Eileen meehan why we don count

While the industry long lived in an era of scarcity of audience data, today there is an overabundance. How might these new forms of algorithmic audience measurement shape the media culture we inhabit?

I have primarily begun to think about this question through the streaming service Netflix. Netflix exhibits an odd contradiction: it exhibits a range of programming about and sometimes by African Americans and other minority groups, including Dear White People , Orange is the New Black , and Narcos , but it also has a reputation among some subscribers and independent producer as insensitive and closed to minority tastes and content producers.

Among some African American subscribers, it has become a commonplace that, once they watch a single black-cast television series or film, they are suddenly inundated with every other black-cast offering on Netflix. Seemingly, the algorithm thinks that black people are only interested in black-cast content, and that everyone who watches a black-cast film or TV series must be black.

The idea that Netflix is largely insensitive to African American tastes is only one perspective, and it may well be a minority one at that. Still, at a time when the fate of cultural diversity on screen is in the hands of algorithms, the people who program them, and the people who interpret their findings, it is worth asking how they are shaping the diversity of the media content available through streaming services.

Here, I sketch out a typology of how to study the role of algorithmic audience analysis in commercial African American streaming culture, including questions of recommendations and user interface, content availability, and programming decisions.

What results is a sort of research agenda, parts of which are certainly much easier to research than others. Racial bias and exclusion in recommendation algorithms can happen at different moments in the process. However, Horowitz also found that African Americans undersubscribe to Netflix, even as they purchase more pay-per-view programming and oversubscribe to Hulu: while 57 percent of all urban viewers subscribe to Netflix, only 56 percent of African Americans do.

We're told that if you don't like what you see on TV, don't blame the industry, blame yourself. This book dispels the myth that the television industry is just giving viewers the programming they want to see and, thus, we as viewers are 'responsible' for the existence of shows like Fear Factor and yet another Survivor. In fact, Eileen Meehan explains, viewers exert no demand in the market for ratings, advertising slots, program production, or telecasting. She also counters the idea that TV programs reflect our culture directly.

Introducing us to the political economy of television, Meehan covers programming, corporate strategies, advertising, the misnomer of 'competition' among networks, and organizations that seek more industry accountability. Eileen R. Chapter 6 References.

Meehan tells it like it is! Television is unmasked in this lively, well-documented, and sharply argued text that will be savored by media students and scholars. Articles Cited by. Title Sort Sort by citations Sort by year Sort by title. Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, , Critical Studies in Media Communication 3 4 , , Smythe, , Ruthless criticism: New perspectives in US communication history, , The political economy of information, , Articles 1—20 Show more.

Help Privacy Terms. Dazzled by Disney? Rethinking Political Economy: Change and Continuity. ER Meehan Journal of Communication 43 4 , , Gendering the commodity audience: Critical media research, feminism, and political economy ER Meehan Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, ,