Television Audiences Across the World ― Deconstructing the Ratings Machine

This book is the first to explore the composition of television ratings in a cross-cultural, comparative manner. Using both communication history and the sociology of quantification, Television Audiences Across the World illuminates why the whole television industry, and television audiences themselves, refer to ratings as the main way to represent the television-watching public. It shows how a specific technology, the peoplemeter, has become the 'state of the art' in very different cultural contexts, including major non-Western countries. It analyses how television audience measurement succeeds in homogenizing diverse ways of watching television among different populations, creating 'apparent nations', and at times ignoring entire regions or parts of the population. The chapters in this volume discuss why television audience measurement has become the dominant model for the evaluation of popularity in the post-modern world, the true 'voice of the masses', still powerful in supposedly fragmented societies.

Jerome Bourdon is Professor at the Department of Communication, Tel Aviv University, and associate researcher at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech. A leading television historian, he also researches memory and media, and the coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Cecile Meadel is Professor of Sociology at Mines ParisTech and researcher at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (Mines-CNRS). She researches the genesis and uses of communication technologies, from broadcasting to the Internet.