Page 99 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Normative knowledge: the breakdown of the public service ideal 87
erosion of conviction was compensated by embracing the same forms of empirical
knowledge, particularly audience measurement information, that was already routinely
used within the American commercial television industry. In this sense, the crisis of the
imagination Garnham (1983) talks about can be seen as a lack of imagining new ways of
knowing the audience that are qualitatively different from the commercial way of
knowing. I will trace the ramifications of this crisis through two case studies: the British
BBC and the Dutch VARA. In both cases, the crisis implies the loss of a particular
normative construct of ‘television audience’: the ‘disciplined audience’ in the case of the
BBC, and the ‘natural audience’ in the case of VARA.