Meme Counters

Last Sunday's New York Times magazine had an article about some boardroom-shaking technological innovations in the field of broadcast ratings. The author Jon Gertner suggests that if you "change the way you measure America's culture consumption...you change America's culture business. And maybe even the culture itself. Change the way you count, and potentially you change the comparative value of entire genres as well as entire demographic segments."

When the US charts started incorporating sales data back in 1991, backwoods and backstreet beats like country and hip-hop were revealed to be more popular than the suits had previously imagined. This week in the UK, the intention to incorporate download statistics in our own charts was announced, and again the suspicion is that careers and lifestyles will be affected by this methodological switch.

Gertner's article also briefly alludes to the fear that his nation is "becoming weightless, an agglomeration of data about who we are and how we behave that seems to have more substance (and certainly more financial value) than our actual selves."

Such anxieties have considerable pedigree. Jorge Luis Borges told a famous tale about a map "so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory" it represents. The people of the Empire whose cartographers produced this marvel end up relating more to the map than the territory beneath. Baudrillard found this story very useful for illustrating his concept of simulation - the process whereby representations of things come to supecede the things being represented. "The death of the Real".

Borges was an Idealist, and therefore might be said to have believed that map and territory are interchangeable in a meaningful way. I'm not so sure about this. In an early post on this blog I outlined my suspicion that a granular approach to media measurement does indeed resemble the process by which coffee is freeze-dried and turned into granules before water and the suggestion of more or less accurate correspondence to the original are added back and the consumption begins.

In yesterday's post, I borrowed from John Berger to suggest that any cultural activity that derives purely and simply from economic motivations is usually less valuable (financially as well as creatively), than that which sets about to transcend them. There are powerful, densely-packed 'premium' meanings in top tier output that can't really be approached and understood in the same way as the hack stuff. Thus a perfect map created anywhere inside the territory, will never be anything other than a projection of it, because the transcendent qualities of the original channel into other less calculable and representable dimensions.

Anyway, what are these new bits of kit that the meme counters are getting excited about?

The PPM or Personal People Meter by Arbitron is a device worn by volunteers which monitors any media they hear, or at least any media featuring a psychoacoustically-masked signal encoded at a frequency just below the transmitted sound. Unlike ratings measurement the PPM can record when the wearer has been within earshot of media in hospitals, hotels and in the workplace. It can handle the time-shifting effects associated with devices like TiVo and it knows when the wearer leaves the room during a commercial break. By focussing on the audible signal as opposed to the emitting device, PPM is better placed to cope with the rapidly diversifying "zoo" of digital media. Apparently it won't freak out your pets either.

Arbitron and VNU (Nielsen's parent company) are collaborating on Project Apollo which will track 70,000 PPM volunteers across the USA identifying all the advertisements and messages these people see, hear, read, or simply hang around, and mapping them onto the purchases they subsequently (I think) make. Gertner observes: "You could say it's a massive scientific trial of cause (marketing) and effect (buying). Or you could say with some trepidation that it's about creating a more perfect, more efficient consumer society."