Preface

This book is a collaborative vision. It is a product of the “collective intelligence” of a third year course in communication dedicated to the study of audiences, appropriately named “COMM 3P18: Audience Studies.” In September 2023, this course undertook the study of contemporary audiences, approaching it through the lens of participatory culture, critically interrogating the productivity of fans and active audiences in contemporary culture. But this class was not just an audience for the lectures of its professor (me); this class was also an active audience (in many senses of the word). Throughout the term, they queried key concepts in the emerging field, challenged the insights of researchers investigating emerging phenomenon, and grappled with changes in business practices and a promotional environment where audiences have to be managed, not merely cultivated or addressed. They pondered and debated issues in seminars, considered case-studies from recent news, and also produced original research. This book shares that research with you. As such, this book is not only investigating active audiences, it is the product of them.

I started the course by challenging the students to think of how they are members of an audience. I gave them an example of how I was a member of an audience in the months prior. Together with my family, led by the fascination of my youngest daughter, I once again “got into” this year’s Eurovision contest. If you aren’t familiar with it, I shared the following two videos prior to my first lecture:

Why did I share these videos? I think they’re fun. The energy in them is a good place to start a course (or a book). I also think they demonstrate some key entry-points into the specific character of (inter)active audiences in our contemporary participatory culture. The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) does not just invite audience interaction through public votes to determine the winner (though it does depend on this – and 2023 marked the first year that fans around the globe could vote rather than just members of participating nations). As Carniel notes, there are “complex personal and cultural interactions between people and texts, such as the ESC, that manifest as participatory culture and global fandom”^[1]. The contest’s website cultivates its fandom, constantly reminding fans of previous performances and previewing upcoming chances to participate^[2]. Fan-produced sites and social media discourse drive the phenomenon further. In fact, Eurovision has been used to demonstrate “how Internet-based social technologies mediate [televisual] events, acting variously as a completely separate sphere of dissemination, or a complementary channel to the TV broadcast”^[3].

Who, then, is producing the phenomenon that is the ESC? It is surely, not just the executives in television studios. “In the contemporary ESC, it is no longer possible to entirely separate the fans and audience from the production and culture of the contest itself”^[4]. Fans consume their favourite performances (or recirculate them, as I have done here), and they argue over them too via fan-made websites and dedicated channels on YouTube…

This quick example of the Eurovision Song Contest demonstrates many ways that people are audiences for media but also how audiences do things with media. This book gives students a chance to grapple with key concepts and discourses surrounding audiences and also gives them a chance to present their own examples of how audiences interact with communication media (and produce their own content for communication media). It demonstrates the vivacious character of audiences today, and makes sense of the participatory cultures that both facilitate such activity and which are further constituted by it^[5]. Audiences matter. And while there are a wide variety of ways to study audiences (and some of them are introduced in Chapter 1), this book seeks to address audiences as nodes of participatory, networked culture, examine the circumstances whereby fan-audiences engage in meaningful participation in media culture, and present fandom as a model of twenty‐first‐century production and consumption practices.

This book follows the same structure as the course upon which it is based. Part I includes twelve chapters corresponding to twelve different ways of conceptualizing fans and participatory culture in our contemporary moment. The twelve areas are not an exhaustive survey of fan foci. We could have specific chapters on “TV fandom” or “film fandom” or “music fandom” but instead have chosen wider “genres” of fandom that transcend specific media. Subsequent parts of the book provide for case-studies of these fan groups, based on student interests.