You are what your cable box says you are

Here's my more scholarly stuff. Let me know if I’m a bullshit artist.


Since the late 1940's Nielsen Media Research has tracked the popularity of television shows by having families agree to attach an electronic monitor to their TV. Families also agree to track what shows they watch in a diary. Viewers are classified by age, sex, and race. The findings are then sold to corporations who determine how to market their product during advertising blocks and to television stations who determine advertising rates. Recently an even newer development is being tested called P.P.M, or portable people meter. P.P.M meters have the ability to understand exactly how much television and radio programming a person was exposed to through an intricate system of digital sound detection. The newest models of P.P.M will be able to track the music you hear in the grocery store, the cable channel you are watching on television, and the billboards you see driving on the highway.

Apart from the mind-blowing technological feat of this device, there are serious implications to the understanding of knowledge and power within our society created by these portable people meters. In NYC when Nielsen introduced new electronic TV meters there was a barrage of criticism from FOX news heads because their shows had a huge dip in ratings. When you change the way you count, or change the constitution of knowledge, you potentially change the value of entire genres or cultural norms. Because the business of mass culture relies so heavily on the classification and cataloguing of the desires of a population, a change in the knowledge of what is popular changes the entire system of the creation of culture. This poses serious questions about the nature of popular culture. Who is actually deciding what is popular?

The advent of constant surveying, polling, and monitoring of our society's population has created a connection between the knowledge that comes from classification and the interests of businesses and corporations. These classifications have created a form of power that reaches into our individual and collective consciousness and that suppresses our ability to resist. Our understanding of who we are has been fundamentally distorted by who we are told we are by the creators of culture. Our knowledge of norms has shaped the way we live and how we act. "Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the arrogant breed who are our masters.¨(Deleuze, 181) According to Steve Morris, Arbitron C.E.O., "Every age group, every cultural group and every demographic group is in the process of getting media packaged expressly for its members.¨ America is becoming a web of data about who we are and how we behave with no real concern for our actual selves. Our classification or demographic group determines our behavior. Because we are told that those like us act a certain way, we tend to fall right into line. Are you what your cable box says you are?