The Monopoly that Won’t Divide: France’s Médiamétrie

Abstract

Under which conditions does a private and monopolistic facility provide information data on a highly competitive market, considering that those data are of general interest? The French case offers an interesting case study to unfold the quantification of audiences as a socio-technical mechanism, which produces ratings in a way that can be effective for very different actors, inside the television industry as well as outside (Bourdon, 1994; Bourdon and Méadel, 2011; Méadel, 2010). Actually, ratings may no longer be a ‘blind spot’ for researchers, but they remain a black box (Latour, 1987); that is, a techno-social mechanism that produces things routinely agreed upon and (almost) never questioned, except in times of crises which must, by definition, be quickly solved. Opening this black box might provide us with valuable insight into contemporary culture, the way it represents its audiences, and the way legitimacy is conferred (or not) upon specific cultural artefacts, especially through quantification (Herbst, 1993: p. 3).¹