Media Audience Essay 2500 words AGPS Referencing
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Media_and_Audiences_----_Chapter_3_AUDIENCE_COMMODITIES_AND_AUDIENCE_ACTIVISM.pdf
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Whereas the key to the children’s market used to be the products, the branding and the marketing, tomorrow’s winners will be those that first find ways to make children true stakeholders of the company and so part of the company’s destiny. Tomorrow’s winners are those that realise that they need children to reach children.
(Antorini 2003: 212)
Media industries are not immune from the impact of social and cultural change. The increasing complexity of the media environment affects all stake- holders in the media, including audiences. A recent book by Lindstrom and Seybold, Brandchild (2003), from which the above quotation is taken, envisages a future where consumer identities are so integrated with product branding that cultural identities that lie outside the sphere of consumption will be of secondary importance in the development of personal identity. It demonstrates the closeness of the relationship imagined between customers and services promoted by the new customer focus in marketing. This new focus blurs the distinction between commercial and social science research and advocates the mediatization of all aspects of cultural life. Whether it is appropriate or not, commercial research undertaken to make marketing more successful is increasingly presented as social science and/or cultural research. This is the case in Lindstrom and Seybold’s book, and it also characterizes the positioning of ratings research by Webster et al. (2000).
This chapter explores the relationship between broadcasting and ratings analysis, and introduces the key terms used in ratings practice, before examining a range of perspectives that have been used to criticize ratings and
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the impact of ratings on the system of mass communication. It returns to the question, introduced by Meehan (1984), of whether ratings research is social science or an industry service. It identifies and analyses the underlying assump- tions of the industry service model of audience research, before looking at some of the unexpected ways the imagination and sometimes desperation of particular audience communities has motivated them to an audience activism. Such activism allows them to present stories, ways of thinking and cultural histories that are fundamental to their personal (identity) survival, but which are neglected in mainstream media’s programming.
As the repercussions of media convergence change the power balances between broadcasting and user-pays media, more and more audience activities are being mediatized and subjected to commercial control. The withdrawal of arts funding by governments has added to this shift from public patronage to commercial development and exploitation of arts audiences. This chapter looks at what this shift might imply for audiences.
Ratings and broadcasting
Audience measurement is a type of audience research that documents the size and composition of media audiences. It allows patterns of audience activity to be tracked over time and it generates the type of data that permits comparison of audience behaviour from one medium to another. An industry-based research service, audience measurement generates information that is essential to the operation of media industries. Information about audience size and composition is, after all, the basis on which programming and pricing decisions are made. Webster et al. (2000) note that audience measurement is widely used by a range of organizations, companies and government authorities to deter- mine not only what is broadcast, but also what opportunities for engagement with media are offered to whom. Advertisers use audience measurement data to plan media campaigns and then to evaluate them. Broadcasting companies use audience measurement to plan broadcasting schedules, to guide decision- making about programming and to evaluate their performance. Governments, government authorities, media organizations and financial planners use audience measurement to develop broadcasting policy, allocate broadcasting licences and to determine the commercial value of media companies and other media properties. This dependence on, and preference for, ratings is questioned in this section, as we examine the relationship between broadcasting and ratings and consider the justification of claims that ratings provide an adequate account of audience behaviour.
Beville (1988) has described ratings, the measure that records the percentage
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of a population that watched or listened to a particular programme, as the centrepiece of the broadcaster-audience communication system, because, ‘Rat- ings with their feedback element are the nerve system that largely controls what is broadcast’ (Beville 1988: ix). Webster et al. (2000: 1) consider the ratings system to be, ‘indispensable to the media’s interest in building audiences and to society’s interest in understanding mass media industries’. They describe rat- ings analysis as commercial audience research, and situate it alongside the social and cultural audience research traditions, rather than in the field of marketing. There are several reasons why, at face value, this characterization may appear appropriate. The information generated by ratings analysis is as much about the media as it is about people and their consumption of media commodities. The underlying assumptions of ratings assume the occurrence of a media event: in particular it is recognized that the generation of audience exposure to particular media products depends on structural dimensions of mass communication (the licensing to broadcast to particular populations, the regional restrictions on operations of the media, and so on) as much as on individual choices about which media equipment to buy and whether or not to turn it on. Ratings analysis draws attention to aspects of audience engagement with media that are, in general, considered peripheral in cultural approaches, but central for the day-to-day operation of the mass media.
The ratings approach, therefore, represents one extreme in the field of audience research — an extreme Webster et al. (2000) characterize as:
• Applied — in the sense that it sets out to provide answers to specific ques- tions, like ‘how many people watched the programmes we broadcast last night?’ or ‘what percentage of the people who watched the programme were women aged 18 to 35?’ In this sense it is pragmatic rather than ‘theor- etical’ research.
• Administrative — ratings analysis contributes directly to the decisions broadcasters make as to how to operate as a business (what types of programmes to buy, when to schedule them, what pricing policy should be adopted for selling advertising spots, and so on). Ratings analysis helps broadcasting companies operate more efficiently, and in this sense it is not critical of the media — rather it is part of the communication system.
• Quantitative — ratings analysis relies on sampling procedures, and on adding up instances of audience behaviour described as ‘exposure’ (discussed below). Qualitative information about audiences is outside its scope.
• Syndicated — ratings analysis is used to generate reports that are offered for sale to companies and individuals involved in the media industries.
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It is not designed to solve social or cultural problems, but to deliver immediately usable information to the industry.
For these authors, ratings analysis is important because it is how the com- mercial audience research sector operates. Their work alerts us to the fact that for many in the broadcasting and advertising industries, and in the field of government policy, audience research is synonymous with syndicated com- mercial audience research services. The fact that ratings analysis exists to serve the needs of industry creates suspicion in the minds of researchers who are committed to theoretically informed, critical research that draws on qualitative data and that asks questions about audiences that question the system of mass communication and whose social, cultural, political and economic interests it serves (Ang 1991; Meehan 1993; Nightingale 1993).
Key concepts in ratings analysis
Whether or not we agree with Webster et al.’s (2000) account of their value, ratings are clearly important in terms of the basic media knowledge required to understand what media services, products and texts are produced and dis- tributed, and how audience interests are taken into account (or not) in making those decisions. The data recorded and the statistical analysis of that data have produced some of the key terminology (for example rating, share, fre- quency and reach) used by media industries and by the press to evaluate the performance of broadcasters and to assess the popularity of particular pro- grammes, to set the price for advertising spots and to indicate how many times an advertisement should be repeated during an evening’s viewing.
The ratings approach is based on techniques developed for counting and statistically analysing a single audience behaviour, referred to in the media industries as ‘exposure’. Sissors and Bumba state that:
Industry leaders have chosen a measurement of media audiences-exposure- that is less than perfect, but that can differentiate media vehicles on the basis of their audience sizes.
(1996: 69)
They define exposure by the simple phrase, ‘Open eyes facing a medium’ (1996: 467–8). In an advertising-driven media environment, media industries can be understood as existing to generate exposures. In this sense, audience exposures are the commodity at the heart of broadcasting. Exposure is, in effect, the only commodity produced by the broadcasting industries. All other products of broadcasting (the programmes, the newscasts, the personalities,
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the advertisements) are services designed to generate audience exposures. From this industry perspective, exposures are counted and analysed in ways that allow them to be pre-sold to advertisers and others. The capacity to predict, and therefore to pre-sell, audience exposures provides the cash flow for commercial broadcasting. And the capacity to predict audience exposures for particular media vehicles is based on another mass-audience behaviour: the loyalty demonstrated by the inclination to view additional episodes of programmes enjoyed.
The broadcasting companies, in turn, finance the production of ratings reports. Probably the best-known commercial audience research services are offered by AGB Media Services and Nielsen Research, the main providers of ratings and other media research in the USA and many other countries throughout the world, but the internet has provided the means for many new companies to enter the market in audience measurement services. For broad- casting research, the broadcasters operating in a given region each contribute funding for the production of their syndicated service. They set up or subscribe to a ratings service that provides the sort of data they need, but that can be seen as impartial. Impartiality is important. Without it advertisers and others who buy media services could not be sure that the ratings reported were accurate and reliable. In addition, advertisers, production companies, and government agencies are able to buy their own customized reports about ratings directly from the research companies.
Key measures used in ratings analysis
Audience measurement and ratings research use two types of analysis — gross and cumulative analysis of the recorded exposure data. Gross measures record audience size and include ratings, share and gross ratings point (GRP). Cumulative measures count up exposures over time, and include audience reach and frequency, cumes and audience duplication. These concepts are the basic conceptual equipment needed for a rudimentary understanding of audience measurement (Webster et al. 2000: 159).
Gross measures of audiences
Webster et al. (2000) describe the ‘gross measures’ of audience exposures as ‘snapshots’ of the population, and they consolidate this photography analogy by referring to audience viewing as ‘exposure’. Counting exposures can be thought of as rather like taking ‘snapshots’ of audience button pushing, and extrapolating general pictures of programme and channel selection from that
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data. Exposure data is used repeatedly in diverse combinations to generate the type of information advertisers or broadcasters need for media planning and programme scheduling. Contemporary metering technologies have made the measurement of exposures on a minute-by-minute basis (if desired) a reality, and statistical analysis of the recorded data is reused for a variety of purposes.
The most publicized measure of audience size is the rating. Ratings are based on counting up how many people are exposed to the programme. Measures are taken at quarter hour intervals for the duration of a given programme. It is not uncommon for commentators to talk about the ratings ‘peaking’ at a given figure, thus indicating the highest number of viewers the programme attracted at any one point in time. Webster and Lichty (1991: 255) define rating as ‘the percentage of persons or households tuned to a station or programme out of the total market population’. Taken alone, a rating makes no sense — it is just a number. It becomes meaningful only in comparison with other numbers — particularly the ratings for other programmes. Now, at a given point in time it may be that only 50 per cent of people are watching TV. If a programme broadcast at this time received a rating of 10, this would mean that 10 per cent of the total sample population were watching that programme; 40 per cent of the sample were watching something else; and the other 50 per cent were not watching TV at all. The rating indicates the percentage of the sample who were watching the programme. On the basis of the rating it is possible to calculate a projection of how many people altogether watched the programme. When we see ratings reported in the newspaper as hundreds of thousands or millions of viewers, this is a projection of the actual number of people who watched the programme, based on the exposures recorded for the sample.
The concept, share, has been generated to talk more easily about the relative size of audiences. It is based on only the people who are viewing at a particular point in time. In the hypothetical example above, 50 per cent of the total population are viewing and we know that 10 per cent are tuned to our target programme. The calculation for share is based on the total of the 50 per cent who are tuned in (the households using television), and so our target pro- gramme has attracted one fifth of the viewing audience — or a 20 per cent share. Share is an important concept because the size of the viewing audience changes so much over the day. Small audiences during the day gradually grow larger as people return from work, dwindling again as people go to bed. It is therefore to be expected that some programmes with very small ratings may attract a very high share of the audience, if the overall size of the viewing audience is small.
A third audience measurement which appears to be of particular interest to advertisers (and almost no one else), is the gross rating point (GRP). The GRP is
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‘the gross impressions of an advertising schedule expressed as a percentage of the population’ (Webster and Lichty 1991: 250). The GRP records the number of times a particular advertisement, or series of advertisements, was seen. It does this by summing up the ratings for the programmes broadcast at the times the particular advertisement was scheduled. As Webster et al. (2000) indicate, the problem with GRPs is that they are not able to distinguish repeated viewing by one person from single viewing by many people. Nevertheless, the GRP provides an indication of how many people in a population are likely to have seen a particular advertisement.
These three concepts, rating, share and GRP, are all described as gross measures because they count up the numbers of viewers (exposures) for programmes, channels, or advertisements. As Webster et al. (2000) suggest, they are like photographs. They are snapshots taken at the time of exposure. They record past behaviours. For this reason they are not necessarily a good indication of what the audience will watch next. Ratings experts have therefore developed another type of analysis based on exposures that records past viewing patterns and provides the basis for predicting future viewing patterns. This type of analysis is called cumulative analysis.
Cumulative analysis
Cumulative analysis involves tracking audiences over certain periods of time, and on the basis of that tracking, making predictions of future viewing. The key concepts in cumulative analysis are reach, frequency, audience duplication, and the cume itself. The term cume is short for ‘cumulative audience’. Webster and Lichty (1991: 248) define it as, ‘the size of the total unduplicated audience for a station over some specified period of time’. This definition draws our attention to the fact that cumulative measures sift out the carry-over or ‘duplicated’ audience from the new viewers tuning in. They add the new viewers to the carry forward totals. The cumulative audience is then the total of the people who tuned in for at least some time during the period for which the cume is being calculated.
Audience duplication is the term used to discuss the likelihood of the same people turning up in the audience of another programme. It ‘describes the extent to which the audience for one programme or station are also in the audience for another programme or station’ (Webster et al. 2000: 236). The term is used in discussion of audience loyalty and is fundamental to establishing programme, channel or advertisement reach and frequency. The concept reach refers to the number of people in a population who see the advertisement, programme or channel at least once in a given period of time. Frequency refers to the number of times each person reached is likely to have seen a particular
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advertisement, programme or channel. Reach and frequency are often used together to provide a sense of the depth of penetration of channels or messages within the population. For example, a broadcaster may argue that a given advertisement has a reach of 80 per cent and a frequency of 5, meaning that 8 people of every 10 could have seen the advert an average of 5 times over a given ratings period. Reach and frequency allow advertisers and others to judge how frequently they need to repeat their ads, and in which time slots, in order to make sure that the people they want to see their adverts do so.
Reach and frequency measures are also used by channels, including publicly funded ones, to demonstrate the cultural importance of their operations. In countries where publicly funded broadcasting is a small component of the broadcasting mix, publicly funded channels are charged with a responsibility for enhancing the diversity of programme choices available. Where commercial channels aim to attract as broad a reach and as high a frequency as possible, public channels often face structurally ambiguous expectations from the governments that fund them and from the general public. They are expected to rate well, but not to compete actively with the commercials; to provide diversity and yet still to compete; to develop a small but loyal audience and yet to provide something for everyone. In other words, it is expected that many different people will watch the public broadcaster a little, and a few people will watch the public broadcaster a lot. In terms of reach and frequency they are expected to achieve high reach with low frequency at the same time that they achieve a low reach with high frequency. This is a scheduling impossibility. Of course, commercial channels argue that since their reach is so broad and their frequency so high, public broadcasting is completely unnecessary, with the result that there is very little diversity programmed into the broadcasting system until many more channels are competing for audiences (as has occurred since the introduction of cable and digital TV).
Sampling
Before exposure data can be collected, people willing to take part in the research must be located. Not just anyone will do, however, because the ratings companies must be certain that the people chosen for inclusion in the research, as a group, are representative of the total population. All audience research is based on sampling — the process whereby some people are chosen to represent the whole population. Ratings surveys may be local, regional or national. The idea is that the people in a given geographic area, or people with particular characteristics, are identified as the target population, and then a subset of that population is chosen as the sample population. It is important that the sample chosen is representative of the target population, otherwise the research data
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will not be reliable. In ratings research two types of sampling are often combined: multi-stage cluster sampling and stratified sampling. Obviously some rules apply to how samples are chosen to minimize bias and sampling error.
Multi-stage cluster sampling (see Webster et al. 2000: 102) involves several stages of listing and sampling. It is a sampling procedure that involves listing all the counties in the nation first, then selecting a random sample from the total; second, all census tracts in the chosen counties are listed and random samples of census tracts chosen; third, all city blocks in the selected census tracts are listed, and a random sample of city blocks are chosen. Researchers will then go to the chosen city blocks, to randomly selected households, to locate people to take part in the research. However each stage included in the sampling allows a little more sampling error to creep in, so considerable care is taken to decide on how many sampling stages need to be included.
Because multi-stage cluster sampling is based on a geographic spread of the population, it may not be possible to avoid the problem that too many of the same sort of people (for example too many singles or too many children) may end up in the sample. A second type of sampling is often combined with multi-stage cluster sampling to minimize this problem. The second type of sampling is called stratified sampling, and it again involves listing and sampling — this time for characteristics like age, sex, income level, ethnicity — information recorded in national databases which provide the guidelines for sample stratification. This information provides the researchers with knowledge as to what proportion of people with particular characteristics they need to recruit so that the sample matches the national profile as closely as possible.
Combining these two sampling strategies helps to minimize sampling error for syndicated research services, but it is such a complex and expensive process that once it has been set up, the operators tend to want to make use of the sample for some time. As a result, most television ratings services establish research panels, which are used for a number of years before panel members are replaced. Panels are one of the reasons ratings research is criticized since, over time, the household composition and demographic status of panel members can change dramatically — people get older, members leave the house or new members arrive (Meehan 1993). The desire to maintain a panel for as long as possible has been affected by the introduction of expensive metering technologies like people meters. So the service providers face the difficulty of keeping the panels for as long as possible while trying to avoid the introduction of sampling error by attrition.
Sometimes events outside the control of the ratings service provider can jeopardize the reliability of the sample. For example, if a channel decided
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to cover a story on ratings, this might prove of disproportionate interest to the panel members, attracting more of the panel to watch the programme than would otherwise have done so because of their personal involvement in the ratings process. Such acts can even be undertaken as a cynical attempt to alter the outcomes for a ratings period, and to disadvantage other broadcasters. In effect it is a case of the broadcaster directly targeting the panel members. Given Meehan’s (1991) concerns about the targeting of the ‘consumerist caste’ by the ratings system, this type of act may point to the possibility of endemic bias in the panel system.
Critique of ratings
While the importance of ratings analysis for media industries cannot be dis- puted, the impact on society and culture of a system of broadcasting driven by ratings has been strongly criticized. This debate took on international signifi- cance in the early 1980s when Smythe (1981) argued strongly that advertising- supported broadcasting treated audiences as though they were commodities. Smythe argued that while people might feel they were being entertained by broadcasting, the reality was quite different. He suggested that audiences were in fact bought and sold on the basis of their viewing habits and their capacity for participation in the sphere of consumption.
A few years later, Meehan (1984) suggested that, as a form of communication between people and broadcasters, the ratings system is a technology of domination, and that, unfortunately, its significance has been largely over- looked by studies in political economy of the media. Hartley (1987) criticized the propensity for channel executives and others to patronize audiences, and as a result, to assume a low level of interest in quality television production. This point is echoed in Neuman’s (1991) analysis of the economics and politics of programming. In a discussion of ‘the economics of common denominators’, Neuman demonstrates that the forces of competition operating in the mass broadcasting context create imperatives for channels to programme for majority taste at the expense of minority interests. He concludes that:
If one thinks about the likely career benefits to broadcasting executives, one can imagine that the pressure is consistently in the direction of making optimistic forecasts about winning large portions of the mass audience, rather than retreating from a possible position of industry leadership to serve smaller minority audience tastes.
(Neuman 1991: 155)
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The broadcasting context
Broadcasting distributes information from an industry centre (TV channel; radio station) to a local periphery (people’s earphones, homes, cars, work- places, or clubs). It seeks ears to listen and eyes to see, rather than individuals, groups, subcultures or communities. If people have access to the infrastructure for broadcasting, they can join the audience. The logic of mass broadcasting assumes a mass distribution system capable of reaching those eyes and ears. Broadcasters produce and distribute media materials using transmission systems they either own or lease from governments, in accordance with national communications policies for the regulation of broadcasting. Such regulation differs markedly from one national context to another, between the extremes of total commercial control on the one hand, and total government control on the other. Broadcasters therefore produce and distribute information. They manage broadcasting technologies, production, and the distribution systems that operate through the media, and this managerial control places them at an advantage, vis-à-vis audiences, when it comes to making decisions about what type of information will be broadcast and how that information should be packaged. As managers of the broadcasting system, they are always in the stronger position when it comes to organizing the terms of their contact with audiences.
Audiences, by contrast, are dispersed. Most people never discover the extent of the interests they share with others in broadcast materials. Of those who do, a few form clubs and associations to share the pleasure of particular texts, to help each other find out more about favourite programmes, or to lobby for changes to broadcasting or broadcast information. Fans, as will be demon- strated in Chapters 5 and 6, are excellent examples of audience formations that organize communally to enhance their enjoyment of favourite media texts. They develop associations based on their interests in particular texts, and have been documented to use their combined power to change production or broadcaster decisions that threaten those texts (Hobson 1982; Jenkins 2002).
Audience power in the broadcasting context
In general, mass audiences have been characterized as helpless in the context of broadcasting, but this is not, strictly speaking, a particularly useful way to think about the problem. Generally speaking, audiences have a range of powers at their disposal that, at least hypothetically, should make it possible for them to take an active role in mass broadcasting. Even if, currently, such powers are dissipated by a system of broadcasting and audience feedback that, at best,
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subdues and, at worst, effectively silences audience activism, it is important to understand that the potential for a more active audience intervention in broad- casting does exist. The sources of power available to people as audiences are linked to people’s simultaneous participation in three interlocking spheres of activity: in the public sphere, in consumption, and in the media sphere. It goes without saying that power is not equally distributed in these spheres of activity, and this is reflected in the ways that some allegiances and associations result in particular socio-cultural groups being better served by broadcasting than others.
By virtue of their humanity, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship or other right- bestowing affiliation in the public sphere, audiences are able to lobby the broadcasters, governments, advertisers and others to intervene in broadcasting. Later in this chapter we consider examples of audience activism where mar- ginalized communities have created opportunities for the production of media programming that suits their communal needs. Since mainstream audiences, however, are dispersed they are often slow to take advantage of such rights unless or until they devise the means to organize such lobbying action. People are, however, increasingly using their power as private citizens to undertake litigation directed at the impact of mass broadcasting on their lives. Such action is usually directed at advertisers or manufacturers after people have experienced harm as a result of information released through the media. To date, litigation has mostly been associated with the use of advertised products like cigarettes or fast food. Sometimes litigation is mounted on the basis of the ways actions or people are represented in advertisements, for example dangerous driving in motor vehicle advertisements, sexist representation of women, or racist representation of particular cultural groups.
The second source of audience power lies in people’s consumption activities — as we will see, the more people spend, the more power their needs and wants command in the broadcasting system. The link between the market, advertising and broadcasting is sensitive to people’s consumption activities. This sensitivity is heightened by the ratings system. If broadcast advertising did not produce increased sales for advertised products, then commercial broadcasting would be unable to continue. The value advertisers attach to having their advertisements broadcast at times when the consumers they seek are likely to be viewing is the reason why commercial broadcasting exists.
Meehan (1993: 206–7) has argued that the commercial broadcasting system has had unintended consequences, in that it has been set up around the interests of the better-educated middle classes, whom she describes as the consumerist caste. As a result, the ratings system does not provide programming for the public so much as for the consumerist caste. She claims that the educated middle classes with comparatively large disposable incomes were, and remain,
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the ‘quality audiences’ the syndicated measurement services were designed to identify. Much of the evidence provided by Beville (1988) and by Webster et al. (2000) confirm this privileging of the consumerist caste, since in the early years of broadcasting it was more wealthy listeners who first had access to radio and television sets, whose literacy and self-discipline was sufficiently developed to easily comply with diary and survey completion requirements. The better educated were also more likely to be sufficiently interested to cooperate with the self and family monitoring required to complete ratings diary entries, which rapidly becomes boring and repetitious. The power associated with consump- tion is therefore reflected in the design of ratings — particularly in the data selected (exposures and demographics, psychographics and geographics) and the recording arrangements required.
There is a second level at which consumption endows some audiences with an unequal share of broadcasting power. Because advertisers want their products advertised to people who are willing and able to buy them, practices like audience targeting, niche advertising and audience segmentation have developed. In recent years these practices have sought increasingly close associ- ation between product and programme or favourite characters. Synergies and correspondences between programme and viewers, the products advertised, and characters and plots are carefully fostered. Ratings are kept high by sticking with proven formulas. In recent years adverts that feature actors from the sponsored programme have been screened during the programme, and alter- nately actors from the adverts make guest appearances, in role, in the pro- grammes. The difference between advertisement and programme is minimized in a way that suggests the ubiquity of the product — that it is best because most people use it. Turow (1997) has argued that the practice of audience segmenta- tion has increased social inequality by desensitizing people to the needs and interests of others as a result of seeing only consumerist versions of social and cultural life on TV. Clearly, more attention is paid to the production of pro- grammes that will attract viewers who are also likely consumers of advertised products. People’s level of participation in the consumerist caste provides an indication of the satisfaction they will experience as broadcast audiences.
The third source of audience power, and the most carefully monitored, is the power inherent in people’s activities as audiences. In mass broadcasting, people’s power stems from the fact that broadcasters need them to keep watching or listening. Audiences are the reason broadcasting companies exist — no audiences, no broadcasters! The availability of people as potential audiences can be seen as a commercial opportunity — as it has been wherever the media are commercially funded, so broadcasters use programming to attract audiences, particularly the audiences sought by their advertisers and sponsors.
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Broadcasters therefore offer a broadcasting service to audiences, and they sell access to audience exposures to advertisers. In this way audiences are simultaneously consumers of broadcasting services and commodities sold to advertisers. Ratings analysis is the process that transforms audience exposures into the statistical reports and profiles that will convince advertisers to buy audience exposures. It is a form of value-adding that enhances the raw material of audience exposures, making them saleable commodities. It is also the feed- back system that guides the network in scheduling programmes so that the audiences advertisers want to see their adverts are tuned to the designated programmes. In this sense ratings analysis assists the regulation and manage- ment of broadcast audiences.
In this context, issues of audience agency need to be disentangled from audience power. Most audience research, outside audience measurement, has focused on audience agency (see Chapter 6) — the personal power people exert when making sense of broadcast media materials and integrating them into their self-understanding or life-worlds. Studies of audience agency focus on what people do with media materials. Tuning in is one small and rather insignificant expression of audience agency. Yet ratings research transforms it into the justification for a system of audience regulation.
Exposure as audience engagement
In the final analysis, the simple twist of the wrist (or push of the button) of people switching their sets on and off or tuning from station to station provides the single most important piece of information about audience behaviour.
(Beville 1988: xii)
A critique of ratings would not be complete without commenting on the strangeness of the assumption that exposure is the most significant audience behaviour. Advocates of the ratings system (Beville 1988; Webster et al. 2000) accept switching on/ switching off as an adequate account of audience agency. This assumption circumvents attempts to set a wider agenda for the discussion of audience issues in contexts like information services, advertising and audience policy development. We have identified six grounds for concern about the use of ‘exposure’ as, in effect, a measure of audience agency.
a) Exposure is the only information registered and recorded as data for ratings. In their model of audience behaviour, Webster et al. (2000: 181) outline the structural and individual constraints that affect audience behaviour. They explain that from an industry point of view, the only significant audience
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behaviours are tuning in, staying tuned, channel changing, and turning off. All these behaviours are recorded as just the one behaviour, exposure. Accordingly, there is room for concern that projections based on the patterns of exposure to media inform the ‘long-term development of technologies, programming services and strategies’ that are used in mass communication, and that in turn influence the ‘long-term cultivation of tastes, expectations and habits’ (Webster et al. 2000: 181). The ratings system accepts as ‘given’, or as inevitable, that control over broadcasting is held by broadcasters and can be used as and how the broadcaster wishes. While this view may reflect the ways the broadcasting industry understands itself, it should be noted at this point that other commen- tators on the USA communications industry, for example Neuman (1991), have offered more complex and critical evaluations of the power of broadcasters. This illusion of control is possible only because such a narrow definition of audience engagement and agency is adopted and because it is not more often questioned by media researchers.
b) Exposure is an audience behaviour — the behaviour of tuning in to a broadcast programme. To achieve the abstract measurements desired for statistical analysis of mass audiences, everything about audience that is not directly relevant to this act is stripped away. Focusing on exposure produces a view of audience engagement evacuated of socio-cultural meaning, in a process whereby exposure behaviour is transformed from being but one dimension of an audience event into the only sign of an audience commodity. Fundamentally it does not matter to the broadcasters and advertisers whether a particular programme is interesting to its audience or not — all that matters is that they are tuning in to it, that the programme rates better than the others available at the same time, and that advertisers are prepared to pay for advertising space. It is assumed that this can be achieved by clever scheduling rather than by better audience research (Neuman 1991). By basing the ratings system on exposures, all the difficult and disputable issues involved in the complex action of being an audience are conveniently bundled into a basket labelled ‘irrelevant’.
c) Exposure, as a sign of audience activity, indicates little about people’s media likes and dislikes — though perhaps it could if exposure data were com- bined with audience/text studies. It is impossible for information based on exposures to provide feedback on the social or cultural meaning of the choices people make when viewing television. At best, exposures may provide data that allows post hoc speculation about the reasons why people acted the way they did, but in a system that cannot differentiate between free viewing (watching programmes because you want to) and forced viewing (watching programmes chosen by someone else — a situation described in Gray (1987) and Morley (1986) and noted in many audience ethnographies), the jingoistic suggestion that ‘audiences get the media they deserve’ simply does not make sense.
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d) Exposure, as an audience behaviour, involves a choice between limited options. To some extent this is inevitable given the nature of free-to-air broadcasting, but the limited choice situation has allowed broadcasters to assume that audiences would not be discriminating if they had other options available. Fortunately, perhaps, the introduction of new technologies of trans- mission (optic fibre, satellite, data casting and so on), and the tendency for people to have more than one television set in the home, is making it possible for people to select media materials on the basis of personal interest more than was possible in the past, though Neuman (1991) has warned that the competitive nature of broadcasting will continue to favour mass-audience interests.
e) Exposure — when considered the centrepiece of the audience event — leads to other dimensions of the audience/media event being disregarded. In Chapter 1, we noted five dimensions of the audience/media event: the people and the nature of their affiliations, the diversity of audience activities, the nature of the media materials with which people engage, the nature of media time-spaces different technologies create, and the media power relations that structure media industries and set the parameters for audience action. As noted in Chapter 2, the early audience researchers thought of exposure as but one of the intervening variables in mass communication. In ratings analysis, however, exposure is taken to be the audience event, and in this respect, the acceptance of its relevance leads to an extreme and abstract rendering of media events, that focuses attention on tuning in at the expense of a bigger ‘media and audiences’ picture that might allow audience interests in information to be more closely scrutinized. Among other outcomes, this protects the media from having to seriously evaluate the quality of their programming.
From a pragmatic industry perspective, abstraction provides a standardized measure of audience activity. By ignoring most of the differences between viewers and disregarding reasons for viewing, quite diverse acts of audience can be treated as examples of the same thing — being tuned in. Audience exposure is beyond dispute if the reasons for the exposure are defined as irrelevant. Either people tuned in or they did not. There are no grey areas, and provided those who use the information generated agree that the instruments used to measure audiences are sufficiently accurate and properly recorded, disputes as to the validity and reliability of the measures can be avoided. Neuman (1991: 153–7) has demonstrated how the competitive nature of the media, the restrictions of the numbers of broadcasters permitted by law to operate in a given market, and the size of the audiences served, ensure that a mass-audience focus will continue to dominate new programme development. This is because, crudely speaking, more advertising revenue is obtained from mass-audiences than from catering to specialist interests.
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f ) Exposure, as used in ratings analysis then, covers up the very differences that, if they were taken into account, would provide the basis on which better programming and better broadcasting services could be developed. Scheduling for the highest rating means that some audience participants are not served well by the broadcasting system. Add to this the preferential treatment offered to the ‘consumerist caste’ (Meehan 1993), and the groups likely to experience dissatis- faction with free to air broadcasting become obvious — the intelligentsia, the poor, older people, children.
Neuman (1991) has provided a helpful analysis of how marketing theory can shed light on the reasons why, even when more media carriers (magazines, TV, radio, press, HD TV, games consoles, the internet) are available, the pro- gramming on offer remains oriented to the mainstream mass-audience. Basically, since broadcasters always seek the highest rating in a particular time slot, they will aim to schedule programmes that are only a little more attractive to more people than their opposition, rather than try to outstrip the com- petition. Speaking hypothetically, if a given media market sustains three free to air channels, each would aim to attract one third of the available audience. This may seem counter-intuitive to people who imagine that a broadcaster would want to dominate the market by aiming for a 100 per cent rating. How- ever, apart from very rare occasions like a celebrity wedding or the World Cup soccer finals licensed to one channel only, aiming for 100 per cent ratings is short-sighted. In a three-station market, each station will be most viable (and equally attractive to advertisers) if they are each able to regularly attract about a third of the available audience. When a second-ranking station decides to challenge the top-rating station, it will do so only by diverting audiences away from both the top-ranking and the lowest-ranking stations. However, offering a programme that is radically different from programming that already rates well is more risky than offering something only marginally different from programmes already rating strongly in a given time slot. The risk is that the existing core audience may shift in the opposite direction to that desired. Neuman has noted that:
The promotional hurdle imparts a conservative influence, tilting pro- gramming decisions away from one-shot programs in general, and risky gambles on unfamiliar formulas and new faces in particular.
(1991: 151)
As a result, unconventional programmes are often scheduled at times that are inconvenient for the viewers most likely to enjoy them. The task of providing programming that is innovative or looks to expand viewer interests beyond the comfort zone falls to publicly funded broadcasters (like the British Broadcasting
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Corporation or the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and to broadcasting services set up for this purpose (like the US Public Broadcasting Service, Britain’s Channel Four and Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service). From the perspective of the mainstream broadcasters, this has the added advantage of transferring some research and development costs to the public sector, or to private companies or individuals whose work is bought by the public sector. Successful public sector programmes can later be purchased for broadcast by the free to air channels.
The implications of statistical thinking
Webster et al. (2000) justify the ratings focus on exposure by pointing to the analytical difference between broad patterns of mass-audience behaviour and particularized and localized accounts of niche-audience activities. They acknowledge that mass-audience statistics are unable to account for particular instances of audience choice. They use this distinction to justify the preference for statistical analysis:
This science of predicting mass behaviour and audience characteristics has been called statistical thinking. It was developed in the eighteenth century by, among others, insurance underwriters. Consider for example, the problem of life insurance. It is almost impossible to predict when any one person will die. But if the researcher aggregates large numbers, it’s not hard to estimate how many people are likely to expire in the coming year.
(Webster et al. 2000: 8)
This comment draws our attention to the history of statistical analysis and its use in social administration and urban planning, since this ‘statistical thinking’ is by no means just a matter of preferring quantitative methods over qualitative analysis. While the origins of statistical thinking may be traced to the eighteenth century and the beginnings of social administration, the par- ticular type of statistical practice found in ratings analysis is more closely linked to at least three mid-twentieth-century movements:
• behaviourism in psychology; • the ‘disciplinary technologies of “philanthropic” Fordism and the Keynsian
welfare state’ that were associated with ‘the rise of new social movements aimed at achieving greater social justice in the city’ (Soja 2000: 98); and
• political behaviouralism and its application to public opinion polling in political science (Cook 1978).
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The reduction of audience response to a measurable action like exposure mirrors the approach to stimulus-response behaviourism advocated by Skinner in the 1950s, which proposed that all psychological behaviour could be studied by analysing behavioural responses and refusing to have your thinking messed up by unmeasurable phenomena like feelings and opinions (Skinner 1973).
The fixation with what might be called collective consumption was a com- ponent of the social movements that endorsed egalitarianism in the 1960s — particularly in urban planning and renewal programmes. In this context, statistical analysis could provide evidence of the scope and depth of social problems and assist with the planning and costing of improvements. In the context of broadcasting, though, the statistical approach has worked to cover up ordinary people’s interests, as individuals and as communities, and to privilege an amorphous notion of the public (in this case ‘the silent majority’). The commercial use of ratings allows exploitation of people’s viewing time rather than an improvement in the broadcasting services.
Because of the close parallels between ratings analysis and public opinion polling, the criticisms of the use of statistical thinking in political science in the 1960s and 1970s offer some interesting perspectives on the application of statistical thinking to contemporary audience research. Cook (1978: 101), for example, suggested that statistical thinking in ‘political behaviouralism’ (his terminology) emphasized analysis rather than substance, general patterns rather than particular or individual action, and explanatory rather than ethical attitudes. Webster et al. (2000) put forward an argument for the superiority of research committed to analysis, general patterns and explanation to situate ratings analysis as audience research.
In Cook’s view, the proclaimed neutrality of ‘political behaviouralism’, as it applied to public opinion polling, was actually a form of conservatism. He proposed that this reductionist conservatism consolidates the status quo, circumvents the development of critical evaluation of political situations, con- texts or policies, and devalues the complexity and importance of the political behaviours it measures. The so-called value-free terminology used in political polling ‘describes voters as if the most that can be expected of them is what we rightly expect in the case of ill informed and prejudiced voters’ (Cook 1978: 107). His criticism echoes the dilemma ratings analysis has posed for other approaches to audience research. The reliance within the broadcasting industry on ratings severely compromises the options for other audience or media research agendas and undermines the recognition of the value and relevance of other types of audience research, particularly research concerned with identity and cultural value (see Chapters 4 and 5). Hartley (1987) expressed just this concern when he explained how the ratings system encourages industry
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personnel to talk about audiences as though they are childlike and unable to think for themselves.
Overall, the emphasis on exposure in ratings analysis, advertising and media planning fails to take into account that what is excluded at the moment of the initial transformation of a complex human activity (engagement with media) into a standardized measurable behaviour (exposure); this may be important for understanding the larger patterns and meanings of media consumption in contemporary society too. In particular, by reifying a mundane act, exposure, as the sign of audience, the importance of other audience action and agency is under-valued. By claiming that ratings analysis is audience research, Webster et al. (2000) situate audience measurement as the dominant approach to audience research and assume that the audience questions pursued by other media researchers mirror their own. They are in good company by doing so, however, since the marketing approach that informs the understanding of more and more information service sectors is based on this assumption.
This affirms Meehan’s (1984), admittedly minority and academic, view that ratings analysis is fundamentally not social science research, but a commercial service designed to provide specific types of information, for which broad- casters and advertisers are willing to pay. Rather than present ratings analysis as a story of progress and enhancement of social science practice, Meehan proposed that increasing collusion between broadcasters and advertisers constructed, in turn, a relationship between broadcasters and audiences that normalized broadcaster control. Meehan considers the industry use of ratings to be a hegemonic practice that protects the interests of dominant economic groups by allowing the industry to position critical analysis of the media outside the sphere of its normal operations.
The commodity audience
The information about ratings and their use, outlined above, has shown us how audience behaviours are transformed into measurable statistics that allow audiences to be traded as commodities by the broadcasting industries. The systems of audience measurement and public opinion polling, devised in the first half of the twentieth century, pioneered a system of continuous audience monitoring using representative population sampling. In the 1990s, the applicability of these systems outside the broadcasting environment expanded dramatically because of digitization and the development of com- puter programs designed specifically to process the data on entertainment exposures and to track audience movements from programme to product, from channel to supermarket, medium to shopping mall.
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During the 1960s and 1970s, banks and marketing companies had begun a similar tracking of commercial transactions, based on records of credit purchases. For example, the use of bank and credit cards makes it possible to track credit and eftpos (electronic funds transfer — point of sale) transactions in much the same way that audience exposures are tracked for broadcasting. In the internet environment, these two data sources — product purchase records and entertainment choice records, have converged, and the systems of analysis based on audience/customer choices has expanded dramatically. In the internet context, being an audience attracts a cost as the free-to-air mass-audience scope of the broadcast media is replaced by a user-pays system.
In this context data mining is increasingly used in conjunction with trans- action tracking to enable commercial operators to be even more discriminating about whom to contact with product information and special deals. Honeywill and Byth (2001), for example, advocate more finely tuned discriminant analysis to allow distinctions to be made between relevant audience segments and likely prospects. The ‘prospect’ is identified on the basis of past purchase trans- actions, and then tempted to buy with inducements like special offers, loyalty deals, free gifts and other preferred client ‘opportunities’.
Clearly the structure of broadcasting is showing the impact of changes linked to the information society, since this type of discrimination in the global e-commerce environment is a good example of the disjuncture Castells has described ‘between the market logic of global networks of capital flows and the human experience of workers’ lives’ (Castells 1998: 346). The development of new services for online audiences are based on statistical analysis of the frequency and duration of site visits and the average number of purchases of online products a consumer is likely to make before shifting on to a new supplier or a new enthusiasm, but the reasons why one person begins and ends their use of an online service, and the personal meaning to the audience/ consumer of the information gained while the customer/service provider relationship remained active, is not investigated. The division between industry research and socio-cultural research remains unchanged.
As consumer activities gather momentum online, and as media convergence dissolves the distinctions between media that had characterized their delivery of information to audiences, the use of information about audiences/consumers by the commercial sector draws to our attention the increasing importance of the consumption activities of audiences on the one hand, and to the mediatiza- tion of activities that were previously not thought of as audience activities, on the other. For example, many research activities that were previously carried out in libraries, museums and archives are now available online, packaged as media commodities, supported by links to product tie-ins and merchandising that allow the immediate purchase of new materials to enhance the
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data-gathering activity. These are audience activities that are not entertainment but information-based.
For example, the commercial opportunities available in B-2-B (business to business) and B-2-C (business to customer) transactions have encouraged a significant investment in the acquisition, development and deployment of online databases, that are in turn marketed as new information services. It is interesting to note, in this context, that over the last ten years, the language of marketing has pioneered metaphors like data mining and information warehousing, to describe the development of audience/consumer research methodologies for internet marketing — customer relationship marketing (CRM) and mass customization. Mass customization is a powerful variant of the ratings system that creates a sales environment where mass audiences can be individually addressed. It involves ‘mining’ e-commerce transaction records and using them as the basis for designing the relationship between manufacturer or service provider and audiences/customers. Honeywill and Byth (2001: 161) describe this process as ‘relationship architecture’. In the e-commerce context, the distinction between audience and consumer collapses, and is transformed into the customer relationship (see Gronroos 1994) or the mass customization strategy.
The process of mass customization is based on the idea that the economics of information, in particular the ‘universal trade-off between richness and reach’ can be redefined in the e-commerce context. It is a variation of the link between reach (how many people see an advertisement or programme) and frequency (how many times the advert is seen by the people reached) introduced earlier in this chapter. Evans and Wurster explain these terms in the following way:
‘Richness’ means the quality of information, as defined by the user: accuracy, bandwidth, currency, customisation, interactivity, relevance, security and so forth. The precise meaning of richness varies from one context to another, but in any one context, it is generally clear what the word means. ‘Reach’ means the number of people who participate in the sharing of that information.
(2000: 23)
Here, a concept about quality, richness, has been added to the rhetoric for the management of audiences. Richness refers to both the value audiences attach to the information service, and to the commercial value of information about the audience. Evans and Wurster (2000) identify six aspects of information that contribute to its ‘richness’.
• Bandwidth is used to distinguish between narrowband (‘stock quotes’) and broadband (‘film’) information.
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• Customization refers to the specificity of the communication — the directness with which it addresses the interests of the audience.
• Interactivity refers to the mode of address used — considering the trade-off between monologue and dialogue, for example.
• Reliability refers, in this context, to the credibility of the participants in the interactions. It contrasts ‘a small group of trusted individuals’ with a ‘large group of strangers’.
• Security, in this context, is a way of referring to the judgements made about how widely particular information should be disseminated.
• Currency refers to the length of time information has been in circulation. (Evans and Wurster 2000: 25)
Evans and Wurster claim that the traditional relationship between the rich- ness and reach of information held that the more people who were addressed by a message, the less rich its information could be, and vice versa. So a television advertisement could have massive reach but would be low in richness, because it cannot provide detailed information about the product (low richness for the audience), and it will be seen by many viewers who are not considered prospects by the advertiser or marketer (low richness for the marketer). Evans and Wurster suggest that in the e-commerce context this relationship has been replaced because e-commerce operates on a global scale (high reach) but is interactive in nature (offering a richness of communication for both audience and marketer). As they put it, ‘Digital networks are now making it possible for a very large number of people to exchange very rich information’ (Evans and Wurster 2000: 29).
This relationship appears to offer benefits to both audience/consumers and to commercial operators, but it depends heavily on the willingness of audiences to disclose large amounts of ‘rich, comprehensive, and perhaps intimate data’ about themselves. It also depends on technical and informational inequalities between consumer and commercial operator, since ‘consumers cannot know what financial arrangements underlie the information and recommendations that are presented to them’ (Evans and Wurster 2000: 155). They note that the audience/consumer is less able to conserve anonymity, prevent reselling of personal information, avoid SPAM, protect themselves against false informa- tion and avoid being manipulated by sellers who are ‘armed with the latest in discriminant analysis’ (154–5).
As a basis for deciding which information is provided to whom, discriminant analysis and mass customization may be experienced by audiences as ruthless, or as heartless if people become aware of the ways they are being grouped and classified, or that they are discriminated against in the offering of special privileges. Mass customization and discriminant analysis remain, in this sense,
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examples of Pierre Levy’s (1997) molar technologies in that they still treat people as ‘masses’ and they work on principles of mediatization that draw on ‘immobilization, reproduction, decontextualization, and distribution of messages’ (Levy 1997: 41). Such administrative approaches to ‘customer’ management create divisions among those participating in media events, and in this respect their positioning of the online audience misses out on the benefits of the internet as an environment for the sharing of ‘collective intelligence’ (Levy 1997: 41).
The creative industries are another site where the media marketing treatment is applied to the management of consumer activities. Here, however, the process is called ‘audience development’, and its aim is to ensure that government funding for the arts is supported by a broader cross-section of the general public than would occur in other circumstances. The idea is that audience tastes are surveyed as the basis of planning by arts institutions, and used as a guide to develop exhibitions and performances that will be strongly supported by potential product users.
Barban, Cristol and Kopec (1987) identified two alternative approaches to matching target markets (the people an advertiser wants to reach) and vehicle audiences (the people who make up the audience following of a particular programme or product): the demographic approach and the product-usage approach. Audience development is based on the product-usage approach.
The product usage approach starts by profiling users of products or services already available. The profile of the product users then becomes the basis for locating additional products or services, perhaps in synergistic fields, that attract people who share similar demographics to the current service users. The product user demographics are matched, first, to the demographics of media vehicle audiences (age, gender, income, education, and so on) and second to the demographics of heavy, medium, light or non-users of the medium. The aim is to develop a media strategy that offers precise placement of advertising, where the target market cannot miss the advert, but which does not waste money by advertising to people who will not be interested in the product. This means that the advertiser is looking for particular types of audience vehicles for advert placement, but also that the audience is continuously segmented and differentiated in a search for the qualities sought by particular marketers. In audience development the aim is to attract new people to the audience for arts products (exhibitions, performances, seminars) by promoting synergies across diverse arts contexts. The demographic approach, by contrast, involves deciding on the preferred demographics of potential users for a product or service and seeking out vehicle audiences that provide a high proportion of people with those demographics. It is well suited to brand advertising and the broadcasting environment, but does not lend itself so readily to arts audience
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development because it is less powerful as a means for locating audience synergies.
The application of market research approaches to arts audience development has created mistrust and widespread misgiving among arts industry workers. As O’Regan has noted:
Marketing and market research directly challenge the value and sig- nificance of an organisations’s own understanding of its audience — often a source of great pride. They introduce a layer of external expertise inter- vening in what many arts administrators see as their organic relations with their audience. They entail a perspective that the audience is never wrong, leading to research programs which start from ‘where people are at’ rather than where the sector thinks ‘they should be’. They give rise to new sorts of expertise needing to be accommodated by cultural organisations. Some claim it has shifted the power within cultural organisations, as market research and audience development initiatives challenge the primacy of creativity in the production process. Turning the arts into ‘just another business’, and adopting the objectifying language of consumers, markets and the like, can be a profoundly alienating experience for artists and cultural workers.
(2002: 129)
The problem is that audience development uses the same profiling of user engagement with audience vehicles (art objects in this case) as the mass media. The same behaviourist approach to research is taken. The same preference for recording actions rather than experiences or opinions pervades the approach. The inherent disregard for exploration of the intensity of arts/media events signals a lack of preparedness to accept the cultural significance of artists, art works and arts events that characterize popular culture production. The intrusion of marketing into the arts context suggests that a deep-seated realignment of distinctions between high art and the popular arts may be occurring, as the art object becomes yet another entertainment vehicle, and arts patrons become yet another audience to be commodified.
The active audience
Despite the increasing and relentless commodification of audiences by the entertainment and information industries, individuals and groups do exercise power in a variety of ways, not just as fans who produce their own cultural artefacts (see Chapter 6) or produce their own websites and news stories
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(see Chapter 7), but also as producers of media outputs which have broad distribution and reach. In some situations, local audiences have taken the provision of the type of media they want to experience into their own hands. Naficy (1993), for example, has documented how Iranian exiles in Los Angeles produced periodicals and radio broadcasts, sponsored newscasts and TV programmes, rented airtime and sold advertising space during their broadcasts. Access to broadcast materials that represented the culture left behind were considered essential for the survival and mental health of the exiles. Naficy has suggested that the state of being in exile heightens the desire for the autonomous construction of being different, and independent media production can work towards achieving such desires.
Using media to actively construct difference bears testimony to the fact that media are an important mechanism for learning about the world. They give materiality to stories that would otherwise exist only as reminiscences and family folklore. Experiencing one’s cultural heritage in the media gives an authority to the story that takes it beyond the personal and into the historical- social. Naficy notes that, in the case of the Iranian exiles in Los Angeles, the popular culture they produced in exile assisted the development of a grounded sense of self from which an engagement with mainstream American culture could be negotiated.
Paradoxically the production of exilic popular culture also helped some ‘exiles’ to reduce their dependence on their ‘home’ culture by more clearly designating their class and social position in the adopted culture:
Exilic popular culture and television are instrumental in the survival of uprooted Iranians. They constructed a cohesive semiotic and discursive space for exilic communitas and an exilic economy, but their commercially driven nature served ultimately to recuperate their resistive and counter- hegemonic spin, turning them chiefly into social agencies of assimilation.
(Naficy 1993: 192)
While the production of exilic popular culture may prove a transitional phase in the assimilation of an immigrant community, Naficy’s analysis points to the fact that identity groups, even when dispersed within the audience, may culti- vate shared interests, define agendas for the production of particular media events, produce the required media materials, and identify exhibition strategies to secure participation in the global mediascape.
The term mediascape was first used by Appadurai (1997: 35), who suggested that, ‘the complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics’. For Appadurai, contemporary society is fundamentally disjunctive because, in the global capitalist system, social organization is based on flows of ideas
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(ideoscape), media (mediascape), money (financescape), people (ethnoscape) and technology (technoscape). He calls these the five dimensions of global culture ‘flows’ and argues that they operate in a quasi-independent manner. For example, he suggests that mediascapes, ‘Provide . . . large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed’ (1997: 35). To become part of the mediascape, news- worthy events are processed as media information, in ways that make them fit the rationality of the media (as opposed to the lived) world. As a result, Appadurai assumes that people engage with the real world through the proto- narratives the media provide in order to make the realities of their daily lives fit the media’s aphoristic account of the world, rather than the other way round. In this sense, the mediascape demonstrates not just that culture is now ‘information-based’, but that in fact it is ‘information dominated’ (Kellerman 2000).
Appadurai believed that the flow of contemporary media teaches people to engage with information in characteristic ways — and predominantly as a commodity — and that this development would lead from a world in which the media report and record, to one where the media agenda and worldview dominates the information landscape. Similarly, Castells (1998: 336) has argued that the emergence of the information society has its origins in more funda- mental changes than just the development of information technologies and growth in the production and distribution of information. The social, economic and cultural changes that have taken place over the last 40 years, he claims, have their historical origins in ‘three independent processes: the information tech- nology revolution; the economic crisis of both capitalism and statism, and their subsequent restructuring; and the blooming of cultural social movements, such as libertarianism, human rights, feminism, and environmentalism’ (1998: 336).
One reaction to the increasing life differences between information producers and generic labour, and the lack of recognition within the information society of people who are marginalized or ignored because they are no longer (or have never been) able to contribute productively to the information economy, is the pursuit of a more activist engagement in the mediascape. This involves finding a way of becoming part of the mediascape rather than of being left outside it. Engaging with the mediascape therefore is obviously a survival strategy for cultural audiences who wish to secure their cultural heritage and its narratives as part of the global cultural pattern. Castells has argued that:
Cultural battles are the power battles of the Information Age. They are primarily fought in and by the media, but the media are not the power holders. Power, as the capacity to impose behaviour, lies in the networks of
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information exchange and symbol manipulation, which relate social actors, institutions, and cultural movements, through icons, spokes- persons, and intellectual amplifiers.
(Castells 1998: 348)
One way in which less powerful actors can gain part of the cultural terrain is through negotiating the meaning of mainstream media products. Gillespie (2000), for example, has pointed to disjunctures between global media and local experience in her ethnographic research among British Asian youth in London. She noted that coming to terms with their ‘limited’ representation in mainstream media led to a devaluation of British/Asian identity, and fostered instead a ‘desire for new kinds of transnational and Diaspora identities’ (2000: 165). The disaffection with British/Asian identity precipitated more intense identification and involvement with transnational issues like consumerism, feminism, environmentalism, and human rights, alongside Diaspora identifica- tions and connections. These Diaspora identifications and connections included viewing everything from Bollywood blockbusters to home videos that maintain family connections, exchange family information and allow family members to engage in video tourism. Gillespie suggests that the consumption of both global and ‘local’ media contributes to the development and maintenance of split identities as young British/Asians continuously switch between global affiliations, home culture orientations and local traditions.
The media initiatives of indigenous and ethnic minority communities in the 1980s and 1990s were important steps in the development of independently owned and controlled alternative media industries throughout the world. Their activities included production, distribution of imported videos, CDs, magazines and other entertainment from the home culture, support for ethnic radio and community TV and subscribing to specialist broadcasting. Impor- tantly, alternative media industries are largely made possible by the tireless and unpaid labour of numerous enthusiasts and amateur presenters. The range and quality of work undertaken by local communities who are determined to contribute their voices to the mediascape parallels the work of fans and audiences on the internet. Engaging with flows of media product by contri- buting work and time has strengthened communal information networks associated with the discovery and enjoyment of the media materials. Based on recognition of the centrality of media in the operation of contemporary society (its ‘information-based’ nature), ethnic and indigenous communities have initiated strategies for taking control of their representation in both mainstream and local contexts.
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Conclusion
Earlier in this chapter, we noted that Meehan (1984) had expressed concern at the possibility that ratings might become the only system of communication between broadcasters and audiences. We have seen that ratings analysis treats the audience event as an abstract and measurable behaviour: exposure. The ratings system has worked well for broadcasters, in that it has kept audiences viewing (if not satisfied), advertisers paying and broadcasters in control of the mass communication system for more than 75 years. It is perhaps ironic there- fore, that advertising practices, informed by ratings and other market research data, appear to be making changes to broadcasting inevitable. The interests of advertisers and the emerging competition with the internet, a medium that simultaneously engages, entertains and sells, are shifting the balance of power, not just in broadcasting but in the entertainment industries in general. It is clear that in broadcasting, manufacturers will play a more informed and active role in their relationships with audience/consumers, but the situation for arts manufacturers (artists and musicians) remains unclear. The type of competitive environment promoted by the application of marketing principles is not well- suited to the production of excellence. Rather, as we have seen, it benefits mainstream production and middle-brow culture at the expense of the type of commitment to excellence that traditionally has been the cornerstone of the arts industries. Yet it seems that the mantra of the ‘consumer relationship’ is being chanted and is challenging the commitment to audience cultures that has held sway in audience research for the past 20 years (see Chapters 6 and 7 especially).
In this chapter we have seen how ratings analysis and audience development define the audience/media event in terms of one audience behaviour: exposure. While ratings analysis may present itself as the most influential form of audience research, its claims seem tenuous. Current developments in customer relationship marketing are adding new audience management tools to the commercial research context, with the management of consumers based on analysis of complex data banks. These developments challenge media researchers to look again at what is happening in this field.
While the shortcomings of these approaches are considerable, as we have shown, they cannot alter the fact that ratings and other audience measurement services receive massive support from broadcasting industries, governments and public authorities. A clear articulation of the shortcomings of the marketing approaches by media researchers is needed to ensure that audiences are con- vinced of the value of lobbying for change, and of the importance of audience activism — not just as a service to particular audience communities but as a source of difference in the communication system.
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Further reading
Meehan, E. (1993) Heads of household and ladies of the house: gender, genre and broadcast ratings, 1929–1990, in W.S. Solomon and R.W. McChesney (eds) Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Neuman, W.R. (1991) The Future of the Mass Audience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Webster, J.G., Phalen, P.F. and Lichty, L.W. (2000) Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research, 2nd edn. Mahwah, New Jersey and London: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.
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