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This book is the first to deal with the world composition of television ratings. It focuses on the peoplemeter, a 25 year old technology which succeeds in homogenizing very different populations and television practices. It provides a fascinating account of the production of figures on which the whole world of popular culture depends.
List of contents
Introduction; Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel PART I: INVENTING MEASUREMENT 1. The Politics of Enjoyment: Competing Audience Measurement Systems in Britain, 1950-1980; Stefan Schwarzkopf 2. Still the British Model? The BARB versus Nielsen; Marc Balnaves 3. Canada's Audience Massage: Audience Research and TV Policy Development, 1980-2010; Philip Savage and Alexandre Sévigny 4. The Monopoly that Won't Divide: France's Médiamétrie; Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel 5. Pioneering the Peoplemeter: German Public Service; Susanne Vollberg PART II: APPROPRIATING AUDIENCE FIGURES 6. Power Games: Audience Measurement as a Mediation Between Actors in India; Santanu Chakrabarti 7. Imagining Audiences in Brazil: Class, 'Race' and Gender; Esther Hamburger, Heloisa Buarque de Almeida, and Tirza Aidar 8. From Referee to Scapegoat, but still Referee: Auditel in Italy; Massimo Scaglioni 9. Domestication of Anglo-Saxon Conventions and Practices in Australia; Mark Balnaves 10. Market Requirements and Political Challenges: Russia Between Two Worlds; Elena Johansson and Sergey Davydov PART III: CONFRONTING CHANGES 11. The Role of Ratings in Scheduling. Commercial Logics in Irish Public Television; Ann-Marie Murray 12. The Local Peoplemeter, the Portable Peoplemeter, and the Unsettled Law and Policy of Audience Measurement in the US; Philip Napoli 13. Challenges of Digital Innovations: A Set-Top Box Based Approach; Katrien Berte and Tom Evens 14. Thickening Behavioral Data: New Uses of Ratings for Social Sciences; Jakob Bjur
About the author
Tirza Aidar, University of Campinas, Brazil
Mark Balnaves, University of Newcastle, Australia
Katrien Berte, Centre for Information on the Media (CIM), the Belgian Joint Industry Committee
Jakob Bjur, TNS-SIFO, Sweden
Jérôme Bourdon, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Heloisa Buarque de Almeida, University of São Paulo, Brazil
Santanu Chakrabarti, Oxfam GB
Sergey Davydov, National Research University, Russia
Tom Evens, Ghent University, Belgium
Esther Hamburger, University of São Paulo, Brazil
Elena Johansson, Södertörn University, Sweden
Cécile Méadel, Mines ParisTech, France
Ann-Marie Murray, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Philip M. Napoli, Rutgers University, USA
Philip Savage, McMaster University, Canada
Massimo Scaglioni, Università Cattolica, Milan, Italy
Stefan Schwarzkopf, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Alexandre Sévigny, MacMaster University, Canada
Susanne Vollberg, Martin-Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
Summary
This book is the first to deal with the world composition of television ratings. It focuses on the peoplemeter, a 25 year old technology which succeeds in homogenizing very different populations and television practices. It provides a fascinating account of the production of figures on which the whole world of popular culture depends.
Additional text
"This collection is a most comprehensive book on television ratings systems. It offers a remarkable breadth of case studies of nations from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. These also include a wide variety of types of measurement practices and organizational structures. Such an array offers great opportunities for comparative analyses. Just as important, the book is theoretically, analytically and critically sophisticated. It examines the various critiques of audience measurement, such as the important distinction between substantive and procedural truths and the underlying assumptions in quantification and statistics about human behaviour and social relations." - Richard Butsch, Rider University, USA
"The book is an impressive collection of chapters which together provide a wide perspective of perspectives on audiences - and to that degree the book is truly unique - that captures the systems of audience measurement ultimately based on ratings of some kind as well as the scope of ensuing challenges to audience measurement ... this book is certainly a contribution to strengthening the foundation of the field and allowing for much more advanced discussions in the future." - Media Innovations, 2015
Report
"This collection is a most comprehensive book on television ratings systems. It offers a remarkable breadth of case studies of nations from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. These also include a wide variety of types of measurement practices and organizational structures. Such an array offers great opportunities for comparative analyses. Just as important, the book is theoretically, analytically and critically sophisticated. It examines the various critiques of audience measurement, such as the important distinction between substantive and procedural truths and the underlying assumptions in quantification and statistics about human behaviour and social relations." - Richard Butsch, Rider University, USA
"The book is an impressive collection of chapters which together provide a wide perspective of perspectives on audiences - and to that degree the book is truly unique - that captures the systems of audience measurement ultimately based on ratings of some kind as well as the scope of ensuing challenges to audience measurement ... this book is certainly a contribution to strengthening the foundation of the field and allowing for much more advanced discussions in the future." - Media Innovations, 2015
