Zuschauerdaten und Demokratie.: Das Wissen der empirischen Zuschauerforschung und mediale Selbstbeschreibungen in der Bundesrepublik der siebziger Jahre

Abstract

Audience Research, TV-viewers and the discourse on the West German Society of the 1970s as a participative democracy

Audience research in West Germany in the 1970s was massively influenced by a transfer of research methods and techniques from Britain and the US, leading to manifold transnational ties between institutions in the field of media research. The systematic study of TV-audiences, of their composition as well as their actual behaviour, was no exception from this rule. This paper investigates the function that this kind of data had for the West German society of the 1970s and argues that the knowledge produced – for example in the so-called time budget studies – was not just gaining significance as it adapted established research methods. Neither did the knowledge about the West German TV-viewer become a reference for professional debates alone. Instead, the statistics about audiences turned into a matrix for performative and discoursive negotiations of the West German society as a democratic and participatory community.