Television Audiences Across the World - by J Bourdon & C Méadel (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book is the first to deal with the world composition of television ratings. It focuses on the peoplemeter, a 25 year old technology which succeeds in homogenizing very different populations and television practices. It provides a fascinating account of the production of figures on which the whole world of popular culture depends.

Review Quotes

"This collection is a most comprehensive book on television ratings systems. It offers a remarkable breadth of case studies of nations from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. These also include a wide variety of types of measurement practices and organizational structures. Such an array offers great opportunities for comparative analyses. Just as important, the book is theoretically, analytically and critically sophisticated. It examines the various critiques of audience measurement, such as the important distinction between substantive and procedural truths and the underlying assumptions in quantification and statistics about human behaviour and social relations." - Richard Butsch, Rider University, USA

"The book is an impressive collection of chapters which together provide a wide perspective of perspectives on audiences - and to that degree the book is truly unique - that captures the systems of audience measurement ultimately based on ratings of some kind as well as the scope of ensuing challenges to audience measurement ... this book is certainly a contribution to strengthening the foundation of the field and allowing for much more advanced discussions in the future." - Media Innovations, 2015

About the Author

Tirza Aidar, University of Campinas, Brazil Mark Balnaves, University of Newcastle, Australia Katrien Berte, Centre for Information on the Media (CIM), the Belgian Joint Industry Committee Jakob Bjur, TNS-SIFO, Sweden Jérôme Bourdon, Tel Aviv University, Israel Heloisa Buarque de Almeida, University of São Paulo, Brazil Santanu Chakrabarti, Oxfam GB Sergey Davydov, National Research University, Russia Tom Evens, Ghent University, Belgium Esther Hamburger, University of São Paulo, Brazil Elena Johansson, Södertörn University, Sweden Cécile Méadel, Mines ParisTech, France Ann-Marie Murray, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland Philip M. Napoli, Rutgers University, USA Philip Savage, McMaster University, Canada Massimo Scaglioni, Università Cattolica, Milan, Italy Stefan Schwarzkopf, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Alexandre Sévigny, MacMaster University, Canada Susanne Vollberg, Martin-Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany