Flow Conference 2008: What We're All Thinking/Watching

One last thought on something that Joshua Green said at my roundtable at this year's Flow Conference: the visibility of ratings, of what we believe to be popular, is part of nation-building and imagined community building through mass media. If we see that American Idol is a highly rated program, then we’ll watch it to be part of that cultural zeitgeist and we’ll believe it to be a reflection (for better or worse, inclusively or exclusively) of what it means to be American. It occurs to me that the numbers are so much more important to all of us as viewers trying to understand what our culture is and how it thinks and what our places are in it now than they were in the past precisely because there are millions of media options today that we can all share with one another.

50 years ago, there were three networks, 5 to 20 radio stations per market, and a handful of movies at the theater at a given time. If you wanted to get an idea of what America was thinking, what its passions were, how it felt about an external threat or its future or its past, you had limited resources from which to draw from. The three networks gave you an idea of what your fellow citizens were thinking (nevermind the fact that they probably didn’t arrive on those thoughts on their own and that the cultural preoccupations on display were the preoccupations of coastal elites or what those elites imagined the public might be thinking or wanting). We had a shared consciousness. It was a shared consciousness that was forced upon us, but a shared one nonetheless.

Today, with the wealth of outlets and content available to the individual (working on some hard data w/ Russ Neuman to back this up), there is no de facto shared consciousness. That is, it is not dictated by the limits of technology and communications infrastructure and economy in the way that it was 50 years ago. And yet we still want to know what our fellow citizens (or fellow humans all over the planet) are thinking about. How do we know what they’re thinking about? Ratings. That represents the need for accurate ratings, not from the advertisers, the networks, or the creators, but from us, the viewers. Now more than ever, in a world where there is no de facto shared consciousness, we look to the ratings as a way to tell us what others are thinking and where we stand in that larger community.