The role of Audience in the age of Globalization IIby Ien Ang

1- Institutional Knowledge: the need to control

Auto – reproduction of the institution By Christian Metz – setting up

arrangements

The reproduction of the institution highly depend on the institution to perpetuate itself.

Institutional Knowledge: the need to control The familiar problem occurs in

Broadcasting: it too cannot take its audience for granted.

Television audience membership is principally voluntary and optional. So, they can try to influence them but they cannot control them in any direct manner.

Institutional Knowledge: the need to control Audiences must constantly be

seduced, attracted, lured.

The predicament: privatized reception mysterious interlocutor

Institutional Knowledge: the need to control The impossibility of knowing the

audience – in the sense of knowing ahead of time exactly how to “get it”

Know the audience!

Institutional Knowledge: the need to control

The predicament: TV's invisible addressee.

Institutional Knowledge: the need to control Researching :

Measuring the audience

A tool for symbolic politics rather than for rational decision making

Valued but scorned, cited but patronized

Institutional Knowledge: the need to control

The institution faces with the oppositions

Production vs. Consumption

Sender vs. Recipient

Institution vs. Audience

Institutional Knowledge: the need to control

Passive Aggressiveness of the audience

2- Audience as-market and Audience as-public Audience as-

market

Potential consumers, Giving the audience what it wants

Objects that are being advertised

Audience as- public

Consist of citizens who must be served

Purposive transfer of meaning is important

Audience as-market and Audience as-public Audience as-

market

Is indispensable for the economic functioning of the system

Audience as- public

Forcing the audience to confront the frontiers of its own taste

Audience as-market and Audience as-public Audience as-

market

Presented with highly formalized procedure of knowledge production

Audience as- public

Transferred meaningful messages, more problematic, under pressure,apparently, transformed into an audience as -market

Audience as-market and Audience as-public Audience as-

market Audience as-

public

Fundamental commonality in the two institutional system: Seeing “TV audience” as an objectified category of others to be controlled.Cannot stop struggling to conquer the audience!

3- Television audience as taxonomic collective The audience is , autonomous , supra

– individual existence

A collection of spectators, a group of individuals, attend a performance and receive a message sent by another

Television audience as taxonomic collective

Taxonomic Collective: an entity of serialized, in principle unrelated individuals who form a goup solely because each member has a characteristic – spectatorship

Television audience as taxonomic collective A photographic image of the total

television audience is impossible to take

A discursive construct, the statistical figure

A term of amassment, the audience becomes constructed as a distinct category (a football match audience, for instance)

Television audience as taxonomic collective

Audience

Television -Audience

Attracted, Lured, Conquered audience

Non-audience (the viewers are within it)

(audience as – market,audience as - public)

.depersonalized

4- The limits of discursive control

Institutional predicament: There is no way for mass media inst.

to secure the conditions of their own reproduction by exerting direct control over their audience.

The limits of discursive control According to Metz, there is only way

to get over the problem, instilling a spontaneous desire

It is through the rhetorical assumptions of the programmes transmitted - programming (European viewers, American viewers)

The limits of discursive control The quest for conquering the

audience remains, a matter of trial and error.

The limits of discursive control are inevitable, TV inst. cannot get to grips with the social world of actual audiences.

The limits of discursive control Why discursive: the identities of

actual audience are inherently unstable, dynamic, uncertain, fluid, fuzzy and elusive

So, there can be no prefixed recipe for controlling the ins. and audience relationship

The control and the conquest of the audience is never something definite and completely achieved!

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience Panopticon (the prison and the living room example)

Central to the technological operation of audience measurement: its core mechanism, and ultimate ambition, is control through visibility

For Foucault, it is the metaphor for a technological device whose function is to increase social control

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience Foucault's Docile Bodies -The goal of

the commercial TV

Implying total behavioral control over them – the ability to force them to adopt the “ideal” viewing behavior.

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience Rating services put the viewers under

the constant examination…

Audience measurement is an incomplete panoptic arrangement

Viewers are not prisoners but free consumers!

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience All audience measurement

technologies in principle depend on the propriety of having people submit themselves to permanent monitoring

Intricate measurement methods may not simply lead to ever – increasing control, -- to less control --a less link between power and knowledge

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience Watching TV, sense as a behavior in

its own right.

In measurement of the audience, whatever the way, there seems to be no such thing as “watching TV“ as a separate activity.

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience The boundaries of TV audience are so

blurred, how could it be possibly be measured?

The result: The way people relate to television is too capricious and heterogeneous to be reduced to an exhaustive list of measurable units.

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience Epistemological revolt: what actual

audiences do with television is ultimately in excess of uniform, objectifying quantification, categorization and representation.

Is not a simply some sort of romantic eruption of viewers’ rebellion

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience The result: The TV industrial complex

is unable to control the uses of its own technological inventions: as a matter of paradox, the strategy of making watching TV more attractive by offering new technological devices to do so, only leads to less and less control over audience authority

The end