cultural politics, however, a more fundamental,
epistemological issue imposes itself with these developments. It concerns the tricky status
of the concept of audience as it functions in audience measurement’s discursive work.
We have seen an increasing difficulty for the industry in determining beyond any doubt
what ‘watching television’ is. In other words, the very empirical basis on which
‘television audience’ as object of measurement is founded seems increasingly to escape
unambiguous operationalization. Paradoxically, then, audience measurement tends to
become a practice in search of its object rather than a practice researching a given object.
Contrary to what is suggested by its epithet, it is by no means certain what the object of