Page 59 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 50
In the face of this growing demand for more accurate and more detailed information
about television consumption, the ratings business has now come up with the ‘people
meter’, a new audience measurement technology that was introduced in the United States
3
in 1987. The people meter is supposed to combine the virtues of the traditional setmeter
and the paper-and-pencil diary: it is an electronic monitoring device that can record
individual viewing rather than just sets tuned in, as the traditional setmeter does. It works
as follows.
When a viewer begins to watch a programme, s/he must press a numbered button on a
portable keypad, which looks like the well-known remote control device. When the
viewer stops watching, the button must be pressed again. A monitor attached to the
television set lights up regularly to remind the viewer of the button-pushing task. Every
member of a sample family has her or his own individual button, while there are also
some extra buttons for guests. Linked to the home by telephone lines, the system’s central
computer correlates each viewer’s number with demographic data about them stored in
its memory, such as age, gender, income, ethnicity and education.
There is definitely something panoptic in the conceptual arrangement of this intricate
measurement technology (Foucault 1979), in that it aims to put television viewers under
constant scrutiny by securing their permanent visibility. This is attractive for the industry
because it holds the promise of providing more detailed and accurate data on exactly
when who is watching what. The people meter boosts the hope for better surveillance of
the whole spectrum of television-viewing activities, including the use of the VCR.
Smaller audience segments may now be detected and described, allowing advertisers and
broadcasters to create more precise target groups. New sorts of information are made
available; hitherto hidden and unknown minutiae of ‘audience behaviour’ can now be
detected through clever forms of number crunching (see, e.g., Beville 1986a and 1986b).
Still, the existing versions of the people meter are by no means considered perfect
measurement instruments, as they still involve too much subjectivity: after all, they
require viewer co-operation in the form of pushing buttons. A professional observer
echoes the widespread feelings of doubt and distrust when he wonders:

Will the families in the sample really take the trouble? Will they always
press the buttons as they begin watching? Will they always remember to
press their buttons when they leave the room—as when the telephone
rings, or the baby cries?
(Baker 1986:95)

It should come as no surprise, then, that furious attempts are being made to develop a so-
called passive people meter—one with no buttons at all—that senses automatically who
and how many viewers are in front of the screen. For example, Nielsen, the largest ratings
company in the United States, has recently disclosed a plan for a rather sophisticated
passive people meter system, consisting of an image-recognition technology capable of
identifying the faces of those in the room. The system then decides first whether it is a
face it recognizes, and then whether that face is directed towards the set (unfamiliar faces
and even possibly the dog in the house will be recorded as ‘visitors’). If tested
successfully, this system could eventually replace the imperfect, push-button people
meter, so Nielsen executives expect (San Francisco Chronicle 1989). In short, what