London.
The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Christian Christensen, who begins by highlighting the emergence of what he calls the 'replay-relay audience'. One example here is the discussion between Daily Show host Jon Stewart and MSNBC financial host Jim Cramer about the quality of MSNBC's financial coverage; another is Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents' Association dinner speech in 2006, which tore into both the Bush administration and the mainstream media for their coverage of Bush's administration; yet another is Jon Stewart's 2004 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, which ultimately led to the demise of that show after Stewart fatally critiqued the show's format and its effect on journalism and public discourse in America.
Each of these appearances were massively retransmitted through YouTube and other videosharing platforms, and in doing so challenge the professional news status quo. By providing platforms for this content - some of which is now several years old, but keeps coming up - social media challenge traditional power relations in the media; they provide episodic and occational publics through which the ephemeral encounters and connections that occur in everyday life might have democratic effects. This ties into John Hartley's work on the idea of a redactional society, too, through whose processes information, knowledge and culture is contested. Such a redactional society is partly the product of a profound public discontent with journalism's established regime of truth.
Replay-relay activities, then, are a form of redactional or monitorial citizenship; through them, texts are re-introduced into public debates by audiences, and the ephemeral and extended nature of social media are manipulated. Such practices also rely on the archival nature of social media, and the datamining practices by (not of) audiences which they enable - and of course, they also point to the impact of Daily Show-style 'fake news' on how audiences construct their critique of mainstream news.
