Construction Of Audience Research Articles

Book Review: Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age, by Brooke Erin Duffy

Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age. Brooke Erin Duffy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 208 pp. $85 hbk. $25 pbk.Women's magazines-those overtly gendered media spaces-have played a role in shaping concepts of female identity since Godey's 's Lady's 's Book began offering advice on domestic ideologies in the 1830s. But what is a woman's magazine in an age of iPads and tablets, social media, and fashion blogs? How are convergent media technologies and their concomitant economic pressures reshaping the industry? What happens when a woman's magazine positions itself as (to use the industry's new mantra) a brand rather than a physical text?In Remake, Remodel: Women's s Magazines in the Digital Age, Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor in the School of Media and Communication at Temple University, surveys the shifting media landscape of today's women's magazines, skillfully tracing the recent seismic shifts in the industry, including the rise of participatory culture, the need to produce copy for multiple platforms, and the pressures convergent technologies put on the magazine industry's already-close relationship with advertisers. Looking largely through the lens of magazine producers-publishers, digital directors, editors, graphic designers, and other creatives-Duffy blends theory with extensive field interviews, attendance at trade shows and professional conferences, and a thorough review of the discourse on digital disruption found in the industry's professional and trade publications. In doing so, she provides a thoughtful-and thought-changing-look into a specific segment of a specific media industry as well as a compelling case for a research methodology that blends political economy with cultural studies.The early chapters of Remake, Remodel establish the necessary context for Duffy's analysis, both in terms of media theory and magazine history. Later chapters-the most compelling of the study-focus on the complexities of the industry as it works to incorporate digital practices. For example, Chapter 4, Rethinking Readership: The Digital Challenge of Audience Construction, explores one of the industry's formerly unassailable principles-audience segmentation. Relying heavily on demographic and psychographic data, consumer magazines in general ( and women's magazines in particular) have long targeted niche audiences based on factors such as age, marital status, and household income, building the magazine's content and tone around those specific readers and, perhaps more importantly, attracting advertisers based on that reader profile.But new digital technologies, Duffy shows, have put pressure on the way magazine publishers think about their audiences. Thanks to digital technologies, for example, today's magazine publishers can combine demographic data with detailed information about consumer purchases (so-called transactional data) from sophisticated customer databases, making cross-marketing opportunities easier to sell to advertisers, but also raising issues of editorial creativity and reader privacy. …

Industry Conceptions of Audience in the Digital Space

Developments in the production of news, entertainment and advertising on the Web, mobile and other digital media have led academics as well as industry practitioners to advance new conceptions of audience power within the media context. We will critique these conceptions and suggest a research agenda that expects different, though converging constructions of audience among production, distribution, exhibition and financing areas of a digital media industry. We will argue that the most consequential audience construction takes place at the financing and distribution nodes, and we will suggest social implications as well as implications for academic thinking about audiences.

Mature Poets Steal: Children’s Literature and the Unpublishability of Fanfiction

Many fan scholars have argued for a literary approach to fanfiction as an ideal venue for illuminating reader-response theory. I extend this argument to consideration of texts for young people, as this genre is wedded to a construction of audience that is alienated from the means of production. I focus upon Harry Potter fanfiction; the popularity of both the books made fan practices more visible than ever before. I argue that great fanfiction is often unpublishable, since it draws its aesthetic power from both its freedom from the constraints of the publishing industry and its embeddedness within a community of readers and writers: fanfiction, unlike published literature for young people, relies upon a presumption of readers’ knowledge, rather than their ignorance.

Altered egos: gay men reading across gender difference in Wonder Woman

Arguments about representation in comics and other media have largely consisted of simple and direct identity presentation, yet there is growing evidence that audiences construct identification moments in a myriad of ways. Gender identification, for instance, with protagonists in comics may seem straightforward, yet there is ongoing evidence that audience members cross the male–female divide to find themselves within protagonists of another gender. Wonder Woman, for instance, has a considerable gay male fan base. This project approaches Wonder Woman with a semiotic and cultural studies analysis to see how the character is made up of several syntagms that encourage this kind of identification, including same-sex society, fighting intolerance, finding one’s place and thriving in transformation. Rather than a secret identity for the hero, the project calls this relationship an ‘altered ego’ for the reader.

A Call for Polycultural Arguments: Critiquing the Monoculture Rhetoric of the Local Food Movement

Through an analysis of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, No Impact Man, and Deep Economy, this essay examines how local food movement arguments reinforce a monoculture identity for the movement. Analyzing movement rhetoric for how it accounts (or does not account) for the lived experiences of the poor, illustrates how blind spots in local food movement arguments aimed at popular audiences construct those of low socioeconomic status as outside the bounds of movement membership. The essay contends that recognition of broader practices, knowledge, and lived experiences in movement rhetoric might make space for the development of a polycultural movement.

Commentary: The Industrial Construction of Audiences in Mass Media Industries Notes toward a Research Agenda

(2013). Commentary: The Industrial Construction of Audiences in Mass Media Industries Notes toward a Research Agenda. Annals of the International Communication Association: Vol. 36, Communication Yearbook 36, pp. 270-275.

Le film de recherche comme processus d’action

Cet article traite du film de recherche comme étant issu d’un long processus de co-construction et de production avec des acteurs multipositionnés. Le film est producteur de nouveaux savoirs issus de la démultiplication des problèmes de posture du chercheur, de l’instabilité dans laquelle il produit et diffuse sa recherche filmée. Ces problèmes ne se limitent pas aux questions de réflexivité et de positionnement du chercheur, il faut également savoir jusqu’où « tenir » le film pour qu’il soit réalisé, diffusé. Il provient en tant qu’« œuvre » d’un processus incertain, construit autour de déplacements et de réajustements successifs pour tenir le projet, la réalisation, la diffusion dans lequel le chercheur est en permanence confronté à différentes formes de décalage qu’elles soient juridiques, institutionnelles, ou professionnelles.

Remembering the popular music of the 1990s: dance music and the cultural meanings of decade-based nostalgia

Following the popularisation of dance music in the 1990s, and the consolidation of disc jockeys (DJs) as global stars, this article examines the attachment of music audiences to this decade by examining the popular flashback dance parties held in the Netherlands. By drawing on theories of cultural heritage, memory and nostalgia, this article explores 1990s-themed parties as spaces where music audiences construct cultural identities and engage with their musical memories. Based on in-depth interviews with audience members, DJs and organisers of dance events, this study examines the meaning of cultural memories and the manner in which nostalgia arises in specific sociocultural settings. The findings indicate two ways in which cultural memories take shape. At early-parties, DJs and audiences return to the roots of specific genres and try to preserve these sounds. Decade-parties offer an experience of reminiscence by loosely signifying the decade and its diverse mix of music styles and fashions.

Postmillennial breast cancer photo-narratives: Technologized terrain

Postmillennial photographic narratives that represent women's lived experience of breast cancer and its technologized terrain provide the focus of this essay, which offers a critical analysis of Catherine Lord's The Summer of Her Baldness (2004) and Lynn Kohlman's Lynn Front to Back (2005). The essay examines ways in which narrators and audiences construct multiple meanings regarding the somatic and symbolic contours of this disease, and it explores the following questions: What distinctive contributions to readers’ and viewers’ understandings of women's material and technologized bodies do twenty-first breast cancer photo-narratives offer? How might feminist theories of illness, autobiography, and embodiment and postmodern constructions of narrative subjectivity enhance analysis and interpretation of breast cancer's textual and visual representations? What discursive tropes and personae, visual and rhetorical strategies, ethical and aesthetic debates, and opportunities for discursive resistance and audience witness do these narratives engage?

Disturbing the eternal silence of the gallery: a site of dialogue about hunger in America

The social importance of the museum centers on the social practice of narrative construction. Museums tend to structure their narratives from the perspective of those who administer and govern them. Audiences construct narratives dialogically with their peers, as well as in response to museum texts. Table of Contents, an exhibition at the Witte Museum in San Antonio about the causes of hunger, presented a series of compelling visual and audio narratives to which hundreds of visitors responded with their own written narratives in a comment book. Comment books can be an important dialogic activity in which social discourse takes shape. Analysis of that dynamic also shows how narrative co-construction acts as an important social function of museums.

Defining and Experiencing Authorship(s) in the 130 Composition Classroom: Findings from a Qualitative Study of Undergraduate Writing Students at the City University of New York

Theories of authorship and models of the author have been influential in shaping various approaches to composition theory and pedagogy. While discussions of the role of the author and authorship in composition studies have been going on for some time, tensions be- t ween the theoretical (author as social construct) and practical (author as agent) dimensions of authorship remain unresolved. Presenting the findings of a qualitative study of undergraduate writers at The City University of New York, this article explores student perspectives on models of authorship, the relationships between these models and student experiences of authorship in different writing situations, and proposes the importance of distinguishing between the multiple models and definitions of authorship and the rhetorical contexts associated with each. KE YWORDS: authorship, authorships, Romantic author, authorial construction, audience construction, students, writers, authors

Constructing Audiences in Scientific Controversy

Scientists, their allies, and opponents engage in struggles not just over what is true, but who may validate, access, and engage contentious knowledge. Viewed through the metaphor of theater, science is always performed for an audience, and that audience is constructed strategically and with consequence. Insights from theater studies, the public understanding of science, and literature on boundary work and framing contribute to a proposal for a framework to explore the construction of audiences during scientific controversy, consisting of three parameters: history, composition, and role. Applying this framework to the controversy over the presence of genetically modified maize in Mexico demonstrates how multiple and contested audiences form during a scientific controversy. Different scientific “productions” construct distinct or overlapping audiences; audiences constructed at one time become “easy recruits” for later stages of the controversy; and the various roles cast for different audiences showcase strategies for building scientific power and reflect assumptions about the capacity for publics to participate in the governance and production of science.

Intertextuality, mediation, and members’ categories in focus groups on humor

This paper extends studies on intertextuality into a more explicitly interactional context. I examine the actual process of intertextuality where comedy audiences construct recombinant selves through making sense of various membership categories as well as through making sense of a certain kind of comedy. The examination of this process requires receptive research; however, most studies leave the interpretive process unanalyzed. Conducting both a sequential analysis and a membership categorization analysis will reveal that categories are not “pre-formed” but “per-formed” in situ. To illustrate these points, I report on a receptive study of Local comedy in Hawai‘i.

Scotland in Your Eyes: the Representation of Scotland in French Press Advertising since 1995

It can be argued that the advertising of a foreign destination is placed at the interface between two cultures: on one side the culture of the potential host and, on the other side, the cultural background of the tourist. For Urry (1990) the construction of the tourist gaze 9 is fundamentally based on contrast since tourism, a form of 'deviance', inherently seeks departure from established routines. This antipodal stance is indeed such a crucial cornerstone of tourism that the observation of tourism practices can, he argues, inform by contrast on the standard, normal' practices of a given social group. Although contrast is undeniably a prime appeal in destination advertising, marketing practitioners also see the need of embedding the values of the targeted group in the advertising message in order to satisfy international tourists' needs (Reisinger and Turner 2003) and reinforce their perceived self-image to create brand empathy (Morgan and Pritchard 2002). Social scientists have also stressed the part played by the tourist's culture in the semiotic process of meaning construction, as the decoding of the advertising message is negotiated through the recipient's referent system (Dann 1996) and relies on pre-established ways of seeing (McCannell 1973, Culler 1981). The process of audience construction in destination advertising is therefore underpinned by the bipolar tensions of familiarity and difference: the need, on the one hand, to work with the societal practices, values and expectations of the targeted audience as ideology tends to be conservative (Gold and Gold 1995, O'Barr 1994, Cathelat 1992), and, on the other, to suggest life enhancement through a temporary diversion from the familiar, in the exploration of 'new frontiers' (McCannell 1973).

Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (review)

Reviewed by: Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience Katie N. Johnson Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre in the Americas Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004; pp. xiii + 293. $55.00 cloth. Dorothy Chansky's Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience offers an important contribution to American theatre history. Defining the Little Theatre movement as "a national, multipronged phenomenon, and not just the work of well-known experimenters," Composing Ourselves redefines and expands the parameters of the collective movement that sought to reform theatre as something other than Broadway fare (2). While some books have recently examined theatre artists or theatres in the Little Theatre movement (such as Shannon Jackson's Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity;J. Ellen Gainor's Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915-48; or Cheryl Black's The Women of Provincetown), Chansky's is the first extended study since Constance D'Arcy Mackay's 1917 The Little Theatre Movement in the United States and is a welcome addition to that body of research. Constituted by six chapters, Composing Ourselves is smartly written, weaving archival research, historical [End Page 138] context, and critical theory to redefine the Little Theatre movement and its key players. Chansky is careful to avoid hasty generalizations, mapping out the movement's contradictions and ironies while observing it included "forward-looking activism and modernist aesthetics as well as skepticism, nativism, elitism, and nostalgia" (3). Chansky also redefines the Little Theatre movement by pressuring the timetable by which we bracket it. While most historians focus on the work of the 1910s, Chansky broadens the timeline to include the 1920s, arguing "that only the full arc of the work within both decades" can account for the wide array of theatre making in Little Theatres across the country (5). Her discussion of theatre reformers of the 1920s, especially the recuperation of Alice Gerstenberg's career in chapter 5, is among the greatest strengths of the project. As the title implies, Chansky also focuses on how Little Theatres formulated what she calls "audience construction," or: the creation of attitudes and behaviors concerning theatergoing in the minds and bodies of actual or potential spectators as well as other Americans. The purpose of audience construction was, beginning in the Little Theatre movement, and remains in the United States, to create and maintain a permanent audience class and a public belief in the importance of theatre in civic and personal life. [7-8] With detailed examples, Chansky shows how audiences were cultivated (and cultivated themselves) during times of dwindling theatregoing. Chapter 2 illustrates various attitudes toward audiences and theatre making by reformers, from those who blamed the audience for their lack of taste or "breeding" (Edward Dithmar and Annie Nathan Meyer), to those who strove for professionalism (Beulah Jay's Little Theatre of Philadelphia), to those who used theatre to serve neighborhood immigrants (Hull-House and Henry Street Settlement). Chansky's third chapter focuses on two major influences in Little Theatre audience construction: Theatre Arts Monthly and George Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop at Harvard. As divergent as these forces might appear at first glance, Chanksy observes that both were indebted to the view that "the audience must function as an informed participant in the creation of serious theatre, and the audience must be organized so as to guarantee payment for that theatre" (71). As backdrop for that discussion, Chansky gives a helpful, if somewhat overdrawn, historical overview of theatre reformers who published their theories about the new theatre. The chapter is most intriguing when Chanksy shows how Baker's 47 Workshop developed a cadre of educated theatregoers, designers, playwrights, and directors, including Eugene O'Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, and Edward Sheldon. Here, Chanksy's argument is crisp and compelling as she documents Baker's rigorous audience development that, in spite of its success, fell victim to an Ivy League bias. Another valuable contribution Composing Ourselves makes is its attention to gender, race, and ethnicity in theatre making of the day. Chansky notes how racism and sexism underwrote the movement at the same time that some...

Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age

This study melds “contextualist” and “resource dependence” perspectives from industrial sociology to explore the implications that audience construction by marketing and media firms hold for the core assumptions that are shaping the emerging media system of the twenty-first century. Marketers, media, and the commercial research firms that work with them are constructing contemporary U.S. audiences as frenetic, self-concerned, attention-challenged, and willing to allow advertisers to track them in response to being rewarded or treated as special. This perspective, a response to challenges and opportunities they perceive from new digital interactive technologies, both leads to and provides rationalizations for a surveillance-based customization approach to the production of culture.

Along the Spectrum of Dissent: Review of the Construction of Authorship and Audience in Two Types of Demonstration

Along the Spectrum of Dissent: Review of the Construction of Authorship and Audience in Two Types of Demonstration

Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century Paul B. Foster (bio) Bonnie S. McDougall . Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. ix, 281 pp. Hardcover $35.00, ISBN 962-996-029-x. This anthology of highly polished, previously published papers directly challenges the canonized status of China's twentieth-century works, authors, and audiences. McDougall presents a consistent, singularly harsh, but simultaneously subtle and convincing argument for a critical approach to modern Chinese literature that emphasizes the demystification of the process by which authors, their works, and the modern Chinese literary field in general are constructed. Refreshingly without recourse to literary-critical jargon, McDougall methodically reveals the politics of power and institution operating in symbiosis with self-censorship and Western sinological study to obscure truths about modern Chinese literature. She demonstrates that the resulting valorization of mediocre literary products and authors is a product of the Chinese intellectual's obsession with his own marginalization—his fall from privileged social status and power in a post-civil examination China. The construction of modern Chinese literature studies thus resulted in a "fictional [canonized] author" and an "imaginary [canonized] audience" that served to buttress the tenuous legitimacy of the very producers and consumers of the new literature since the May Fourth period. This theme provides the canvas that McDougall uses as she courageously interprets the broad-ranging issues in modern Chinese literature, including its fundamental validity and direction. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, "Authors, Audiences and Critics," examines "the role that critics and scholars in Western countries have played in the formation of the modern Chinese literary canon" (p. 8). Moreover, locating [End Page 425] the idealization and dramatization of authors' lives in the continuum of the role of "intellectual" descendent of the literati of dynastic times, McDougall makes a significant contribution to the study of modern Chinese literature by redirecting C. T. Hsia's famous "obsession with China" to demonstrate that it was not the discourse of nationalism or internationalism (the fate of China) with which intellectuals and writers were primarily concerned, but, in fact, the fate of the intellectual and his privileged role in society. McDougall's second significant contribution to the field is in directly confronting the issue of the quality of modern Chinese literature. She unmasks the phenomenon of "inferior literary texts masquerading as modern masters" (p. 24). She implies that modern Chinese literary studies needs a massive reevaluation as a field, especially given the complicity of Western sinology in the construction of imagined authors and audiences. McDougall points out "how very little still is known about Chinese writers and readers, and how unreliable or untested much of the information that we have about them is" (p. 1). Chapter 2, "Modern Chinese Literature and Its Critics," sets the scene for the latter parts of the book as McDougall systematically raises questions about the process of canonization from the May Fourth through the post-Cultural Revolution periods. She argues that canonization has not been well studied, and notes that both intended and actual audiences have been ignored. Moreover, by treating literary texts as social science documents that provide a window into the "public and private consciousness" of authors and readers, Western scholarship has been complicit in canonization by taking for granted and valorizing the "official literature." This discourse of canonization directly influences the reception of modern Chinese literature inside and outside China, and has been counterproductive to the field as a whole: "For contemporary Chinese writers, however, the lack of an enthusiastic Western response has been deeply disappointing. Since May Fourth, Chinese writers have seen themselves as contributing to world literature, and to be disregarded in this way undermines the internationalism that they strive for" (p. 37). McDougall's demystification of this century-long cycle of inbred, mutually self-invested writing and critique, moreover, demonstrates "the huge conceptual gap between Western critical methodologies and non-Western literary texts" (p. 30). She brilliantly suggests that modern Chinese literature holds the potential for advances in world literary understanding by demonstrating the necessity to "adapt Western literary theories to deal with...

Music Television and the Invention of Youth Culture in India

MTV is often associated with concerns about global cultural homogenization and the spread of a rebellious youth culture. However, the political economy of satellite television in postliberalization India has ensured the construction of a music television audience that is neither antinational nor antielder. On the basis of a reception study of music television in India, this article argues that audiences construct a sense of generational, national, and global identity in a manner that calls for a deeper understanding of cultural imperialism and audience reception. The findings of this study suggest that although the emerging youth culture in India does not seem confrontational in generational or national terms, it is not so much a case of audience resistance as that of co-optation by global hegemonic forces.

Television Teen Drama and HIV/AIDS: The role of genre in audience understandings of safe sex

This study focuses on audience understandings of safe-sex messages ?contained? in television drama. It focuses on the process of audience construction of meaning; on the work that audiences engage in to understand HIV-related television messages. Data consist of 20 focus group discussions conducted subsequent to the viewing of one of two AIDS-related television programmes. Following a Shotterian approach to meaning construction, analyses of audience transcripts indicates that genre is an important hermeneutic tool shaping audience understandings of, and engaement with, health related messages. However, audience emphasis on ?the messag? works against audience engagement with this message. The message is so clearly signalled to viewers that they are able to prepare their defences against the message before it even arrives. The implications for health promotion via mass media generally are discussed.