Audience Studies Research Articles

Other New Books in Audience and Reception Studies

Other New Books in Audience and Reception Studies

The mediation of distant suffering: an empirical contribution beyond television news texts

This article draws on the results of a large-scale audience study to examine how audiences respond to mediated encounters with distant suffering on UK television. The research involved two phases of focus groups separated by a two-month diary study. Research participants’ mediated experiences of distant suffering were generally characterised by indifference and solitary enjoyment, with respect to distant and dehumanised distant others. However, the results also signal that, in various ways, non-news factual television programming offers spectators a more proximate, active and complex mediated experience of distant suffering than television news.

Museus: Engajamento e colaboração

Until recently, plan actions in a museum was to gather content, and objects trigger a significant volume of information and collections to be exhibited for public enjoyment through exhibitions, educational activities, ultimately aimed at different public programs. Our commitment was to bring to light collections asleep in technical reserves, arrange them in an interesting way, fulfilling a chronological or thematic script, add them a lot of historical, scientific or artistic relevant information, and wait for our audience seize the entire data volume we offer them. Gradually, waves of unrest and irreverent questioning were ravaging the day to day of museums and, somehow, they were showing us that the senses should be multiple, plural. The progress of audience studies, the advent of the internet and the scope of social media, among other social and global changes of relevance, scoured the museum world so radically that it is imperative that we reflect, relax and prepare for a new time, which has now come to the museum turns into an increasingly space-forum, a territory of experiences, , shares and innovation. This text seeks to discuss some aspects of museum-forum, the museum who cares to search, to ask, to listen, to discuss, to share, to seek, to contribute to building a more just, pluralistic society, more worthy, truer, and therefore inclusive. This is the essence that should guide the museological action, committed to the reality in which the museum operates with the society that gives it meaning, with the actions that the community elects, the practices that she recognizes as her and decides to encode and perpetuated for the future. Key words: Sharing; participation; collaboration; innovation; museology;

Reading the BDSM romance: Reader responses to Fifty Shades

This article presents the results of survey data from readers of the Fifty Shades novel series. It is almost 30 years since Janice Radway’s (1984) Reading the Romance was published and audience studies have burgeoned. However, public discourse about E L James’s trilogy was couched in assumptions about ‘formulaic’ genre fiction, alongside debates about its ‘mainstreaming’ of BDSM, and little of this discussion drew upon the voices of readers. Our research reveals readers’ complex, often contradictory, responses to the novels. For these readers, the acts of reading and discussing the novels offer a range of (dis)pleasures, from erotic enjoyment to the amusements of critique; from self-gratification to participation in cultural dialogue.

Countering cultural hegemony: Audience research in the Arab world

Abstract The article provides a critical review of Arab scholarship on audience studies, focusing on the themes and different traditions adopted by Arab scholars, such as positivism versus cultural studies. Drawing on several examples of audience studies in the Arab world, I argue that this type of research has been influenced by the call to document and counter western cultural hegemony. While the majority of these studies quantitatively measure media consumption in terms of time used on these media and type of programmes watched, the underpinning assumption is the need to counter the negative impact of imported cultural programmes on Arab audiences, particularly youth. I argue that Arab researchers here are situated as experts detached from the audiences, thereby positioning themselves in a knowledge hierarchy above the subjects of their research. The review shows the implied view of Arab audiences as passive receivers of information, and potential victims of the recent technological innovation of communication.

Media territories and urban conflict

This article deals with the media-related practices enacted by social actors during urban conflict. Its theoretical objective is to stress the need for audience studies to focus on social actors’ concrete practices and, consequently, to switch from essentialist notions of ‘audiences’ to ‘audiencing’ as a practice. This makes it necessary to build theoretical and methodological bridges between audience and urban studies. Focusing on a conflict between Chinese migrants and Italian residents in an area of Milan, the article employs the concept of ‘media territories’ to account for the heterogeneous assemblages of media platforms, contents and devices mobilised by social actors to make sense of the conflict and to impose their own representations of the self, of competitors and of urban space. Within these assemblages, audiencing forms an important ‘secondary’ activity, whose sense can be understood only in relation to the other practices involved. The exploration of these assemblages is necessary for coming to grips with social actors’ conflictual media practices, and to understand the dynamics of urban conflict in media-saturated contexts.

Selective believability: A perspective on Africans’ interactions with global media

Abstract The transformation of the media landscape, facilitated by advances in communications technologies, has changed the dynamics of media-audience relationship and posed new challenges to reception research. Perhaps nowhere is this as profound as it is in transnational audience studies, for cross-cultural interactions have never been wider. This article attempts to highlight a new perspective on African audiences’ engagement with global media and point to new postulates in audience research. It briefly reviews key reception theories, ranging from the effects tradition to active audience paradigm and encoding-decoding model. It then offers a case study on Northern Nigerians’ interactions with international media, particularly the BBC World Service, to unveil the patterns and consequences of such interactions. The mainly Muslim Northern Nigerians were found to be high consumers of western media products, especially the BBC’s, but with high level of selectivity. Although they regard BBC as the most credible broadcaster that aids their understanding of international affairs and influences their everyday lives, they still see it as a western ideological instrument that portrays the West positively and depicts the Islamic world and Africa negatively. The findings reveal patterns and particularities of postcolonial audiences’ consumption of transnational media that suggest new theoretical postulates in reception research. They indicate the audiences’ tendency to exhibit a phenomenon of ‘selective believability’ in their interactions with international media. They also highlight the mediating roles of religion, culture, ideology and other extra-communication factors in such interactions, and identify the dynamics of credibility and believability. Credibility appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for believability in audiences’ consumption of dissonant messages.

Pride and popcorn: consuming the idea of community at film screenings in the Turkish diaspora

A range of studies have revealed the interrelatedness of identity construction, community formation and media among diasporas, mostly focusing on domestic contexts. Seeking to add further nuance to the understanding of the social lives of diasporas, we concentrate on media culture in the public environment of the film theatre. The significance of diasporic film consumption is investigated through a local audience study of Turkish film screenings in Antwerp. The phenomenon of the screenings was analysed through a multi-method approach, including 536 questionnaires among audiences, 19 in-depth interviews and 3 group interviews, along with previous findings (on distribution and exploitation) of the same project. The results show that Turkish films are almost exclusively attended by people with Turkish roots, creating a Turkish diasporic space within the boundaries of the urban and the public. The audience study shows that the screenings fulfil a major social role but also affect understandings of community.

Revisiting the NRI ‘genre’: Indian diasporic engagements with NRI and multiplex films

As a nodal point in the global presence of Indian cinema, films about Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) have become a cherished object of textual analysis. Research on this topic has challenged diasporic representations in the NRI ‘genre’, but at the same time has linked them up with actual diasporas. Based on the results of an audience study conducted through in-depth interviews, this article critically reviews the consumption of NRI films by diasporic audiences. The responses of diasporic Indians to such films in Antwerp (Belgium) revealed that this audience related neither to the implied diasporic spectator nor to the actual audience nor to the diasporic representations in these films in a straightforward way. Therefore, the article equally assesses the diasporic Indian consumption of ‘multiplex films’ and the preference for realism related to the latter.

Sleeping with the enemy: Audience studies and critical literacy

Audience studies is not the vibrant field it was in its 1980s and early 1990s heyday. Cultural studies today has a more balanced interest in production, audiences and texts. A renewed focus in audience studies on everyday meaning production, identity and relations of power could benefit from recent developments. Theorization of power especially has benefited from recent work on governmentality. In accord with recent work on ‘affect’, there is an opportunity for renewed vitality and urgency. Was audience studies damaged beyond repair by the charge that it is a populist field that celebrates rather than interrogates everyday media culture? Could a concept such as cultural literacy provide a bridge to help re-establish the critical credibility of audience studies or would it burden this field with its implied notions of standards, distinction and cultural exclusion? The article discusses recent work with youth audiences to inquire into the possibilities of ‘critical literacy’. It proposes taking up questions and insights raised by affect theory, to merge appreciation, criticism and understanding of the forces that drive (the possibility of) change, and to embed critical literacy in cultural studies’ ongoing interest in the construction of (cultural) citizenship.

Interview with Armand Mattelart

Interview with Armand Mattelart, June 7, 2012 Interview conducted by James Hay, Jayson Harsin, & Jim Cohen Interview translated by Jayson Harsin Interview edited by James Hay, Jayson Harsin, Jim Co...

A Study of the General Programming Channels Audience : Relatives Between Gratification Sought and Gratification Obtained

A Study of the General Programming Channels Audience : Relatives Between Gratification Sought and Gratification Obtained

Contested Meanings: Audience Studies and the Concept of Cultural Identity

The aim of the essay is twofold: First, through a literary expose, Andre Jansson tries to come to terms with the meaning of cultural identity. How shall the concept be theoretically defined? And how shall it be distinguished from the general concept of identity, and from more particular (and often very recklessly used) types, such as collective identity or social identity? Second, he makes an analysis of how the concept of cultural identity is related to media use. What does the interaction look like? And how shall the concept of cultural identity be approached within audience studies?

Diasporas and Audience Studies: A Fruitful Match? Reflections From a Media Ethnographic Study on Turkish and Moroccan Film Audiences

Diasporic communities, especially in urban multicultural settings in the West, have emerged as one of the major sites for innovative audience research. This growing body of research connects media sociological questions with the study of global and transnational media flows. In this contribution, some of the main studies on diasporic audiences are revisited, exploring in which ways diaspora studies and audience studies have turned out to be a fruitful match. This is linked to and further exemplified by the discussion of a media ethnographic study of film reception among the Turkish and Moroccan communities in Antwerp, Belgium. It is demonstrated how the ‘diasporic turn’ reformulates traditional boundaries in audience research, proposing banal yet meaningful engagements with media texts. Finally, it is argued that a focus on diasporic audiences has revealed that ethnicity and nationality intersect with other social and cultural determinants such as gender, generation and religion, putting the diasporic proposition itself into perspective.

Audiences, Cosmopolitanism, and Inequality in Black British Jazz

In one sense, jazz is a marginal cultural form in Britain. Poised uneasily between high and low culture, state subsidy and commerce, and youthful and aging cohorts, jazz has a relatively small listenership. Jazz is also an imported genre, and whereas in the country of its origin, the United States, black musicians have played a central, even defining role in its development, it is not clear at first glance how far jazz made by black Britons can be identified as a specifically black tradition or as simply the contribution of individual black musicians, always a minority, to the larger British scene (see Toynbee in this issue). Still, precisely because of its ambiguous position on the cusp of a number of key sociocultural divides, black British jazz, as we will tentatively call it, raises important issues to do with cultural values, race, and class. We want to suggest that its location makes it symptomatic, if not typical, of certain contradictions in contemporary British culture and beyond. In particular, it makes an illuminating case study in the cosmopolitanism that, among others, the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Natan Snzaider (2006) argue characterizes the present conjuncture. A key point for these writers is that cosmopolitanism is unremarkable and unfolds beneath the surface or behind the facades of persisting national spaces, jurisdiction and labelling (8). Generated by increasing migration, global trade, and cultural exchange, it is an emergent social process that involves really-existing relations of interdependence between different peoples. We would suggest that black British jazz encapsulates just this kind of practical cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, our central argument is that it is also riven in important ways by inequality. Indeed, what is so significant is that inequality, across both race and class, impacts strongly on a musical culture that seems to carry the promise of cosmopolitan encounter and mutual understanding between black and white, high art and popular culture. The present article aims to explore how this is so through a study of audiences at jazz concerts in the United Kingdom featuring black British musicians. Perhaps we ought to begin by examining some of the historical context through which black British jazz has emerged in the present moment. When, during the mid-1980s, a generation of British-born black musicians turned to jazz from reggae and funk (the Jazz Warriors orchestra was crucial here), they were hailed by the media and record companies. Performances and recordings soon found a and relatively young white audience in addition to the peer group of the musicians themselves. For a while, black British jazz was strongly correlated with subcultural capital (Thornton 1995). In the context of the times, shortly after the New Cross fire and the inner city riots of the early 1980s in the UK, (1) this was on the face of it at least a moment of hope, emblematic of what Stuart Hall (1988) saw as a turn towards new In contrast to a fixed form of ethnic identity--black--formed in response to racialization in the postwar period, ethnicities were fluid, open, and multifaceted, Hall suggested. (2) Above all, they were creative in that the kinds of cultural expression in which they were manifest were innovative and hybrid. Hall was discussing black cinema rather than music, but the Jazz Warriors surely fitted well with his characterization of the culture of ethnicities. Here was a form of musical cosmopolitanism, involving the interaction of notionally American jazz with musics of the Caribbean, and played mainly by the children of migrants to Britain. Now, more than twenty-five years later, black British musicians continue to play jazz, and indeed they appear to have consolidated their position and generated a self-sufficient tradition, a tradition with a strong sense of its own identity. Many have also become actively involved in music education as a way of passing on that tradition and giving inner-city youth access to what they understand as being an important art form. …

The Geopolitical Audience: Watching Quantum of Solace (2008) in London

This article argues for the intersection of popular geopolitics and audience studies in audience power. This is demonstrated through a survey of viewers attending the James Bond film Quantum of Solace (QoS) at three theatres in the greater London area. Geography emerged as relevant to audiences in three forms. First, geography was understood as a catalyst for resource-based wars, providing an opportunity to reflect on these conflicts and their future likelihood. Second, geography serves as a difference engine for producing tension and excitement. Finally, geography emerged through the situatedness of viewing and rhizomatic nature of subjectivity. However, these geographies must be understood as part of a larger geopolitical assemblage that is animated by audience power. In conclusion, we argue for an understanding of geopolitical space as constituted through audiences’ constituent power to produce topologies. While audiences did not transform QoS into a radical text, this potential remains latent.

Where Is National Cinema Today (and Do We Still Need It)?

"National cinema" is often questioned as a category, yet persists as a way of advertising national qualities, both culturally and economically. Although a founding concept in the writing of cinema history, it has recently been stigmatized as an equivalent of the national literatures promoted by nineteenth-century bourgeois elites, and also challenged by an emphasis on the transnational, yet can be demonstrated to have an empirical basis in audience studies.

Post-Postmodernism: Automodernity and Its Relevance to Understanding Contemporary Media Audiences

The current paper aims to review the most relevant currents of thought in studying mass-media audiences and connect them with the concept of “automodernity,” as developed by Robert Samuels in his book New Media, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory after Postmodernism. The first section of the paper provides an analysis of the evolution registered in the field of audience studies, from regarding audiences as a vulnerable crowd of media recipients to viewing them as empowered groups of media consumers, who are able to select and intervene inside the media products they prefer. From the surfacing of audience studies research in the 1940s and the development of the “hypodermic needle” theory to the contemporary theories regarding active audiences, the first section of the paper observes how the field progressed over time. Building on these ideas, the second section introduces the concept of “automodernity,” used by Robert Samuels to describe Western culture after postmodernism, and explores its relevance to understanding contemporary media audiences.

Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials.

Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. Third edition. London: Sage, 2012. 386 pp. $51.00 paperback (978-0-85702-888-4) I begin with the suggestion that Rose's book addresses slightly different topics than it claims to. Rather than an overview per se, the book consists primarily eight essays that analyze how some topics have been studied visually, and in some instances, how have been constructed to do so. Discussion topic and method are generally paired. For example interpretation is applied to fine arts paintings and films (and video games, less convincingly); content is applied to the study National Geographic magazine photographs; semiology (semiotics) is almost entirely devoted to the study advertising; psychoanalysis to the study sexual difference in film. The pairing continues with I, which combines documentary or historical images with other forms data, but it breaks down II, which is a study institutionalization visuality rather than the study per se. Rose's chapter on studies and beyond reviews the long tradition television audience studies before turning to new studies, including ethnographies family photo worlds, mass media viewing, and other forms viewing in society. Finally, her chapter on visual research methods attempts to review all research in which researchers make rather than find images in thirty brief pages. The schema is presented as a table on page 45, and is easier to grasp in that form. From this perspective the book is an interesting inquiry into ways seeing, with commentary on what work for each topic, rather than a text on methods. For example, at the end her chapter on Discourse Analysis II she writes, there are no methodologically explicit deployments discourse II that I know of (p. 259). Liberating the book from an attempt to place all chapters under the umbrella would, in my view, allow for a fuller appreciation what the book does accomplish. This is especially the case since she moves through ethnography and other field with such alarming alacrity. Some especially noteworthy general themes include the idea that images should not and cannot be reduced to their causes or even constituent parts. There is always something greater; something in the gestalt seeing that defies definition. The chapter on content raises the interesting issue how to code images, and the overview semiotics questions assumptions that photos contain deep structures and messages. By using social semiotics to study the social landscapes new Apple stores, Rose shows that semiotics may survive its disappearing subject matter print advertising. In fact her attempt to analyze a recent ad for an Alfa Romeo automobile (p. 125) using the traditional Barthes-inspired approach, seems forced rather than illuminating. The book draws upon a huge intellectual landscape, including Freud (scopophilia), Lacan, Foucault, Sekula, and Haraway, among others. Often the chapters are deconstructions and recontextualizations the arguments these giants, although the spirits some them might appear bemused to find themselves treated as visual methodologists. Rose defines criteria for a critical analysis which are applied to each approach. These include an admonition to look carefully at images, to understand the social basis their making, and to include an element reflexivity, here defined as a dialogue on how the process making data are part those data themselves. Interestingly enough, most the approaches or covered do to not measure up to these criteria. For example, compositional looks carefully at images but does not address social practices and reflexivity; content also looks carefully at images but does not study the social practices production and has nothing to do with reflexivity. …

Reflections on Communication and Sport

In this essay, Lawrence Wenner reflects on the social and cultural importance of communication about sport. He considers the major influences on his research agenda and how the evolution of his research program came to change over time from one centered on empirical audience study to one anchored in critical and cultural studies. In a focus section on reading sport and narrative ethics, the constituent parts of a “dirt theory of narrative ethics” are framed and contextualized as a response to the increasing presses of commodification on sport-referential narratives. The essay closes with a look ahead for communication and sport research that encourages researchers to turn increasing attention to both institutional/organizational studies and audience studies in order to supplement our critical understandings of sport media texts and narratives.