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Ok – you’re taking a course titled “Audience Studies”…
I figure a good place to start is figuring out what is an audience anyway? Then we can move on to figuring out why audiences matter, and then how we’re going to study them. In this chapter, we’ll quickly span thousands of years, highlight the significance of the last century or so, and then focus our attention on the contemporary media landscape. We will address different ways of thinking about audiences and chart the evolution of audiences from interpersonal to mass to mass-interpersonal, and from passive to active to interactive. Ultimately, we’ll set up future chapters and set the stage for understanding audiences as prime-movers in our contemporary participatory media culture. We will also lay the foundation for understanding (and studying) fans as the most active participants in that media culture.
Taylor Swift provides more than just an appropriate song lyric to get things started. In 2023-24, her Eras Tour is providing massive audiences with content for which they are prepared to pay massively. Her fans purchase untold amounts of merchandise, but also create their own content (such as the GIF, above), expressing their identity and also contributing to an archive of online interactive content and for some, a sense of community. Pent-up audience demand for the concert experience was met by further media product:
We see the push and pull of media industries and media audiences in this spectacular example of Taylor Swift (now a media industry on her own) feeding audience demand by creating more opportunities for new audiences to become fans or for current ones to celebrate their fandom. Cinemark’s chief marketing and content officer typified the audience response to the announcement of the new film as “frenzied traffic.” This mobilizes the classic frame of excessive, out-of-control fans, even as he said that the theatre chain was “ready for Swifties to be enchanted by this concert film.” Audiences derive meaning from media content, consuming, recirculating, and sometimes adding their own contributions, ultimately creating added value for themselves and others, while industries derive economic value from this audience behaviour.
This quick Taylor Swift example demonstrates how, to quote the title of a recent Henry Jenkins’ book, we are all not just witnesses to, but players in, “Participatory Culture in a Networked Era.”[1] Even if you’re not a fan, you’re subject to a media environment subject to the culture industry that is Taylor Swift — popular radio play her songs endlessly, streaming sites change their polices because of her, and even the announcement of her film’s release date caused other movies to reschedule theirs, knowing that the box office and the cultural conversation will be dominated by her. NFL football fans in 2023 found their world suddenly intersecting with her burgeoning romance with Kansas City Chiefs’ star player Travis Kielce. Clearly, certain kinds of content matter to audiences, and audiences matter to industries. But before we explore the details of our current situation, we should go back to the beginning.
Once upon a time, if you were a member of an audience, it was a more straightforward phenomenon. You gathered in a place and met at a specific time to take in (and sometimes participate) in a performance. Maybe you were granted an audience with a king, or maybe you were in the audience for a theatre production. Either way, you had to be there, both producer and receiver of a communicative act or event, physically sharing in the experience. In the days of Ancient Greek theatre, this was typically a raucous occasion: “the public was an active partner, free to comment, to be commented upon, to assist, or to intervene with the on-stage production” (Sullivan, 2013, 11). In the days of Shakespeare, “theatre audiences were also noisy and unruly as well as divided by class, with the wealthier patrons seated well above the poorer folks who stood on the ground in front of the stage” (Gasher, Skinner & Coulter, 2020, 88). What we see in both these examples is the existence of a simple audience.[2] You were gathered in a shared space, physically present with your fellow members of an audience, all gathered because of a shared object of attention.
The main features of the simple audience are as follows: communication between performers and the audience is direct; the performance event takes place at a designated, ‘local’ place; the event is invested with a high degree of ceremony by the audience; the performance is public; the distance between the audience and the event is high; as, finally, is the attention of the audience.[3]
Though simple audiences continue to the present day, one has to admit that everything changed when it came to thinking about audiences with the introduction of the printing press. “With printing, the art of communication between the originator of a message and its recipient(s) became increasingly mediated” (Gasher, Skinner & Coulter, 2020, 88 [emphasis in the original]). When an audience was physically co-present with performers (though separated by a stage or platform), the medium through which communication traveled was the space (and time) between mouths of the performers and the ears of the audience members and no-one really thought of it as a medium since it was so immediate.[4]
Separating the audience from the message sender both in time and space, we now have imagined audiences rather than physically co-present spectators. Whereas a simple audience is “real” (constituted in a particular place, able to be seen and experienced by everyone in that place), a mass audience is “socially constructed” and its experience is felt differently.
[quickly move to the 20th century and mass audiences with mass media
Mass audiences are global and relatively more prone to distraction than simple audiences who are typically preoccupied with the performance in front of them. Mass audiences form around technology. While the simple audience is mediated by space (in Ancient Greece, you could only pay attention to something you could hear — the medium was speech whereas in modern society a simple audience is larger because of electricity, the physical environment of a theatre or stadium is still the limiting factor), the mass audience transcends space; the audience of three people in their home, pictured below, is not massive, but they’re part of a mass gathering of people, all focused on the same radio transmission. They are connected to each other through their shared experience, even as they are disconnected, physically, from each other.
Mass audience events do not involve spatial localization, the communication is not so direct, the experience is more of an everyday one and is not invested in quite the same way with ceremony, less attention is paid to the performance, which is typically received in private rather than public, and there is even greater social and physical distance between performers and audience.[5]
[quick overview of 20th century perspectives on audiences (fear of propaganda, media effects… cultural studies and reception as response to behaviourist tradition)
In the 21st century, audiences have once again evolved. Today, we take for granted their always online, digital, diffused nature. One typically encounters members of diffused audiences “engaging through ways that are nonlinear and on-demand like social media and blogs,”[6]. In this state, “everyone becomes an audience all the time. Being a member of an audience is no longer an exceptional event, nor even an everyday event. Rather it is constitutive of everyday life.”[7]
It is important to realize that an individual can be part of simple, mass, and diffused audiences all at the same time.We have gone from an earlier era where audiences that gathered together were, by necessity, engaged in interpersonal communication. Then, with the introduction of mass media, society became used to massively corporatized media industries delivering standardized content to large, impersonal audiences. And now, today, with social media forging connections between “friends” and “followers”, everyday individuals can become micro-celebrities and many grow up seeking to become influencers, forging “mass interpersonal persuasion” through online networks that allow individuals to change attitudes and behaviours on a mass scale.[8]
When it comes to social media, audiences are always active (making meaning) and often interactive (creating content for fellow audience members). Of course, audiences can also be (largely) passive, scrolling seemingly mindlessly through a never-ending stream of algorithmically-generated content. Perhaps it is important to not fall into the trap of technological determinism: The technology helps fashion the audience, but doesn’t entirely constitute it. People are always free to interpret content and may choose to do so through hegemonic, negotiated, or oppositional lenses.[9]
In this environment, we can’t even reasonably speak of (specific) media audiences anymore – we have transmedia audiences. Storyworlds are created to pull audiences across platforms and often encourage greater immersion in commercial narratives…
We live in a time of “datafied audiences” where there is more focus upon the systems that media audiences operate within (the networks of exchanged information and the platforms where users spend their time) and less focus on the actual media habit and practices of users. Livingstone frames this contemporary condition in the following fashion: ‘Away with the socio-cultural, displaced by individual “behaviors.” Away with context, meaning, interpretation, for it is the hidden patterns beneath awareness that matter. Away with audiences’ motivations, commitments, and concerns – for if data reveal what people “really” do on and through digital media, why talk to them anymore?’ (Livingstone 2019: 176f).
Clearly, audiences are not simply consumers. They are also prosumers. Audiences online don’t only consume media content, they also produce it (at the most basic level by providing personal feedback through reactions, or comments). Beyond sharing content, audiences can “remix” it too, adding their own voices and styles to content, remediating it and circulating it via their own networks. Audiences are also users.
This confusion is not just a 21st century condition:
We are dealing not with a single kind of social collectivity but with a great variety of different ones, all with a valid claim to be called an audience. This diverse set includes: media fans; social and political groups; ethnic groups; local communities; information consumers; special-interest groups; subcultures; lifestyles; taste cultures; market segments; and so on.[10]
Work cited
Gasher, M., Skinner, D., & Coulter, N. (2020) Media & Communication in Canada: Networks, Culture, Technology, Audiences.[11]
Livingstone, S. (2019) Audiences in an age of datafication: critical questions for media research. Television & New Media 20(2): 170–183. DOI: 10.1177/1527476418811118
Sullivan, J. L. (2013) Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.[12]
- In fact, Taylor Swift could be used as a case-study for almost every week of this course. Not every individual who is exposed to her music or memes about her is a fan. So what does it mean to be a participant in this networked era defined by user-generated content? (week 2 - participatory culture overview); And what does it mean to be a fan of hers and what different types of audiences coalesce around her? (week 3 - fandom overview); how is her audience viewed by industries producing both the content for them and the audience itself? (week 4 - the audience commodity); how do people generate content against her? (week 5 - anti-fans); what are the politics of her audience and how do they engage in politics (week 6 - political fandom); how do her fans organize as citizens, advocating for social change (week 7 - civic fandom); how is her audience fashioned around her star image? (week 8 - celebrity fandom); how is the Taylor Swift "brand" managed? (week 9 - public relations and fandom); how do fans create their own Taylor Swift-inspired merchandise (Week 11 - consumer fandom); how does toxic fandom organize around Taylor Swift? (week 12 - "ugly" fandom). As you can see, the only week that might not explicity link to Taylor Swift is week 10 on "Sport Fandom" -- and even then, one can easily draw linkages to the enthusiastic tribalism and ritualistic gatherings that define this type of audience...) ↵
- I find it interesting that the division of Shakespeare's audiences has been reversed in contemporary times. The seats closest to the stage are the absolute priciest, while those further away tend to be more affordable. Stadium seating introduces a wrinkle of class division too - we find large and sometimes opulant corporate boxes situated above the nose bleeed seats. ↵
- Abercrombie, N. & Longhurst, B. (1998). Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. Sage. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446222331.n3 ↵
- Intentional play on words, there! I find it interesting that technology is integrated into spaces today in order to alter the experience of simple audiences. For instance, large stadium concerts depend upon large screens to better communicate what's happening on stage to the people who presumably need assistance seeing it. In a completely different setting, the most competitive swimmers in the world (where medals are sometimes awarded based on finishes measured in hundredths of seconds) are constantly innovating in order that no-one is at a disadvantage when they're an audience (!) for the starting signal before their event. A starter's signal (gun, traditionally, but now a loud beep) is going to be heard sooner by those swimmers closer to it compared to those at the opposite end of the pool (lane 1 is immediately next to it, vs. lane 8). In the Paris Olympics each swimmer's starter's block had a loudspeaker under it to eliminate any such advantage. Also, because light travels faster than sound, a flashing indicator of the start is also set up (both at the side and the middle of the pool). But this only assists timers, not the swimmers who need to have their attention fully focused ahead. Thus, new starter's blocks are also being developed with a light strip immediately under each swimmer. (If you want to check this out: https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/tech-tuesday-new-starting-block-tested-at-world-championships/). Simple audiences aren't always so simple! ↵
- Abercrombie, N. & Longhurst, B. (1998). ↵
- Jason Kido Lopez. (2023) Redefining Sports Media. London: Routledge, pg.75 (DOI: 10.4324/9781003164272-5) ↵
- Abercrombie, N. & Longhurst, B. (1998) ↵
- Fogg, B. J. (2008). Mass interpersonal persuasion: An early view of a new phenomenon. In H. Oinas- Kukkonen, P. Hasle, M. Harjumaa, K. Segerståhl, & P. Øhrstrøm (Eds.), Third International Conference on Persuasive Technology (pp. 23–34). Berlin: Springer. ↵
- Stuart Hall - his decoding model is often lurking in the background of reception theory and analyses of active audiences. ↵
- Denis McQuail.(1997) Audience Analysis. London: Sage. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452233406 ↵
- Perhaps the most widely used introductory textbook in Canada for first year COMM courses, FYI. ↵
- Interestingly, the professor who last taught this course took a much broader view of audiences -- and this was the textbook that was assigned! In my opinion, it covers a bit too much ground that you should already be expected to know by 3rd year (see how I just dropped the Stuart Hall reference, earlier, into the mix...) but it's good, overall, and you can find the entire thing online should you want to grab some easy and authoritative context-style content for your papers! ↵