Page 55 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 46
herself/ himself to as much output as possible, including most importantly the
commercials which in fact make the financing of the programmes possible. This merging
of the two types of consumption is corroborated in the occurrence of one single activity, a
presumably one-dimensional type of behaviour: ‘watching television’. This complex
intermingling of economic conditions and cultural assumptions with regard to television
consumption is a necessary precondition for the construction of an institutional
agreement about the exchange value of the ‘audience commodity’ that is bought and sold.
As is well known, this agreement is reached through the intermediary practice of
audience measurement, producing ratings figures on the basis of the amount of ‘watching
television’ done by the audience. These figures are considered to be the equivalent to
box-office figures for cinema attendance (see, e.g., Meehan 1984; Ang 1991).
But this equivalence is fundamentally problematic, as I will try to show in this chapter.
Undertaken by large research companies such as Nielsen and Arbitron in the United
States and AGB in Britain and continental Europe, audience measurement is an
entrenched research practice based upon the assumption that it is possible to determine
the objective size of the ‘television audience’. However, recent changes in the structure
of television provision, as a result of the introduction of new television technologies such
as cable, satellite and the VCR, have thrown this assumption of measurability of the
television audience into severe crisis. The problem is both structural and cultural: it is
related to the fact that ‘watching television’ is generally a domestic consumer practice,
and as such not at all the one-dimensional, and therefore measurable, type of behaviour it
is presumed to be.
The domestic has always been a contested terrain when it comes to the regulation of
consumption. It is a terrain which, precisely because it is officially related to the ‘private
sphere’, is difficult to control from outside. Of course it is true, as the young Jean
Baudrillard once stated, that ‘[c]onsumption is not […] an indeterminate marginal sector
where an individual, elsewhere constrained by social rules, would finally recover, in the
“private” sphere, a margin of freedom and personal play when left on his [sic] own’
(1988 [1970]:49). The development of the consumer society has implied the hypothetical
construction of an ideal consuming subject through a whole range of strategic and
ideological practices, resulting in very specific constraints, structural and cultural, within
which people can indulge in the pleasures of leisurely consumption.
Indeed, it is important to note that the day-to-day, domestic practice of television
consumption is accompanied by the implicit and explicit promotion of ‘ideal’ or ‘proper’
forms of consumer behaviour, propelled by either ideological or economic motives and
instigated by the social institutions responsible for television production and
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transmission. More generally, the acceptance and integration of television within the
domestic sphere did and does not take place ‘spontaneously’, but was and is surrounded
by continuous discursive practices which attempt to ‘normalize’ television-viewing
habits.
For example, Lynn Spigel (1988) has shown how American women’s magazines in
the late 1940s and early 1950s responded to the introduction of television in the home
with much ambivalence and hesitation, against the background of the necessity for
housewives to integrate household chores with the attractions (and distractions) promised
by the new domestic consumer technology. Through the advice and suggestions put
forward in these magazines, they helped establish specific cultural rules for ways in