TV: Battleground of Representation.

(Part 4)

What is perhaps called for is a re-vision, a re-examination of previous criticisms of ratings-driven television. It certainly hardly seems worth it to continue to criticise the inaccuracies of ratings and their apparent disregard of small, local television audiences, specialised sites that may offer some hope of a different form of television, when the newly designed passive people meters promise to provide personalised rating’s for all customers using either or both of the broad or narrowcasting services.

To criticise this increased attention seems specious when compared with the days when technology only afforded as few small samples representing one monolithic national construct of audience. Under test now in America in a (you guessed it) sample market, Nielsen's new set-top cable box not only connects you to a multitude of (similar) channels, it allows you to gamble on sporting events and Sale of the Century from the comfort of your living room, it also carries out a computer image analysis of your face and body to identify your presence near the set. It can even tell if you are asleep. (It would be interesting to see how this registers on the ratings charts).

This is not to say that government support and intervention to encourage diversity, defined as an "expansion of difference" (Hartley 1991), in the face of market failure to support such diversity is not a justifiable intervention but that criticism based on lack of institutional concern with such issues is fading. The trends in commercial narrowcasting, targeted particularly at smaller and more diverse audiences, take into account the complexities of social life through a recognition, albeit belatedly, of their potential as new sources of revenue.

This is not to support such a response as the 'right' response, merely as the appropriate one for an institution so constructed. The institutional view is that "the smaller channels do not provide exclusive programming for some specific minority but broaden the choice for most viewers" (Barwise and Eherenburg 1990, p 70). This sounds a lot like the ideal aim of the Australian government-inspired social policy of 'multiculturalism', the main platform of the charter of SBS. This institutional hegemonic view stubbornly seeks to accommodate the idea of minority interests within the framework of what "most viewers", the mass market, want. This analysis is quintessentially Gitlin's as much as it is Habermas' or Gramsci's.

Ang is critical of institutional domination as a system that has "ambitions to control the formal frameworks of television's place in contemporary life. As a result, this institutional point of view silences actual audiences who nevertheless 'get along' with television in a myriad of creative yet tacit ways, whose details elude and escape the formal structures set up by the institutions." (Ang 1991 p2). She is positive about tactical resistance (see also below) by active audiences but she does this without fully recognising that the institutions are trying hard to place the grid of a scientific rationalism over all possible audiences, particularly those who "elude and escape"as evidenced by the introduction of people meters, devices that are able to map audiences' viewing habits' in increasingly small divisions of time.

Commentators also forget that this technology is not new and has been under development for some time. The original Audimeter, introduced into the United States in 1936 during the days of radio, does no more than the new 'passive' people meters in 'watching' and recording the audience and every move they make. The main difference is that each set will soon be able to 'talk to the station, sending up-to-the-minute ratings data to a central computer. Similarly, the American ABC's Preview Theatre testing of television shows provides the researcher with second-by-second information, in exactly the same fashion as the infamous 'worm' did during the 1993 Australian televised election debates. Indeed, this 'worm' or realtime dependent graph of the audience likes and dislikes, is exactly what researchers in these preview theatres see on their charts. These charts, some of the most precious and closely-held research material in the possession of institutions, are the mad dream of the numerically oriented social scientists in America. Finally they can 'see' the very workings of the mind of a whole audience, objectified, reproducible, under control, right on the screen in front of them.

The increased resolution of the scientific 'gaze', previously limited to 15 minute divisions in a joint diary/meter mix of audience measurement procedures, is a standard feature in a successfully developing science. And such a science is often driven by the expectations that writers have of it, or at the least is precipitously foreshadowed by them, years before the actual technology allows. I am thinking particularly of the original Pineapple Studios' Max Headroom, a one hour look into the activities of television 50 years from now in a bleak, post-industrial landscape. In this vision of the future the evil station executives of channel 23 sat in their boardroom under the baleful glare of an enormous video screen that gave second-by-second ratings of the channel's shows. At any moment, the effect on the audience of whatever was showing, whatever was said, what was until now invisible, was instantaneously visible. Here, the nation's mind, or minds, was exposed, figuratively and literally, to the institution and its control.