Page 63 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 54
as audience measurement is constrained by strict institutional pressures and limits. We
are dealing here with an industry with vested interests of its own. Market research firms
are for economic reasons bound to respond to changes in demand for types of research on
the part of media and advertisers. Furthermore, it is important to stress the strategic, not
analytic, role played by research in the organization and operations of the cultural
industries. Research is supposed to deliver informational products that can serve as a
shared symbolic foundation for industry negotiations and transactions, and
epistemological considerations are by definition subservient to this necessity. Thus,
innovations in audience measurement should be understood in this context: in the end,
market-driven research will always have to aim at constructing a ‘regime of truth’
(Foucault 1980) that enables the industry to improve its strategies to attract, reach and
seduce the consumer. In this respect, recognition of some of the tactics by which viewers
appropriate television in ways unintended and undesired by programmers and advertisers
may under some circumstances be beneficial, even inevitable, as I have shown above. But
the interests of the industry cannot and do not permit a complete acceptance of the
tactical nature of television consumption. On the contrary, consumer tactics can be
recognized only in so far as they can be incorporated in the strategic calculations of
media and advertisers. In other words, despite its increasing attention to
(ethnographically oriented) detail, market research must always stop short of
acknowledging fully the permanent subversion inherent in the minuscule but intractable
ways in which people resist being reduced to the imposed and presumed images of the
‘ideal consumer’.
If we take full account of the inherently tactical nature of television consumption,
however, we must come to the conclusion that any attempt to construct positive
knowledge about the ‘real consumer’ will always be provisional, partial, fictional. This is
not to postulate the total freedom of television viewers. Far from it. It is, however, to
foreground and dramatize the continuing dialectic between the technologized strategies of
the industry and the fleeting and dispersed tactics by which consumers, while confined by
the range of offerings provided by the industry, surreptitiously seize moments to
transform these offerings into ‘opportunities’ of their own, making ‘watching television’,
embedded as it is in the context of everyday life, not only into a multiple and
heterogeneous cultural practice, but also, more fundamentally, into a mobile, indefinite
and ultimately ambiguous one, which is beyond prediction and measurement. But this
idea, which if taken seriously would corroborate the adoption of a fully fledged
ethnographic mode of understanding, is epistemologically unbearable for an industry
whose very economic operation depends on some fixed and objectified description of the
audience commodity. Therefore, it is likely that technological improvement of audience
measurement will for the time being continue to be sought, stubbornly guided by the
strategically necessary assumption that the elusive tactics of television consumption can
in the end be recaptured in some clearcut and hard measure of ‘television audience’, if
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only the perfect measurement instrument could be found.
De Certeau speaks of a ‘strange chiasm’:

[T]heory moves in the direction of the indeterminate, while technology
moves towards functionalist distinction and in that way transforms
everything and transforms itself as well. As if the one sets out lucidly on