Page 56 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

New technologies, audience measurement and the tactics of television consumption 47
which ‘watching television’ could be managed and regulated without disturbing the
routines and requirements of family life.
However, precisely because the home has been designated as the primary location for
television consumption, a ‘right’ way of watching television is very difficult to impose.
As Roger Silverstone has put it, ‘[t]he status of television as technology and as the
transmitter of meanings is […] vulnerable to the exigencies, the social structuring, the
conflicts and the rituals of domestic daily life’ (1990:179). The domestic is a pre-eminent
site of everyday life and the everyday is, according to Michel de Certeau, the terrain in
which ordinary people often make use of infinite local tactics to ‘constantly manipulate
events in order to turn them into “opportunities”’ (1984:xix). ‘Watching television’ can
be seen as one everyday practice that is often tactical in character, articulated in the
countless unpredictable and unruly ways of using television that elude and escape the
strategies of the television industry to make people watch television in the ‘right’ way.
And as we shall see, the home environment only reinforces the proliferation of such
tactics in the age of new television technologies.
However, the fact that television consumption has been historically constructed as
taking place within the private, domestic context has paradoxically also been quite
convenient for the television industry. Precisely because the activities of ‘watching
television’ usually take place in sites unseen, behind the closed doors of private homes,
the industry could luxuriate in a kind of calculated ignorance about the tactics by which
consumers at home constantly subvert predetermined and imposed conceptions of
‘watching television’.
Again, the cinema provides a suitable comparison. Because the cinema audience is
gathered together in a public theatre, spectators’ reactions to the screen are immediately
available and therefore not easily ignored. For example, Disney’s decision to ban
commercials in theatres was, at least in part, a response to observations that audiences
had booed and hissed a Diet Coke commercial in which Elton John and Paula Abdul sing
the soft drink’s praises (Hammer 1990). Similar audience resistance in front of the
television screen at home, however, remains largely invisible to the outsider. At the same
time, it seems fair to suspect that television viewers are in a far better position to avoid
messages they do not want to be subjected to than cinema spectators, who are trapped in
their chairs in the darkened theatre, enforced to keep their gaze directed to the large
screen. After all, television viewers have the freedom to move around in their own homes
when their TV set is on; there is no obligation to keep looking and they can always divert
their attention to something else whenever they want to. But it is precisely this relative
freedom of television audiences to use television in ways they choose to which has been
conveniently repressed in the industry’s imaginings of its consumers.
This repression is reflected in the rather simplistic methods of information gathering
used by ratings producers to measure the size of the television audience (or segments of
it). Historically, two major audience measurement technologies have dominated the field:
the diary and the setmeter. In the diary method, a sample of households is selected whose
members are requested to keep a (generally, weekly) diary of their viewing behaviour. At
the end of the week the diaries must be mailed to the ratings firm. In the second case, an
electronic meter is attached to the television sets of a sample of households. The meter
gives a minute-by-minute automatic registration of the times that the television set is on
or off, and of the channel it is turned on to. The data are transmitted to a home storage