Question :
Briefly discuss arguments for and against using television ratings to measure television audiences. Use examples to substantiate your argument.
Media audience and analysis
Audience analysis is a task that is basically performed by the technical writers in the early stages of the project which involves audiences. The task is all about assessing the audience to make sure that the information provided to them are at appropriate level. Defining audience is an easy job but requires considering the factors like culture, age and the knowledge of the subject. After considering all these factors carefully, a profile of the intended audience is created allowing the writers to write in a manner that the audience understands (Alasuutari & Pertti, 1999).
Audience analysis involves gathering information about the recipients of the written, visual and oral communication. There are plenty of methods that are used as a technical communicator that are used to conduct analysis since the task of completing the task of audience analysis is overwhelming. Writers sometimes also use conversations to help themselves to complete the audience analysis. Other than that, there is another technique that can be used to analyse audience and is known as the “bottom up” approach (Slater, Michael & Flora, 1991).
Once we talk about audience analysis, the concept of audience reception comes into existence; audience reception is the theory that came in wide use as per characterizing the wave of audience research which started in communication and cultural studies in 1980s and 1990s. As an entire picture is concerned, it is a cultural perspective that tends to concern one way or another exploring active choices using the interceptions made by the media and by their consumers (Whannel & Garry, 1998). The concept of audience reception theory can be traced back to the work done by the British sociologist, named Stuart Hall and his communication model in an essay named as Encoding/Decoding. Hall’s model has put forward three major central premises which are:
- The same event can be encoded in more than one way.
- The message might contain more than one possible reading
- Understanding a problem can be critical
Audience analysis emphasize on the diversity of the responses that give popular culture artifacts that can be examined as directly as possible on the audience who are used for popular texts (Wood & Helen, 2007).
As US is concerned, the term TV rating makes people think of the Nielsen Media Research that came to be as the measurement service for the television industry and the people watching the television shows. Nielsen uses the technique of statistical sampling that uses the technique to predict that outcomes as the elections (Wood & Helen, 2007). They tend to create a sample audience and then they count on how the audience views each and every program. They extrapolate the samples and then estimate the number of viewers and then estimate the entire population watching the show. To understand what they are watching and find out what people are watching, the company gets around 5000 households that agree to be a part of the representative sample for the estimation of the national ratings (Wood & Helen, 2007). There have been 99million households in the United States that has been watching TV. To find out what these people are watching they install meters that select the sample of home tracks when they watch the TV sets on the channel that are tuned to. They tend to install a black box, which is just a computer or a modem that gathers and sends the information to the company which has central computer (Whannel & Garry, 1998). The national TV rely on this meters that ensure reasonably on the accurate results that the company uses audits and the quality and regularly compares on the ratings to get the different samples and the measurement methods. Understanding on how they reach the consumers is the way the audience measurement and helps the media and the companies to make the right plans and programming for the decisions. Choosing what program to watch is another thing that make up for the planning and programing decisions by the user. Television and the way we tend to watch it, has come a long way since measuring audience stated in 1950s.
References:
Alasuutari, Pertti, ed. Rethinking the media audience: the new agenda. SAGE Publications Ltd, 1999.
Slater, Michael D., and June A. Flora. “Health lifestyles: audience segmentation analysis for public health interventions.” Health Education & Behavior 18, no. 2 (1991): 221-233.
McQuail, Denis. Audience analysis. Sage publications, 1997.
Ha, Louisa, and E. Lincoln James. “Interactivity reexamined: A baseline analysis of early business web sites.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 42, no. 4 (1998): 457-474.
Whannel, Garry. “Reading the sports media audience.” Media Sport (1998): 221-232.
Wood, Helen. “The mediated conversational floor: an interactive approach to audience reception analysis.” Media, Culture & Society 29, no. 1 (2007): 75-103.
Maibach, Edward, Connie Roser-Renouf, and Anthony Leiserowitz. “Global warming’s Six Americas 2009: an audience segmentation analysis.” (2009).
Silverstone, Roger, and Eric Hirsch, eds. Consuming technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces. Psychology Press, 1992.
