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Interactivity is currently being celebrated as an exciting and empowering new dynamic in media production and consumption. The rush to predict and characterize new forms of interactivity between media producers and consumers has, however, obscured the ancient nature of interactivity in live media such as theater and performance art (see Dillon, Weisz), as well as the long standing and continuous role of consumer preference in the development of commercial media products (James). This essay argues - using the example of interactivity in Indonesian television programs, and emphasizing the producer’s point of view - that media researchers may be looking in the wrong direction for audience agency, while casting a myopic eye toward market forces in the producer-consumer relationship.
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Give Them What They Want
From early print capitalism to HDTV, market research has always played a role in assessing consumer preferences, from the simplest methods that may only involve comparing how many newspapers sold on a given day as compared with others, to sophisticated sampling methods, “people meters” and focus groups (Blankenship 130-156, Denzin & Lincoln). These methods are intended to assess audience consumption and preferences within various forms of mass media in a way that most benefits producers in their goal to create successful products 1. Thus, the intensity and nature of interactivity between producers and consumers of media products, particularly among private producers in market economies, had been an important area of study long before the Internet and other information technologies appeared on the scene (Vogel 174-177, Wyatt).
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Since media producers have always had an interest in monitoring audience preferences, the issue need not be framed as one of the consumer’s power to interact with producers, but rather the refinement of producers’ methods in collecting market data. The employment of interactive features - and the use of market research - by Indonesian television producers, may provide an instructive example of interactivity in its time-honored form - as a gimmick - rather than a meaningful means of exchange with media consumers.
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Interactive TV in Indonesia
My ongoing ethnographic research into the class distinction and the culture of popular television production in Indonesia has included a number of live-broadcast programs featuring segments of interaction with viewers. Interviews with producers 2 of currently produced programs have also helped me to put together a picture of earlier interactive programs in Indonesia’s short history of private television 3.
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One of the first flirtations with interactivity among Indonesian television programs came in 1995, with the introduction of AnTeve’s Gol Gol Gol, a football-themed quiz show featuring a remote controlled machine that could fire footballs at high speed. Based on letters and postcards they had sent in, viewers could be called at home on the live show and be given the opportunity to fire the football machine, which continually moved around to keep the goalie guessing, by pressing a button on their telephone handset at just the right moment.
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Interactivity has, however, been more visible on music and variety programs. Indonesian banks BNI and BCA both sponsor music programs that rely heavily on viewer requests that are phoned in live. The karaoke quiz show Laris Manis on SCTV features popular Indonesian singers who invite audience members to call in and sing their hit songs live through the telephone. An audience call-in poll is subsequently conducted to rate the viewer/singers on their performance, with prizes given out to the winners.
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Interactivity is also heavily used by a new breed of prime-time ‘infomercial’ programs that have flourished since the onset of the Asian economic crisis. Corporations such as McDonalds have closed the already indistinct gap between content and advertising with variety shows centered around the promotion of their brand. In the McDonald’s program, two attractive hosts wearing stylized uniforms feign unrelenting amusement as they call a local franchise to order delivery of the company’s food. Prizes are also given away through interactive quizzes and promotions. Western programs that have been ‘ported,’ to Indonesia, meaning reworked into a domestic form, such as recent world-hit Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, which began on the RCTI network in August 2001, also bring in interactive television formats from foreign countries with very little mediation.
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Impresario 008 is a popular variety program that features music, dance, interviews, comedy sketches and often a magic act. The hosts frequently interact with viewers who call in to make requests, ask questions of guests, and to answer occasional trivia questions for prizes. Interestingly, the program’s content is, at every stage, molded around the promotion of its primary sponsor, an international long distance telephone company whose access number happens to be 0-0-8. According to station executives, the program was actually created in a deal between the broadcasting station, RCTI, and the long distance company’s parent corporation, to which RCTI owed a great deal of money. The producers’ goal was to create a program that appeared as a normal, if relatively high-brow, variety program, which at the same time persistently promoted the sponsor’s service. Their solutions included an emphasis on international music acts, interviews with foreigners, and frequent on-air international telephone calls to often unsuspecting friends of the program’s guests.
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In all these programs, the role of interactivity is not one of reshaping the form or content of the program. To the extent that it can be deemed interaction between producers and consumers of the media products, the result is not innovative or yielding of agency, but is rather intended as a consumptive value for the greater audience that does not participate. Helmy Yahya, who is often referred to as the game show king of Indonesia, is open about his borrowing from Western, and particularly American, sources in creating formats for quiz and variety shows, however he claimed that Indonesian audiences are particularly intrigued by interactivity. Because of this, nearly all of his current twelve programs feature some form of interaction with viewers, usually via telephone. As in his hit Indosiar program Siapa Brani?, which he also co-hosts, interactivity segments frequently build on one another throughout the program, requiring that viewers watch from beginning to end to have a chance at the larger, final prize.
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Of course interactivity is not limited to entertainment programs; the political instability and economic crisis of the late 1990s brought with it a flurry of new talk shows in which callers could ask questions of politicians, academics, clerics and other experts. While these programs appealed to the wealthiest class of Indonesians, they were not generally successful with mass audiences, and their prevalence has steadily declined since their 1998 heyday 4.
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The Producer’s Point of View
In my interviews with producers of quiz and variety shows 5, two strong reasons for their use of interactivity emerged. Firstly, that it was a popular trend in Indonesian television, and that therefore their programs would appear behind the times without interactive elements. Secondly, several producers saw interactivity as a means of creating a sense of participation and consequently ownership among viewers. It was widely believed that this feeling of being part of the show kept viewers coming back. Though only a minute fraction of spectators would ever have an interaction with the program, the sense that such interaction was possible led audiences to believe that their relationship to the media product was intimate. Most producers considered interactive segments one gimmick among many that they employed to grab viewers’ attention, domesticate foreign formats, and provide ‘something for everyone,’ in the interest of garnering higher ratings among targeted audiences.
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At the same time, producers readily admitted that viewer participation was highly regulated, being restricted to the various confines of the program’s format. Callers who strayed from the substance or spirit of their role were quickly corrected or dismissed. Home participants in quiz shows were also screened by production staff, who tended to favor articulate, lighthearted, and responsive viewers who were well acquainted with the program’s format. Even in political talk shows, callers were screened for politeness, and their questions for ‘appropriateness’. In essence, viewer-participants were selected for their ability to maintain the producer’s vision of the media product.
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The power of audiences to substantively influence television content in Indonesia does not appear to derive from the interactivity commonly incorporated into programs. Instead, viewer preferences are monitored through conventional market research, including television ratings, focus groups, and private interviews. These methods allow stations and producers to employ statistical sampling techniques that ensure feedback is more representative of the audience segment(s) they are targeting. This is in stark contrast to the self-selection involved in interactive programs, which provide input only from a sample of viewers that is skewed by a variety of social, economic and regional factors.
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Interactivity as gimmick is apparent well beyond the medium of television (Barkin & Stone). As emerging media technologies appear to transcend conventional relationships between producers and consumers, it will be increasingly important for academics to temper the prevailing, ebullient futurism with a judicious dose of political economy. This is meant not pessimistically, but as a concession to the perspectives of real-world media producers, whose varying interests and influences are only beginning to be explored through ethnographic research (e.g. Dornfeld, Michaels, Spitulnik).
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15 | | Notes
1 The term ‘successful’ may have a variety of meanings; in the Indonesian television industry, producers are most concerned with ratings and revenue: the first indicating a program’s overall viewership among audiences over five years old, as assessed by A.C. Nielsen, and the second indicating the multifarious calculation of a program’s net profitability, which may depend more on popularity with particular target audiences, as well as qualitative factors that make programs appealing to advertisers.
2 I use the term ‘producers’ in a general sense, to indicate that group of people responsible for the production of a given program, and not only the person(s) who received the ‘producer’ title credit. Specific production roles such as director, writer, actor or producer will be specifically indicated, when appropriate.
3 Private television broadcast did not begin in Indonesia until 1989, when Rajawali Citra Televisi Indonesia (RCTI) began limited broadcasting in Jakarta.
4 All references to the viewership or popularity of a television program are based on ratings data I have received from A.C. Nielsen, the only company that attempts to calculate overall television viewership in Indonesia.
5 All interviews referenced took place between October 2000 and September 2001, in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
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16 | | Works Cited
Barkin, Gareth & Glenn Davis Stone. “Blurring the Lines and Moving the Camera: The Beginnings of Web-Based Scholarship in Anthropology” Social Science Computer Review 18.2: April, 2000. 125-132.
Blankenship, Albert Breneman. State of the art marketing research. Chicago: NTC Business Books, 1993.
Denzin, Norman K. and Yvonna S. Lincoln. “The discipline and practice of qualitative research” in Handbook of qualitative research, Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, editors. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2000.
Dillon, Janette. Theatre, court and city, 1595-1610 . Cambridge, UK; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Dornfeld, Barry. Producing public television, producing public culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Spitulnik, Debra. Mediating communities: nation, locality, and public moralities in Zambian radio broadcasting. PhD Thesis. University of Chicago, 1993.
Vogel, Harold L. Entertainment industry economics: a guide for financial analysis. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Weisz, Gabriel. “Subliminal Body: Shamanism, Ancient Theater, and Ethnodrama” in Primitivism and identity in Latin America : essays on art, literature, and culture. Edited by Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2000: 209-220.
Wyatt, Justin. High concept: movies and marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
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17 | | Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Gareth Barkin. "Oldest Trick in the Book: Interactivity and Market Interests in Indonesian Television" M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01. [your date of access] <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/gbarkin.html>.
Chicago style:
Gareth Barkin, "Oldest Trick in the Book: Interactivity and Market Interests in Indonesian Television," M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/gbarkin.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Gareth Barkin. (2001) Oldest Trick in the Book: Interactivity and Market Interests in Indonesian Television. M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01. <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/gbarkin.html> ([your date of access]). | |
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