The Study of Television Audiences

With the advancement of technology also came the advancement in television programming. Instead of the big three networks which dominated most television viewers’ homes for years, we are all now grateful to have cable which provides us with hundreds of channels and programs to choose from. How often do we watch TV and what are our perceptions of the shows we watch are just some of the questions Professor Yuan answered when conducting her research on the study of television audiences on the macro level.

In Prof. Yuan’s lecture she mentioned how her research showed people who watched TV the most developed this distorted view of the world as a violent and dangerous place and this is better known as the scary world theory. In class we learned about the Pygmalion effect, which is when one person’s expectation of another person’s behavior can become that person’s reality, and the scary world theory is an example of that self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, if an individual watches enough violent shows and every program they watch tends to portray minorities as the criminals or bad guys, whenever you leave your home and you encounter a minority, you will associate them with the criminals in the program you watched on TV and believe they are or will commit some act of violence. Viewers that fall under the category of the scary world theory tend to have a problem distinguishing between what happens in the real world and what happens on the television shows they watch. This is also one of the many ways that people develop stereotypes about groups of individuals. Some people will tend to associate what they see on TV as a representation of that group as a whole, and begin to act on those beliefs.

The scary world theory is a pretty fascinating one to me. If as Prof. Yuan stated, television viewers are free agents and the shows they watch are their preference, then why continue to view programs that affect your perception of reality. One might think that if the viewers insist on watching a certain program, even if it leads them to having a distorted view of real life, that it’s a result of audience loyalty and they love watching the show. Yet audience loyalty seems to be a result of framing by the networks. If ratings show that these types of programs result in the highest percentage of viewers, you would reasonably expect that networks would center their programming on this, thus creating a ripple effect in audiences viewing that leads to them developing the “scary world” mentality. In studying television audiences I think that it would be interesting to see how much of a role network framing contributes to the idea of audience loyalty and the scary world theory.