Saturday, January 3, 2009: 3:10 PM
New York Ballroom East (Sheraton New York)
This presentation explores how audience research, media markets, and the introduction of television into West German households during the 1950s changed leisure practices and evoked new "social-scientific" understandings of the audience. The "seductive powers" of television worried and fascinated West Germans, as new fan groups lionized shows and actors. Television shows were popular, according to critics and fans alike, because they brought extraordinary events as well as the small pains and pleasures of everyday life "skin close."
Broadcast audiences were elective: certain people preferred particular shows. Their choices were also the product of marketing tactics and audience research. Viewers learned about television through program guides and fanzines that advertised and amplified the messages in the shows themselves. "American-style" audience research recorded viewer preferences, probed television's social and psychological affects, and mapped everyday viewing habits. The 1950s "family audience" emerged out of a dialectical relationship between media products, marketing research, and personal preference. If this system valorized the notion of individual choice in a liberal market economy, it also channeled these choices.
The "Schölermann Family," West Germany's first family situation comedy, exemplifies this process. The show dramatized the intimate dilemmas of family life. Because of its "honesty" in describing everyday life, it was immensely popular in the late 1950s. As participation in public forms of entertainment declined precipitously, "Schölermann" viewers joined an electronic neighborhood, a "virtual" or imagined fan community. They shared the same media text and were brought together without leaving the privacy of their own home. West German television created a family audience, not just by building new fan groups and restructuring the use of leisure time. TV offered both a mirror and a model of a comforting middle-class lifestyle that reinforced newly normative ideals of privacy, gender roles, and family life.
Broadcast audiences were elective: certain people preferred particular shows. Their choices were also the product of marketing tactics and audience research. Viewers learned about television through program guides and fanzines that advertised and amplified the messages in the shows themselves. "American-style" audience research recorded viewer preferences, probed television's social and psychological affects, and mapped everyday viewing habits. The 1950s "family audience" emerged out of a dialectical relationship between media products, marketing research, and personal preference. If this system valorized the notion of individual choice in a liberal market economy, it also channeled these choices.
The "Schölermann Family," West Germany's first family situation comedy, exemplifies this process. The show dramatized the intimate dilemmas of family life. Because of its "honesty" in describing everyday life, it was immensely popular in the late 1950s. As participation in public forms of entertainment declined precipitously, "Schölermann" viewers joined an electronic neighborhood, a "virtual" or imagined fan community. They shared the same media text and were brought together without leaving the privacy of their own home. West German television created a family audience, not just by building new fan groups and restructuring the use of leisure time. TV offered both a mirror and a model of a comforting middle-class lifestyle that reinforced newly normative ideals of privacy, gender roles, and family life.