| Using the making of television audiences in Taiwan as a case study, this research explores the institutional and discursive regulation of the so-called deregulated media market, with the regulation of the audience playing a vital role. I use the concept of the fictitious audience commodity to reconcile the differences between material reality (viewers' labor) and virtual reality (audience image). Viewers work but not in the commodity form of wage labor, while the audience is sold as the commodity without embodying any substantial value. The telecommunication deregulation of the 1990s is therefore interpreted as a formal step towards credit-sustained accumulation: commercial communication systems use the credibility of the fictitious audience commodity to convince industrial capitalists to exchange their advertising money for it. The audience as a fictitious commodity is overdetermined by various institutions, discourses, and technologies. Crisis management motivates the making of the audience, while changes in the transindustrial structure of broadcasting work in favor of advertisers' interests. Disciplinary power, exercised in ratings practices, gives a bodily form to the audience, which is modeled after certain dominant images of class, race, and gender in Taiwan. The discursive proliferation of television audiences through the examination has further extended power into new areas. It has created a normative image of legitimate audiences and resulted in such "abnormal" audiences as indifferent audiences, thrifty audiences, angry audiences, and "other" audiences in the gray and black markets. However, as the interplay of power and knowledge advances social controls, it also makes possible the formation of critical resistance and struggle. Viewers from different classes, sexual, and ethnic backgrounds have taken advantage of available resources, capital, and discourse to challenge the imposition of the fictitious audience commodity in various ways. As a result, Taiwan's deregulated commercial communication systems have been threatened by viewers' distrust of the normalized audience and the withdrawal of their labor power from expected audience commodities. The stability of credit as a claim on the future exploitation of viewers' labor depends upon how effectively alternative positions and collective actions are articulated and how effectively strategic integration maintains the order of power and knowledge. |
