“Television Ratings: From Audimeter to Big Data” is a recuperative history of television ratings that examines audience measurement technologies and methods as precursory modes of cooperative data-driven consumer surveillance. First, I ague that audience measurement has been structured by its inherent reliance on the (inconsistent) cooperation—the co-optation as well as the collaboration—of viewers in the task of being measured. Modern surveillance theory tends to focus on how consumer surveillance becomes routinized or appropriated through resignation or alternatively, on the potential of counterveillance, but often overlooks the ways that participation in surveillance is often neither docile nor purposefully inimical, but still (whether it be out of ineptitude, boredom, or noncompliance) inconsistent. The surveillance complex constantly evolves in attempts to work around these forms of noncooperation. Rather than focusing on how cooperation is enacted, my use of cooperative surveillance focuses on how inconsistent cooperation shapes the very processes of surveillance. Second, I take the position that technology is political— it’s an important locus for the conflicts between corporate power and subject agency. In addition to analyzing the technologies that Nielsen and its competitors have used in their national panels, I use previously un-accessed archives to recuperate a history of experimental television ratings technologies and methods that are largely unknown. I argue that audience measurement technologies that failed or never came to fruition can tell us as much about the history of data regimes and consumer surveillance as mainstream ratings technologies. Further, these TV ratings experiments betray television culture’s embeddedness in problematic surveillance and also forecast the limitations of contemporary data regimes. The ratings industry’s response to the challenge of viewer cooperation has been a constant onslaught of technological experimentation to find the “proper standard” or “proper code” to create a commodifiable user/machine language.

My methodology combines top down industry analysis with ethnographic-inspired approaches by utilizing analysis of archival materials, interviews with industry professionals, trade discourse, technology patents, and legal documents, alongside interviews with former Nielsen panel participants. Ultimately, by pairing rigorous historical research with a contemporary media theory lens, my dissertation argues that the US commercial television system as a whole was founded on and even formative of these cooperative regimes of consumer surveillance, which continue to shape contemporary digital media culture.

At the center of this dissertation’s inquiry is Russian realism’s construction of what I call “the form of the peasant.” Created by writers, this mythic image emerged in tandem with the movement’s signature formal innovations in narrative perspective, poetic voice, and descriptive style. It also gave shape to the very ideas of history, national identity, subjectivity, and language which defined Russian realism as a literary movement. The three chapters approach several major texts – Ivan Turgenev’s Zapiski okhotnika [Notes from a Hunter] (1847-1852), Lev Tolstoy’s “Utro pomeshchika” (1852-1856) and Anna Karenina (1874-1877), and Nikolai Nekrasov’s Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho [Who in Russia Can Live well] (1866-1877) – from a historical and formalist perspective, offering a history of realist forms in the social and intellectual context from which they emerge and to which they contribute. Close readings of narrative and poetic texts are performed alongside analyses of a range of theoretical texts that are central to Russian social thought in the mid-nineteenth century, including works by Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Alexander Potebnia, and G. W. F. Hegel. At the intersection of these analyses emerges a myth of agrarian life structured by social anxieties in three interpretative frameworks. First, realism is illuminated in its parallel development to serfdom abolition. Second, social identities (e.g., master and serf; peasant and intellectual) are shown to inhere in forms of narrative and lyric subjectivity. Finally, literature’s engagement with myths of peasant life as pre-modern or timeless belies a central preoccupation with the concept of history understood in terms of non-teleological change. Building on work across disciplines at the intersection of social thought and literary form and reassessments of realism across national traditions, this work is grounded in the belief that it is the nature of literary forms to complicate ideology, expressing ideas obliquely and exploring contradictions. My aim is to show how realism works at once to establish normative frameworks and undermine them, locating Russian realism’s engagement with the peasant myth in precisely this point of tension. Here, the “form of the peasant” expresses an escape from modernity as well as a confrontation with it. In “Forms of the Peasant,” Russian realism emerges as a literary movement with strong connections to other national traditions and historical epochs – connections based in paradigms of empire, class conflict, systems of bondage, and their aftermath.

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