Audience Responses To Media Diversification

Coping With Plenty

Lee B. Becker, Klaus Schoenbach, Lee B. Becker, Klaus Schoenbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136696367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 1989. This volume holds a collection of papers to support a project looking at media content in the 1980s and the anticipation of audience behaviours. Some where presented at the conference of the World Association for Public Opinion Research in Montreux, Switzerland in 1987.

1

When Media Content Diversifies: Anticipating Audience Behaviors

Lee B. Becker

The Ohio State University

Klaus Schoenbach

Academy for Music and Theater, Hannover

The 1980s have seen significant changes in the media environments of many Western societies. New delivery technologies or new uses of old technologies have altered the media landscape. New organizations have developed in competition with the old, and the old have employed various strategies of either defense or adaptation.

Although the technologies have played different roles in the various Western societies due to historical and legal constraints placed on them, the common outcome has been an increase in the options available to audience members. Although the choices have not always been those hoped for by critics, or possibly even desired by audiences, the thrust toward content diversification in at least a limited form has been the common denominator in the Western societies.

Communication historians may look back on the 1980s as a critical time in the development of media systems. Cable television, expanded forms of broadcast television, videocassette recorders (VCRs), direct broadcast satellites, viewdata, and teletext all entered into competition with the existing media for attention, time, space, and money. Whether the new media should be allowed to and would be able to obtain those resources was one of the major questions. Where the resources would come from was another.

THE RESEARCH PROJECT AND THE BOOK

This project began with that simple observation of change. The established ways of doing things were under challenge in the 1980s. In the United States, for example, television programming was proliferating, and the three broadcast television networks, which once held a stranglehold on the flow of broadcast audiovisual materials, were under serious challenge. Television was becoming “pay” television. The vast media empires and smaller, entrepreneurial companies were experimenting with new ways of delivering new materials to the home. In Europe, cable led to increased pressure for expansion of television, and experimentation with viewdata (videotext) and teletext was even more advanced than in the United States, perhaps because the governments or the postal and telephone authorities were putting lots of money into efforts to gain or hold leads in the prophesied communications revolution. Even more importantly, there was significant discussion about dissolving national broadcast media systems that had been protected from domestic and foreign competition. The new means of message distribution did not respect borders as neatly as did the old. The video recorder filled the shelves of stores, and video rental shops were appearing on every corner.

In the political debate, the commercial dialogue, the writings in the popular press, and in academic circles, much was speculated about audience responses to these changes in the media landscape. Some observers said the audiences would be corrupted by the invasion of commercial and culturally debasing content, often coming from elsewhere (usually from the United States). Europeans particularly would be drawn from the uplifting materials of their own media systems to the degrading materials of the marketplace. But audiences, so the alternative (largely commercial, often American) voice would say, would finally get a chance to decide for themselves what kinds of contents they wanted. True democracy would come to the media environment and the public would rejoice in it.

Data to support either of these positions, or any of their variants (generally more articulately presented than heretofore), rarely were available in a single location. The goal of the project we describe here was to assemble evidence, although not necessarily to referee among these various perspectives. Not everyone engaged in the dialogue, of course, has felt a need for facts or is likely to find the data that we have assembled valuable to them. It remains our bias, we clearly admit, that understanding audience reactions to media content diversification resulting from the new media is essential for this debate. We also feel that meaningful responses can be adequately measured. The data assembled here are not believed to be definitive and clearly should not be treated as ends in themselves. The goal of the project, however, was data-based interpretation and evaluation.

To that end, we sought to assemble a group of researchers who either currently were engaged in research relevant to our goal or had, in the past, done work pertaining to it. We were aware of some of these individuals. Others became known to us as we talked with colleagues and pursued leads given to us.

We decided early in the project to limit the focus of our search in a very significant way: We only wanted to examine audience responses to media content diversification in societies with Western media systems and cultures. By this we meant capitalistic societies with traditions of media freedom. But we also only wanted to examine societies with cultures having mostly common principles in the area of media habits, orientations to entertainment, and leisure in general.

Among the Western countries, we identified those that had experienced at least some minimal level of change in media content. We never felt that it would be possible to be exhaustive even within this framework, and we did not seek one report from each country fitting our classification. Rather, we sought reports from countries where we knew some information was available and where we felt that something new could be learned by the type of change being experienced. Precise information on media content change in these societies, unfortunately, was not readily available. As a result, we had to make estimates based on our knowledge of changes taking place in the media system. We then inferred that these system changes should produce content change and diversification. Regardless, in many countries it became difficult to select from among the many researchers doing relevant work; in others, it was a matter of identifying the few. The evidence that some of our researchers were able to assemble is quite impressive. In other cases, the data were quite limited.

Because of some good planning and some good fortune, we ended with 11 countries studied by 14 different researchers or teams of researchers. The countries ranged from as far north as Sweden to as far south as New Zealand, and from as large as the United States and Australia to as small as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Included were countries experiencing a great deal of structural change and those with, at the point of writing, relatively little. The individual reports reflect to a considerable extent the concerns and issues facing the country being discussed.

The countries studied vary along two rather important dimensions. The first dimension is the amount of new types of material that has become available and the amount of choice within those types. By this we mean (a) that fairly significant proportions of the people have access to media delivery systems that (b) offer large numbers of programming or content options. The second dimension is probably more important and clearly more complex: the diversity of that material. The complexity results from the fact that there is very little agreement about what is true diversity in content. For instance, some critics hold that increased entertainment offerings result in more of the same, not diversity, whereas others argue that an increased number of choices—even within the entertainment classification—is a form of diversity. Some go even further and argue that all products of capitalistic media systems are without real distinction. Despite these differences of opinion about the meaning of diversity, there is much agreement that a country receiving materials from other cultures is experiencing some form of content diversification. Our countries vary significantly in that regard.

When we crossed these dimensions and roughly located the countries, we came up with four clusters. The first consisted of countries with relatively little new content to date but most of that content coming from outside. We placed New Zealand, Australia, and Sweden in that category, although there were clear differences even among them. In the contrasting cluster was the United States, a country with a great deal of new content but comparatively little of it coming from outside the culture. In between were two clusters, one made up of Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and West Germany, the other including Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The former cluster had been experiencing relatively large amounts of new content, comparatively little of which came from outside. The latter were receiving a somewhat lesser amount of new material, most of which came from outside.

Any such classification scheme is open to challenge. For example, one can note that there are many isolated communities in the United States (where three quarters of the households are passed by cable) in which there is little diversity, certainly less than in an urban center in Australia. And in most of our countries, including the United States, those households not passed by cable have fewer television choices than almost all Belgian or Dutch households. It remains the case nonetheless that most American households at this writing have more content options open to them than the typical household in the other countries studied. In addition, the classification scheme tried to anticipate change expected to occur in the countries under examination. For example, the German research site examined in this volume is one of those with a prototypical cable system offering a large amount of content. Before the end of the 1980s, about half of the households in West Germany will have the same access to cable. Thus, Germany was classified according to the community studied rather than the objective situation in the middle of the 1980s.

Nonetheless, the tentative nature of this scheme is worth reinforcing. As we have noted heretofore, there are several different ways of classifying countries. The focus here was on content differences (amount and diversity). Other dimensions clearly exist. Even where content diversity is concerned there are options not taken. The use of amount of foreign programming as our sole index of diversity was reasonable, although not exhaustive.

MEDIA, MASS MEDIA, AND “NEW MEDIA”

In this book, the term media is defined as all the ways human beings use to convey symbols to one another—from language to telefax machines. “Mass media”, then, are regarded as a specific kind of media. They are technical instruments spreading symbols to a potentially unlimited audience—an audience that, for instance, does not have to gather in one place and at one time (Maletzke, 1963). Mass media range from handwritten newsletters to television.

An often-used term, new media, needs further clarification: How “new” must a “new medium” be? First of all, we have to take into account that there are different perceptions of what is “new” and what is not. The mass medium of cable television, for example, may not be considered a “new” medium by its audience. It could simply be viewed as more “plain old television.” The same may apply to what the audience thinks of satellite television. This audience may, however, regard the VCR as something “new,” although media experts would probably call the use of VCRs a way to delay the watching of television shows. So, in communication research, VCRs, video discs, and compact discs (CDs) are often only called “new storage media.”

A veritable “new mass medium,” for some experts, has to address new senses or new combinations of senses. It has to use new channels of information. In that definition, for instance, radio was “new” because it was the first mass medium to transmit live sounds as opposed to the earlier ones that either had to be read (newspapers, magazines) or contained only sound that had been recorded some time before (records). FM or stereo radio then would be only an improvement of what is still the mass medium of radio.

From the standpoint of the industry, on the other hand, everything may be “new” that requires new production lines—CDs, for instance. Although, for media experts, CDs may still be nothing but records, only with less background noise.

In this book, we use a pragmatic definition of “new media.” The media are “new” for us if they are recent additions to the electronic mass media system, such as cable broadcasting, satellite broadcasting, videocassette recorders, teletext, and viewdata. We also consider as “new” the addition of terrestrial radio and television stations or the significant expansion of broadcast time (such as the introduction of “breakfast television”) when those additions produce radical departures from tradition. The introduction of local radio in Germany would be another such example. In other words, we focus on new developments in the electronic distribution of materials to a potentially unlimited audience. We do not deal with new print magazines, for instance, and we do not cover new means of individual communication, such as home computers, video telephones, and telefax.

EARLIER PERIODS OF CHANGE IN THE MEDIA ENVIRONMENT

The 1980s were certainly dramatic in the amount of media change taking place. But they were not unique. In fact, the media environments of Western societies have never been static over long periods of time. Rather, they have experienced major changes on at least three separate occasions in the past. The first was the introduction of the printed press. The second occurred with the introduction of radio. The third resulted from the introduction of television.

In 1608-1609, the first organs of the printed press—two weekly newspapers in Germany—entered a system of social communication that had been defined mainly by three ways of message transportation: letters, books, and the spoken word (e.g., Groth, 1928). The earliest source of information about people and events outside one’s own village or town were the oral reports of travellers—traders, soldiers, pilgrims, and troubadours.

But early on, since organized trade had become important, business people had written letters to their companies, families, and friends that had also served as newsletters. For example, the employees of the Augsburg Fugger Company, via their letters in the 1400s and the 1500s from all over the world, kept the people at home posted as to what was going on—particularly in terms of events restricting trade, such as wars or new customs regulations. Those letters often went through many hands and thus resembled handwritten newspapers. As soon as printing with flexible letters was invented in Europe, leaflets became another source of both information and opinion about the world. And books were spreading knowledge and ideas.

Both oral and handwritten reports, as well as printed leaflets, however, were fairly irregular and often not very timely sources of what was going on in other parts of one’s country or the world. Books, in that respect, from the start were not supposed to be means of timely information. Their purposes were education, enlightenment, and entertainment.

For the audience, printed newspapers were superior to those older mass media both in terms of their timeliness and the regularity of their appearance. They began to take over from oral stories, letters, and leaflets the functions that they could better serve: providing a potentially large audience with more and more up-to-date and regular information. The potential audience consisted of those who could either pay for a newspaper or otherwise had access to it. The older mass media did not disappear because of the newspapers, but they were somewhat reduced in what tasks they had to fulfill. Oral stories could focus more on entertainment. Letters increasingly became a means of transmitting private messages from one person, group, or institution to another. Leaflets did not have...