Page 60 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

New technologies, audience measurement and the tactics of television consumption 51
seems to be desired within the television industry these days is a measurement
technology that can wipe out all ambiguity and uncertainty about the precise size of the
audience for any programme and any commercial at any given time.
This recent Utopian drive towards technological innovation in audience measurement
can be interpreted as a desperate attempt to repair the broken consensus within the
television industry as a whole as to the meaning of ‘watching television’. Indeed, from
the industry’s perspective, a kind of ‘revolt of the viewer’ seems to have erupted with the
emergence of the new television technologies: ‘watching television’ now appears to be a
rather undisciplined and chaotic set of behaviourial acts as viewers zip through
commercials when playing back their taped shows on their VCRs, zap through channels
with their remote controls, record programmes so as to watch them at times to suit them,
and so on. ‘After years of submitting passively to the tyranny of [network] television
programmers, viewers are taking charge’, comments American journalist Bedell Smith
(1985:H21). This ‘taking charge’ can be seen as the return of the tactical nature of
television consumption to the realm of visibility, shattering the fiction of ‘watching
television’ as a simple, one-dimensional and objectively measurable activity which has
traditionally formed the basis for industry negotiations and operations.
In other words, what has become increasingly uncertain in the new television
landscape is exactly what takes place in the homes of people when they watch television.
Reduction of that uncertainty is sought in improvements in audience measurement
technology, with its promise of delivering a continuous stream of precise data on who is
watching what, every day, all year long. But beneath this pragmatic solution lurks an
epistemological paradox.
For one thing, as the macroscopic technological ‘gaze’ of audience measurement
becomes increasingly microscopic, the object it is presumed to measure becomes ever
more elusive. The more ‘watching television’ is put under the investigative scrutiny of
new measurement technology, the less unambiguous an activity it becomes. ‘Zipping’,
‘zapping’, ‘time shifting’ and so on, are only the most obvious and most recognized
tactical manoeuvres viewers engage in in order to construct their own television
experience. There are many other ways of doing so, ranging from doing other things
while watching to churning out cynical comments on what’s on the screen (see, e.g.,
Sepstrup 1986). As a result, it can no longer be conveniently assumed—as has been the
foundational logic and the strategic pragmatics of traditional audience measurement—
that having the TV set on equals watching, that watching means paying attention to the
screen, that watching a programme implies watching the commercials inserted in it, that
watching the commercials leads to actually buying the products being advertised.
To speak with de Certeau (1984), it is that which happens beneath technology and
disturbs its operation which interests us here. The limits of technology are not a matter of
lack of sophistication, but a matter of actual practices, of ‘the murmuring of everyday
practices’ that quietly but unavoidably unsettle the functionalist rationality of the
technological project. In other words, no matter how sophisticated the measurement
technology, television consumption can never be completely ‘domesticated’ in the
classificatory grid of ratings research, because television consumption is, despite its
habitual character, dynamic rather than static, experiential rather than merely
behavioural. It is a complex practice that is more than just an activity that can be broken
down into simple and objectively measurable variables; it is full of casual, unforeseen