Page 58 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

New technologies, audience measurement and the tactics of television consumption 49
VCRs had grown exponentially in the early 1980s, reaching about 50 per cent in 1987
(TV World 1987). This multiplication of consumer options has inevitably led to a
fragmentation of television’s audiences, which in turn has led to a perceived inadequacy
of the figures provided by the existing ratings services. What’s happening in the millions
of living rooms now that people can choose from so many different offerings?
Consequently, diverse branches of the industry began to call for more finely tuned
audience information, to be acquired through better, that is, more accurate, measurement.
This call for better measurement was articulated by criticizing the prevailing
techniques and methods of measuring the television audience: the diary and the setmeter.
For example, the proliferation of channels has acutely dramatized the problems inherent
in the diary technique. Suddenly, the built-in subjective (and thus ‘unreliable’) element of
the diary technique was perceived as an unacceptable deficiency. David Poltrack, vice-
president of research for CBS, one of the three major US networks, voiced the problem as
follows:
It used to be easy. You watched M*A*S*H on Monday night and you’d
put that in the diary. Now, if you have thirty channels on cable you watch
one channel, switch to a movie, watch a little MTV, then another program,
and the next morning with all that switching all over the place you can’t
remember what you watched.
(quoted in Bedell Smith 1985:H23)

And officials of the pop music channel MTV complained that their target audience,
young people between 12 and 24, consistently comes off badly in the demographic data
produced through diaries, because ‘younger viewers tend not to be as diligent in filling
out diaries as older household members’ (quoted in Livingston 1986:130). In short,
agreement grew within the industry that the possibilities of ‘channel switching’ and
‘zapping’ (swiftly ‘grazing’ through different channels by using the remote control
device) had made the diary an obsolete measurement tool. Viewers could no longer be
trusted to report their viewing accurately: they lack perfect memory, they may be too
careless. In short, they behave in too capricious a manner! In this situation, calls for a
‘better’ method to obtain ratings data began to be raised; and better means more
‘objective’, that is, less dependent on the ‘fallibilities’ of viewers in the sample. A
method that erases all traces of wild subjectivity.
The video cassette recorder has also played a major destabilizing role in the
measurability of the television audience. ‘Time shifting’ and ‘zipping’ (fastforwarding
commercials when playing back a taped programme) threatened to deregulate the
carefully composed TV schedules of the networks. This phenomenon has come to be
called ‘schedule cannibalization’ (cf. Rosenthal 1987), a voracious metaphor that
furtively indicates the apprehension, if not implicit regret, felt in network circles about
the new freedoms viewers have acquired through the VCR. Through the VCR, the
tactical nature of television consumption clearly begins to manifest itself. In response, the
industry demanded the measurement of the VCR audience: it wanted answers to
questions such as: how often is the VCR used by which segments of the audience? Which
programmes are recorded most? And when are they played back?