Page 57 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 48
unit, where they are stored until they are accessed by the central office computer during
the night. The meter data, which only indicate numbers of sets on, form the basis for what
are called ‘gross ratings’, while the diary data, which are more cumbersome to produce
because they presuppose the active co-operation and discipline of viewers of sample
homes in filling out their individual diaries, are used to compose demographic
2
information about audiences for specific programmes.
It should be noted that these methods of measurement are grounded upon a
straightforward behaviourist epistemology. ‘Watching television’ is implicitly defined as
a simple, one-dimensional and purely objective and isolatable act. As Todd Gitlin has
rightly remarked in relation to the electronic setmeter, ‘The numbers only sample sets
tuned in, not necessarily shows watched, let alone grasped, remembered, loved, learned
from, deeply anticipated, or mildly tolerated’ (1983:54). In other words, what audience
measurement information erases from its field of discernment is any specific
consideration of the ‘lived reality’ behind the ratings. In the quantitative discourse of
audience measurement TV viewers are merely relevant for their bodies: strictly speaking,
they appear in the logic of ratings only in so far as they are agents of the physical act of
tuning-in. More generally, the statistical perspective of audience measurement inevitably
leads to emphasizing averages, regularities and generalizable patterns rather than
particularities, idiosyncrasies and surprising exceptions. What all this amounts to is the
construction of a kind of streamlined map of the ‘television audience’, on which
individual viewers are readable in terms of their resemblance to a ‘typical’ consumer
whose ‘viewing behaviour’ can be objectively and unambiguously classified. In other
words, in foregrounding the stable over the erratic, the likely over the fickle, and the
consistent over the inconsistent, ratings discourse symbolically turns television
consumption into a presumably well-organized, disciplined practice, consisting of
dependable viewing habits and routines.
Imagining television consumption in this way is very handy for the industry indeed: it
supplies both broadcasters and advertisers with neatly arranged and easily manageable
information, which provides the agreed upon basis for their economic negotiations. The
tactical nature of television consumption is successfully disavowed, permitting the
industry to build its operations upon an unproblematic notion of what ‘watching
television’ is all about. This, at least, characterized the relatively felicitous conditions of
existence for (American) commercial television for decades.

TECHNOLOGY AND MEASUREMENT

Since the mid-1970s, however, an entirely different television landscape has unfolded
before the viewer’s eyes, one characterized by abundance rather than scarcity, as a result
of the emergence of a great number of independent stations, cable and satellite channels.
This, at least, is the situation in the United States, but it also increasingly characterizes
European television provisions. By 1987, 49 per cent of American homes had been
connected to a basic cable system, giving them access to cable channels such as MTV,
ESPN and CNN, while 27 per cent had chosen to subscribe to one or more pay cable
channels, such as Home Box Office. All in all, thirty or more channels can be received in
20 per cent of American homes. Furthermore, after a slow start the number of homes with