Researching Today's Transforming Audiences

London.
I've arrived in occasionally sunny London for the Transforming Audiences conference, which kicks off with a keynote by Liz Bird. She notes that conversations about the death of the media audience go back some decades now; the idea of an 'audience' no longer fully captures the reality of media usage and participation, and Web 2.0 and similar phenomena have only provided an even more pointed reminder. There is rhetoric about 'the people formerly known as the audience', but of course these people - audience or not - still matter to us. What is the nature of the dynamic between media and their users, and how may this dynamic be researched further in the current context?

Culture must be seen as a set of practices, as James Carey has pointed out - it's not about the media message alone, but about the cultural practices which surround it. It is futile to look for a direct link between media and audiences, Nick Couldry has suggested; however, a focus on audience activity alone encourages a separation of media content and audiences, and that is problematic, too. Contexts of media use constitute a social field in which people engage in constructions of themselves, not least as members of broader imagined communities, as Mark Peterson has noted, but if this line is followed too far, an idea emerges that media have no power at all over their audiences. The challenge for audience researchers is to conceptualise the influence of media without falling into simple linear patterns - this is a challenge of finding a middle way between a text-focussed cultural studies and an audience-focussed ethnographic approach.

One interesting area here is the study of fandom, as promoted especially by Henry Jenkins, as a cultural form which negotiates between cultural texts (and their producers) and audiences who have themselves become content creators. Participants in such practices are not passive audiences at all, of course; they are engaged in a mediated fan practice which would not exist in the absence of the original texts, but articulate such media in creative and unpredicted ways. That said, the analysis of fan practice should not be exaggerated; not all of us may end up as content creators, as produsers, in the end.

What is necessary, then, is to include all forms of media participation (from highly active to mainly passive) in the study of audiences. This is especially important in the study of online audiences, whose particular forms of activities may not be representative for all other kinds of audiences. The Net has transformed the way that audiences interact with the media, but it is also important to keep in mind the political economy of the media and note the incorporation of Web 2.0 users into business models. And of course, the digital divide remains a real barrier to participation.

How might we explore the intersection between media and audiences, then, beyond Web 2.0? New models may focus on the expression of identity through creative projects by media users, independent of studying producer/receiver relationships within the conventional media; this moves beyond studies of transmission and reception, and instead explores the influence of audiences' awareness of typical media scripts on the social rituals which they practice. In other words, the question is where media figure into the picture of people's everyday social practices, how media experience is constantly in the picture of everyday practice.

Related to this is the field of research which studies collective memory. Where at one time, cultural memory was stored in museums, libraries and galleries, today such memory is increasingly mediated, and personal recollections get caught up with the media portrayal of major events (Woodstock, the moon landing, the JFK assassination, ...). Such work should now no longer rely on content analyses which assume a particular audience for the texts being examined, but a more contextual, ethnographic approach that does go to the people rather than only to the texts.

Work which moves beyond a transmission model of media use also contributes in important ways to communication studies which aim to improve areas such as health communication. A better understanding of the complexity of audience responses to the media would enable the development of more effective public health campaigns, for example, which to date still operate under simplistic and outdated media effects assumptions (and often are rightly critiqued and/or lampooned through user responses on sites like YouTube, for example). Unfortunately, the existing knowledge in qualitative audience research has not made a substantial impact on such related disciplines so far - at best, there usually are simplistic quantitative mechanisms for measuring the impact of communication campaigns on their audiences.

There is no one way of doing audience studies, of course; media are experienced in many different ways, and Web 2.0 has only added more complexity and opportunity here. There remains a need for a critical study of media economy, for work that does connect audiences and media texts, and for work which examines the complex everyday social and cultural ecology of media use.

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