9
ratings. After all, unless we adopt a strictly elitist view of quality (linked up with high
culture), a relevant and major standard for pluralist, quality programming is that
viewers really enjoy watching a certain program. To express the diversity of and
disagreement about aesthetic standards and values, the notion of ‘aesthetic
pluralism’, coined by Herbert Gans (1999), is particularly useful. Those who enjoy a
certain program are part of what I would like to call, again inspired by Gans (1999), a
‘taste community’.
7
This does not automatically imply that program makers and
audience must belong to the same taste community in order to give them real
pleasure. It is not important that makers love their program; it is important, though,
that makers ‘love’ their audience. As one of our interviewees, an independent
producer, told us:
Colonel Parker, the manager of Elvis Presley, always said to him
that during a performance he should not ‘look for his kid, but at the
audience’. When Elvis Presley did a show, he always looked a lot at
the audience. I have started doing it myself as well. What do they
like about a program, or what do they not like about it? Are they
having a good time? Which joke makes them laugh and which
doesn’t? This requires an huge interest in the audience. This love is
crucial to me.
This three-dimensional audience-orientedness can be schematically depicted as
follows:
Table 1. Three ways of understanding audience-orientedness
Who is your audience?
CITIZEN
‘ENJOYER’
CONSUMER
advertiser
What do you focus on?
♦
Address them as
socially committed
♦
Making your
audience aware
♦
Serving taste
communities
♦
Caring for your
audience
♦
Pleasing advertisers
♦
Creating markets
(shoppers 19-49,
youths)
How do you recognize
program quality?
♦
Greater social /
democratic
involvement with the
audience
♦
Fans and genre
buffs enjoy the
program
♦
Program is popular
with the targeted
viewer group
What do you want to
give to your audience?
♦
Community feeling:
sense of belonging to
specific (national,
regional, cultural)
identity
♦
Educating &
informing audience
♦
Rendering visible
democratic culture
♦
Visual pleasure
♦
Enthrall your
audience
♦
Call on viewers’
sense of playfulness
♦
Imagining a better
world and a better
humanity
♦
Consumerism
♦
Conviction that one
can fulfill one’s needs
by buying goods
© ASCoR icm 4-7-02
Convention