Pia audience survey chart

[Aaron Gerow]

> Pia is not "selling information" so much as providing a service to 
> readers,
> telling them how several dozen ordinary moviegoers felt about the film 
> they
> have just seen.

Certainly Pia does provide a service, but any researcher of the 
information society--and some studies have been done of Pia and the 
johoshi--will tell you that information is not just a service, but a 
commodity that is produced and marketed, and thus subject as much to 
the effects of commodity capitalism as any other product. As we all 
know, there are many products out there that are not sold for their 
utility, but for their image or other factors that are as produced as 
the commodity itself. Joho is no different.
>
> Scientific? Probably not -- but again, the results are intended for, 
> not
> researchers, but readers looking to get a sense for whether a film is 
> for
> them or not. As a journalist (formerly with Screen International, now 
> with
> Variety), I sometimes find Pia rankings valuable for getting a "man (or
> woman) on the street" take on a film I can't get from a flack or a 
> critic.
> The comments are especially revealing in their honesty, though raves 
> are
> more common than pans.

But my complaint is that it doesn't give you a man on the street view. 
It gives you a view of a small audience that happened to go to see the 
film in the first few days it was released at a particular set of 
theaters. (Pia does not keep polling weeks down the line and doesn't do 
much polling in the boonies.) First, the people who go to the see the 
film early are not always the "average" people (especially when it 
comes to idol movies or others with a strong fan base). Second, the 
questions are vague, because they don't give the respondent any 
comparative standard for rating (to one person, a 75 may be good, but 
for another a 75 is a bad rating). Third, different audiences have 
different standards: a person used to TV who goes to the movies only 
once a twice a year and is drawn to a film by big TV advertising will 
apply different standards of judgment compared to an avid film fan who 
sees art films once every other week. Since different audiences go to 
different films, the results cannot easily be compared (that's why the 
Pia best ten is largely useless, I believe), unless you are comparing 
the same kinds of films polled under similar conditions.

I'm not saying that the comments or results in Pia should be ignored: 
they may provide a good quote or footnote. But they do not represent 
the man on the street and I find them much less useful than comment 
sites like yahoo.jp, where you can actually read the opinions and get a 
better sense of who is responding and what their arguments are. But 
even there there are problems (e.g., older audiences don't write 
comments on the internet, etc.).

Perhaps the search for the view of the man on the street is itself 
problematic?

Aaron Gerow
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film Studies Program
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu