A Field in Flux: The Intriguing Past and the Promising Future of Audience Analysis

Abstract

Throughout its illustrious history, the journal Television and New Media has made recurrent editorial decisions to keep audiences within the frame of studying television and new media, returning, time and again, to people’s everyday sense-making of the media as both text and object, as Roger Silverstone expressed it, and publishing audience research in ways that articulated its relevance to a range of sectors in communication studies. This special issue, quite fittingly for this journal, brings together a series of articles, which are written by a set of communication scholars who frequently delve into the messy world that is empirical audience research, but who reflect, here, on the very state and status of the field as it navigates a moment in communication studies scholarship where datafication challenges, perplexes, frustrates, enthuses, and, increasingly, engages in some way or another most communication scholars one meets. In this short editorial, I look at the ways in which these articles approach the field of audience research itself, at a point in time when datafication poses an array of new challenges to mediated societies.