The Impact of Participatory Spaces on Audience Participation

London.
The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Eggo Müller, whose interests is in spaces for participation by active audiences. He notes the long history of work on the changing nature of the audience, and the wealth of recent material on Web 2.0 spaces. There's also been a growing amount of critical work highlighting the corporate embrace of user-generated content as cheap labour, however, and examining the in-built assumptions in the design of spaces for collaborative content creation.

Participation as a concept became popular in the 1960s in the context of critical studies of the limitations to citizen participation in the democratic process. Television as a centralised broadcast medium, expecially also in its public broadcasting form, became seen as symptomatic for a division into elite cultural producers and largely uninvolved audiences. More recently, of course, television has also been a significant vehicle for new forms of audience participation through formats from Big Brother to the various [insert country here]'s Most Wanted shows. Such shows position the viewer in specific roles - e.g. as watchful citizen/police snitch - and thus similarly create spaces of participation.

Audiences practices should not be the starting point for research, then - they are themselves shaped by the spaces within which they take place, regardless of whether such spaces exist online or in other media environments. Spaces institutionalise specific power relationships between the different actors in a given media context; the enable or prevent the interaction of these actors in routinised ways. In new media environments, this approach makes it possible to examine the mechanisms through which particular audience practices become conventionalised in specific spaces. (YouTube, for example, combines conventions from television with conventions from oral culture, by focussing on ratings and by not providing direct content editing facilities while also offering a space for conversation and interaction.)

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