Page 69 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 60
arguably the most suitable to unravel the minutiae of difference and variation as they
manifest themselves in concrete, everyday instances of media consumption. What
ethnographic work entails is a form of ‘methodological situationalism’, underscoring the
thoroughly situated, always context-bound ways in which people encounter, use,
interpret, enjoy, think and talk about television and other media in everyday life. The
understanding emerging from this kind of inquiry favours interpretive particularization
over explanatory generalization, historical and local concreteness rather than formal
abstraction, ‘thick’ description of details rather than extensive but ‘thin’ survey. But this
ethnographic interest within audience studies is neither uncontroversial nor
unproblematic. There is no need to go into the details of the controversy about
ethnography here—many others have already done this—suffice it to observe at this point
that what is at stake in the problem of ethnography is not just its supposed lack of
systematicity and generalizability (which is the conventional critique levelled against it),
but also its potential political and theoretical relevance as a form of knowledge. In short,
what’s the point of the ethnographic rendering of media audiences? What is its politics?

THE AMBIGUOUS POLITICS OF ETHNOGRAPHY

That the drift towards ‘the ethnographic’ is not merely a marginal academic matter but is
also traceable in the belly of the beast itself, namely the commercial cultural and media
industries, is exemplified by the crisis around ratings research, which is the most
important and entrenched form of audience research circulating within the television
industry. This crisis gained momentum in the latter half of the 1980s. Leaving aside the
economic and institutional sides of the crisis, the controversy revolves around the alleged
lack of ‘accuracy’ of the ratings figures produced by ratings companies such as
A.C.Nielsen, resulting in major discontent and antagonism in network and advertisers’
circles. In response, a solution is being sought in the development of ever more ‘perfect’
measurement instruments.
As I have already discussed in chapter 3, Nielsen is currently experimenting with the
so-called ‘passive people meter’, a technology which can identify the faces of those in the
living room through an electronic image recognition system (which has a memory where
images of all household members are stored). Using tracking and artificial intelligence
devices, the passive people meter can follow the movement of persons in the room, and
fill in the blanks when people momentarily go out of the meter’s field of vision. As
Nielsen media research president John Dimling claims, this system will be able to
generate audience reports that say: ‘John started watching television at this minute and
second and stopped at this minute and second’ (1994:23). Clearly, this method
approaches the Utopian dream of perfect monitoring, by creating a simulacrum of
unobtrusive naturalistic observation, of what’s happening in the living room, so that there
will no longer be any doubt about who is watching which channel, which programme,
which commercial, at any minute of the day (see Ang 1991 for a full account of these
developments).
There is certainly an ‘ethnographic’ flavour to this corporate initiative, in so far as
being more empirically microscopic is envisaged as presenting an opportunity to improve
measurement accuracy. More generally, marketing and advertising research circles are