Page 49 - Sport Culture and the Media

30 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

on), there is no doubt that, ultimately, audiences are crucial to the success of
media enterprises.
The media, especially in corporate and public form, are expected to be
accountable to their audiences – they are literally at their service. Despite wide-
spread belief in the ease of audience manipulation by unscrupulous advertisers,
television executives and press barons, it is striking that media professionals
see their publics often as fickle, mysterious and essentially unknowable. In a
crowded marketplace where most cultural products that are sold will lose
money, or where success is dependent on stopping the listener from ‘touching
that dial’ or the viewer from switching the remote control, it is necessary
to minimize the risk of failure in an uncertain ‘task environment’ (Hirsch
1971). Managing that task environment is a delicate activity: it is necessary
to ‘second guess’ what audiences want; to act on previous successes by giving
them more of the same while judging when they have become bored or
satiated with a particular format; to offer the requisite level of novelty without
alienating the audience with something too far ‘out of left field’. Making
media texts is, then, both a creative and a conservative activity, requiring a
judicious appreciation of the swings between cycles of standardization, when
a successful formula (like TV ‘infotainment’ shows, teenage ‘splatter’ movies,
‘reality’ television, costume dramas or ‘boy band’ pop music) is found and
reproduced, and cycles of diversification (like the sudden eruption of visually
and sonically confrontational punk music, ironically ‘postmodern’ violent films
with discontinuous narratives, or ‘weird’ TV serials about the dark underbelly
of conventional community life), when novel approaches and material are
desired. David Hesmondhalgh (2002: 233) has argued, correctly, that this model
of standardization/diversification in the cultural industries (based on Peterson
and Berger 1975) is flawed, but it does reflect something of the ‘herd’ behaviour
of cultural producers who are always stealing ideas and formulae from each
other while, contradictorily, going it alone in the perpetual search to be first with
the ‘next big thing’.
The producer–institution–text–audience relationship is revealed to be a highly
complex one that is resistant to the simple accounting logic of attendances,
ratings, readerships, ‘hits’, sales, and so on. In socio-cultural terms, audiences
are highly artificial constructs, temporarily mobilized by the text in often
widely varying circumstances, with different levels of commitment, knowledge
and attention, and prone to dissolve just as analysts believe themselves to be
in possession of the keys to unlock their secrets (Ang 1991; Ruddock 2001;
Balnaves et al. 2002). Nonetheless, in all areas of cultural production there is a
constant, institutionally rational attempt to match the produced text to viable
aggregations of people who will respond positively to it and, better, demand
more. What subject could possibly satisfy and stimulate the competing and