Cécile Méadel, Quantifier le public. Histoire des mesures d’audience de la radio et de la television, Economica, 2010
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17103
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Paola Pallavicini
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Cécile Méadel, Quantify the public. History of audience measures of radio and television, Economica, 2010
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Book Reviews
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2013-07-12
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Paola Pallavicini
2013/07/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17103
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University of Torino
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Cécile Méadel, Quantify the public. History of audience measures of radio and television, Economica, 2010
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Book Review                                                                207
panding on the standardization processes from various points of view,
processes that are an integral part of innovation and, as is well-known, a
crucial element of STS.
    It is also worth mentioning the special attention given to social tech-
nologies of standardization, such as law, governance and bioethics, espe-
cially when the authors argue that their success in stabilizing social order
“is based mostly on a relatively successful standardization. It distances
itself from pinning common goals and instead creates procedures that
permit advances on many different paths” (p. 82).
    This reflection offered by Nowotny and Testa is full of meaningful
passages like those cited above and many other interesting ideas that
make it a dense and stimulating reading, even for non-specialized audi-
ences. Another merit not to be underestimated.

References
Bloor, D. (1976) Knowledge and Social Imagery, London and Chicago, The Uni-
   versity of Chicago Press.
Latour, B. (1999) Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA, Har-
   vard University Press.
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Cécile Méadel
Quantifier le public. Histoire des mesures d’audience de la radio et de la
television [Quantify the public. History of audience measures of ra-
dio and television]
Paris, Economica, 2010, pp. 283
    !
Paola Pallavicini, University of Torino
    !
    The French scholar Cécile Mèadel presents in this volume a first in-
terpretative synthesis of over twenty years research work on the history of
audience measurement in the French broadcasting system. Precious for
many aspects, this study represents in some way the missing link between
media studies and socio-technical studies, and a very useful key for media
researchers to access the field of techno-science.
    Méadel defines the audience measurement in the broadcasting field as
a typical example of performative device (“object techniques per-
formatif”). While this may appear as a normal statement in the young
field of socio-technical studies, such is not in the field of media and
communication studies, which founded their own theoretical apparatus
208                                                            Tecnoscienza - 4(1)

exactly on a clear and radical separation between technical and social di-
mensions in the media action, as we can see in the definition of "medi-
um" still dominant today: “a medium is a tool to transfer contents".
    By pointing out the action of transferring contents, this tradition has
been able to assimilate into a single concept technical tools radically dif-
ferent in their technical basis. So it was, for example, for the key concept
of “massmedia”, shaped through the occultation of the technical basis of
print, cinema, radio and television. And so it is still today for its ambigu-
ous present form, deprived of the prefix "mass", which emerged histori-
cally, not surprisingly, along with the radical restructuring of the media
system triggered by the Internet development in the mid-Nineties.
    Focusing on audience measurement, Cécile Méadel's study enters in
one of the key issues in the recent social history of the television system
(not just of the French one) and crosses it with new questions and inter-
pretations, opening the possibility of a deep revision of the theoretical
background of media history, as well as of our current comprehension of
the media system.
    To consider audience measurement as a performative device – as
Cécile Méadel suggests - implies that it cannot be reduced to a simple set
of technical, methodological, and theoretical tools (as it is in the long last-
ing tradition of Marketing and Public Opinion studies, well known to
media scholars), nor to a cultural practice, translated in a “pow-
er/knowledge device”, as in Ien Ang’s innovative proposal (Desperately
Seeking the Audience, Routledge, 1991). Rather it implies to accept that
audience measurement is something more than their synthesis and that its
action transforms the medium as a whole.
    As a typical socio-technical object, audience measurement is a per-
formative device based on a principle of quantification, which is able to
give an intelligible form to reality and by which reality is transformed at
the same time, through the diffusion and uses of its output data. Today
"share" and "rating" are, at the same time, concepts and core data in our
television culture: they are basic references not only in our understanding
of the social functioning of radio and television, but even in their process-
es of production and consumption.
    On this basis Méadel aims to understand how the quantification prin-
ciple, by means of audience measurement, has emerged historically as the
dominant pattern in the work of media production. The history of audi-
ence measurement assumes in this perspective a shift toward genealogy:
not a linear development of techniques and theories, marked by progres-
sive success and improvements, but a continuous change in the mix of
actors, networks, techniques, tools, goals, results, which identify meas-
urement as a process and which define, time by time, its categories, ob-
jects, rules, and procedures.
    In the opening chapters Méadel analyzes the genesis and development
of the first devices used by French radio broadcasters in the Thirties to
know, understand and qualify their public; and their extension to the tel-
Book Review                                                                209
evision viewership in the early Fifties.
    Méadel notices that, until the end of the Forties, French broadcasters
made use of non-statistical mediators to know and represent their audi-
ence: broadcasters collected and produced a knowledge about their lis-
teners, that did not need to be "objectified". Listeners' letters, their par-
ticipation in live programs, the activities of their associations, their advice
and opinions on the programs, were considered by French broadcasters
as opportunities for knowing their audience: they all concurred to give
form to an idea of the radio audience that was negotiated with the audi-
ence itself.
    At the debut of television system, the French national broadcasting
organization assumed a more centralized model that implied a redefini-
tion of the relationship between broadcasters and their audience. This
new social and technical context gave form to a double process: it
changed the broadcasters needs about their knowledge of the audience
and it extended the perceived social relevance of radio-television audi-
ence, up to identify it with the whole nation. In France, like in the U.S.,
the radio system had rooted in the amateur radio operators' local com-
munities: the television viewer was, instead, a radically new subject, with a
strong national identity but de-localized (in respect to the broadcaster)
and with no roots in previous cultures or practices.
    Cécile Méadel identifies in this new socio-technical configuration of
broadcasting (larger, centrally structured, and spread throughout the
country), the new context in which new interests in audience measure-
ment emerged, brought by new subjects external to the broadcasting sys-
tem: public administration, governmental offices, advertising agencies
and advertisers. All of them started to perceive the growth of broadcast-
ing audience as an issue of more general and multifaceted relevance, both
politic and economic. The first French television audience surveys were
the answer to their new questions.
    Méadel considers this change in the actors interested in audience
measurement, as a key to understand how and why the audience surveys
cannot be considered as a simple and linear improvement of previous
“qualitative” devices. Although they are commonly regarded by media
studies as a relevant step toward a more “scientific” approach in audience
research, they caused a drastic reduction intypical aspects of scientific re-
search, like the wide range of questions and interpretative hypothesis, or
the experimentation in new methodologies.
    Early audience surveys - ambiguous hybrid, cross between the nation-
al statistic culture and the international marketing culture - had their own
techniques, which included a range of data collection tools (personal in-
terviews, diaries and questionnaires), as well as methodological and theo-
retical assumptions connected to them.
    Méadel brings the focus of her historical analysis on the combined
and simultaneous change which invested their technical apparatus to-
gether with the group of subjects interested in its management. She is
210                                                          Tecnoscienza - 4(1)

able to show that audience survey gained its stable and homogeneous his-
torical form, during over thirty years, because of the continuous negotia-
tion among actors involved in its production, rather than its scientific co-
herence (which was often questioned).
    Looking for temporary accords between their diverging interests and
heterogeneous needs, these actors found in audience surveys an effective
tool to transform television audience in an analytical entity: stable, homo-
geneous and quantifiable. Due to this new goal, the same act of "watching
tv" (which identified the tv viewers) lost the participative components
that had been peculiar to the concept in previous un-quantitative audi-
ence research, giving it a more abstract status, based on generic and com-
parable elements.
    In this way the quantification principle becomes, historically, the cor-
nerstone of the measurement device: distant from the traditional common
sense which identifies quantification and objectification, as well from the
constructivist assumptions which reduce quantification to a form of rep-
resentation: here it is the “operational core” of the black box of audience
measurement. "Quantification", Méadel says, “is a thin articulation be-
tween very different and heterogeneous actors and actions, compelled to
work in the greatest instability, but kept close by the black box of meas-
urement" (p. 8).
    The last chapters of the book explore the emergence of the "audime-
ter" device in the French audience measurement system.
    Traditional media studies still consider the audimeter as such as a
“simple” and powerful mechanical instrument that replaced humans in
the data collection for audience surveys. Away from the analytical frame
of the socio-technical approach, this device is usually regarded, at the
same time, as the “technical solution" to human errors in the data collec-
tion (made by either viewers or interviewers), and as the “cause” of the
rapid and global diffusion of a unique and coherent audience survey
method, governed by the advertising market and able to force the entire
television programming to its own needs.
    In Cécile Méadel's interpretation, instead, the “audimeter machine” is
just one of the many components in the process of historical transfor-
mation of audience measurement as a whole, which took place in the
Eighties, with the end of public broadcasting monopoly and the reorgani-
zation of the national television system. This was a change which invested
the entire black box, in its analytic tools, techniques, and network of ac-
tors. In this context audimeter becomes the unique reference system,
which produces data not only for the television market goals, but also for
the governmental regulatory activity on the broadcasting system, (some-
thing like the price indexes or the national statistics produced by IN-
SEE). The objectification of audience measurement produced by its entry
in the black box was, therefore, something more complex than a simple
effect of the "mechanization" of the device: it was rather the effect of a
new social and institutional positioning of the device itself.
