Page 61 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 52
and indeterminate moments which inevitably make for the ultimate unmeasurability of
how television is used in the context of everyday life.
The problem I refer to here has been foreshadowed by a classic study by Robert
Bechtel et al. (1972), who in the early 1970s observed a small sample of families in their
homes over a five-day period. Ironically, the method these researchers used is very
similar to that of the passive people meter. The families were observed by video cameras
whose operation, so the researchers state, was made as unobtrusive as possible: ‘There
was no way to tell [for the family members] whether the camera was operating or not.
The camera did not click or hum or in any way reveal whether it was functioning’ (ibid.:
277). More important, however, were the insights they gained from these naturalistic
observations. Their findings were provocative and even put into question the very
possibility of describing and delineating ‘watching television’ in any simple sense as ‘a
behaviour in its own right’: they asserted that their ‘data point to an inseparable mixture
of watching and non-watching as a general style of viewing behavior’, and that
‘television viewing is a complex and various form of behavior intricately interwoven with
many other kinds of behavior’ (ibid.: 298–9).
Logically, this insight should have led to the far-reaching conclusion that having
people fill out diaries or, for that matter, push buttons to demarcate the times that they
watch television is in principle nonsensical because there seems to be no such thing as
‘watching television’ as a separate activity. If it is almost impossible to make an
unambiguous distinction between viewers and non-viewers and if, as a consequence, the
boundaries of ‘television audience’ are so blurred, how could it possibly be measured?
This study was certainly ahead of its time, and its radical consequences were left aside
4
within the industry, because they were utterly unbearable in their impracticality. Instead,
technological innovations in audience measurement procedures are stubbornly seen as the
best hope to get more accurate information about television consumption. Still, in
advertising circles, in particular, growing scepticism can be observed as to the adequacy
of ratings figures, no matter how detailed and accurate, as indicators for the reach and
effectiveness of their commercial messages. For example, there is a growing interest in
information about the relationship between television viewing and the purchase of
products being advertised in commercials. After all, this is the bottom line of what
advertisers care about: whether the audiences delivered to them are also ‘productive’
audiences (i.e. whether they are ‘good’ consumers). Thus, in more avant-garde
commercial research circles the search for ever more precise demographic categories,
such as the people meter provides, has already been losing its credibility. As one
researcher put it:

In many cases, lumping all 18–49 women together is ludicrous. […]
Narrow the age spread down and it still can be ludicrous. Take a 32½
year-old woman. She could be white or black, single or married, working
or unemployed, professional or blue collar. And there’s lots more. Is she a
frequent flier? Does she use a lot of cosmetics? Cook a lot? Own a car?
Then there’s the bottom line. Do commercials get to her? These are the
items the advertiser really needs to know, and demographic tonnage is not
the answer.
(Davis 1986:51)