Blog

London.


The first day at Transforming Audiences finishes with a keynote by Natalie Fenton and Nick Couldry. Natalie points to creativity, knowledge, and participation as the three central themes of this conference - in that context, what does it mean to be political in the new media age? What are the principles for the way we conceived of and carry out our citizenship? How do we engage in political life?

There are multiple conflicting views on the impact of social media on political participation, of course - a sense that social media break down public/private barriers and lead to new forms of participation, and those who characterise such participation as an incessant meaningless conversation which never leads anywhere. Taken by themselves, both are likely to be wrong - so what is the real story here?

London.


The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Uwe Hasebrink from the fabulous Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, focussing on a large study of young people's social Web use in Germany. Social Web use is a crucial tool in identity formation and expression today, of course, as well as in the managing and maintaining of relationships. The study, which Uwe conducted with his wife Ingrid Paus-Hasebrink, involved an analysis of relevant Web platforms, a qualitative study with young users, and representative telephone interviews with such users.

London.


The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Brita Ytra-Arne, who compares the experience of reading print and online magazines (focussing here especially on womens' magazines in Sweden). Interestingly, Brita's research subjects, established readers of print magazines who nonetheless were also capable Internet users, strongly preferred using print magazines.

This was due only in small part to differences in content, however. A better explanation is provided by considerations of context: media use formed part of everyday life for these people, but the technological context of reading online magazines recalled a feeling of work rather than leisure, and such reading - even where laptops were available - was seen as uncomfortable and impractical. This may well be different for different groups of users, however, Brita stresses. Additionally, the content presentation of Web media was seen as inappropriate: clicking, scrolling, navigating was not seen as preferable to turning the pages of a magazine.

London.


The last Transforming Audiences session for today (that went fast!) starts with Geoffroy Patriarche, who focusses on mobile communication and its impact on transforming everyday mobility. Media and ICT use is itself also dependent on the logic of situations, of course. Geoffroy approached this topic by examining the ICT practices of young adults (25-25 years) in Brussels, especially while using public transport.

Media and ICTs take up travel time, and accompany the user every day; for some, they are also taken along because they will be needed upon arrival. There are immediate distinctions between different ICTs in the way they are stored during travel (e.g. mobiles vs. laptops); this is also influenced by security and usability considerations (some devices are locked, securely fastened to clothes or bags, or hidden, to prevent theft or accidental activation, while others - such as iPods - are prepared beforehand for easy use during travel). Use is also influenced by time concerns - in public transport, there is usually not enough time for laptop or Internet use or the reading of books, while there is no such constraint experienced in newspaper reading, music listening, or mobile phone use.

London.


The final speaker in this Transforming Audiences session is Floriana Bernardi; her focus is on the role of the audience for Roberto Saviano's book Gomorrah, a book on the mafia which was published in Italy 2006 and has been translated into some 40 languages (possibly the first such books to reach a large international audience). Gomorrah focusses on the banal everyday business of the mafia, rather than glorifying (or emotionally denouncing) the criminal life. It confronts the omertà - the resigned silence which prevents citizens from speaking out against the influence of the mafia on everyday Italian life.

London.


Jo Pierson and An Jacobs are up next at Transforming Audiences; their focus is on user innovation in creating new sociotechnical systems. Technology is layered, ranging from the application layer through presentation, session, transport, network, and data link layers to the physical layer; user innovation takes place to date mainly at the top of this layering, not in the lower levels. How can this be changed, and what tools are required to achieve it? How can the user be placed in control of the creative destruction which innovation can bring about - and indeed, what kind of innovation are we talking about?

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.

London.


The post-lunch session at Transforming Audiences starts with a presentation by Mia Lövheim, whose study examines young (18-30 years) female A-List bloggers in Sweden. The interest here is not in link-blogging activities, but in the content created by the bloggers themselves, and the way they create identity and maintain personal relationships through these blogs; bloggers and readers in a way are co-creating the bloggers' identities here. How does this take place for A-List bloggers, though, whose popularity means that their posts are read by the established community of regular readers as well as by a much larger, more casual audience?

London.


The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Richard Mills, whose interest is in the presence of the Beatles on YouTube. The Beatles' image was carefully guided and constructed by their manager Brian Epstein, of course, and the nascent music press of the early to mid-1960 bought strongly into that, creating Beatlemania and connecting it to the wider Swinging Sixties rhetoric. The Beatles themselves eventually reacted against this commercialisation and commodification, and gradually changed their image to embrace countercultural ideas. The evolution of Beatles iconography on their record covers over time also points powerfully to this shift, of course - from the identical suits and haircuts of the first albums to the blankness of The White Album.