TV IN YOUR LIFE

How do you watch television?

Watching television can be a solitary activity or a group activity. It can allow you to be a passive couch potato, or to make active decisions about what you watch--sometimes it can encourage lively interaction with those watching along with you. What are your motivations for watching? The motivations of your friends and family? What kind of audience demand is generated by the kind of TV watching behavior familiar to you?

When you are watching alone, you probably satisfying yourself for various reasons. However, when you are watching with family, must you adjust to their tastes or reactions regarding the programming? Does this affect your motivation? Do you feel differently when watching TV with a group of like-minded friends? And if you and your date or a loved one watch together, maybe your motivations fit still another pattern.

As you read this chapter, you'll see that changing technologies affect how people watch television and the content they watch. And programming content with its advertising is often affected by the types of audiences that TV producers uncover. Sometimes programming pushes cultural boundaries; at other times it reinforces the status quo. But television content and the amount of television watching remain concerns for those interested in individual development, social change, political life, and the evolution of a democratic society.

What influences how YOU watch TV?
  1. When watching TV alone, what are your main motivations?

  2. When watching TV with family what are your main motivations?

  3. When watching TV with friends what are your main motivations?

  4. When watching TV with a date or loved one what are your main motivations?

Active Decision-Making
The widespread adoption of remote controls and VCRs has changed the way people watch television. As viewers gained more control over the time and the television content they watch, they also developed new meanings for some old words.

Audience Demand
There is no reliable approach to or theory of audience demand for programming. Audience research has primarily been designed to find out how viewers react to what is available, not to find out what viewers might design if they had the chance. Cable networks provide the range of programming that allows new areas of audience demand to emerge. Not only does cable run prime-time reruns, movies and syndicated programming, but it also produces original material. In 1993, HBO received praise for producing a movie called And the Band Played On, which was based on journalist Randy Shilts' book about early AIDS research. The broadcast networks turned down the idea because they thought it would be too controversial. As the number of cable channels proliferate, cable networks will generate larger amounts of programming to draw viewers from broadcast networks. (For more information, see page 256 of The Media in Your Life.)

Types of Audiences
With development of multiple cable channels, advertisers increasingly use television to target audiences through use of demographics and psychographics. Although traditional demographics cue advertisers, some larger audiences are bound together more by attitude than by demographics. The Discovery Channel, for example, has "different demographic groups but they share a psychographic tie that binds them together," says Chris Moseley, senior vice president of marketing and communications for Discovery. "They want information and they want to be entertained." Through research, Discovery divided its audience not merely by ages, those over-50 and those under-50, but into categories that included "scholars," "practical," and "boy's-toys." (For more information, see page 257 of The Media in Your Life.)


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