The Handbook of Media Audiences

Virginia Nightingale

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781118721391, 9781405184182
• eBook ISBN: 9781444340501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the complexity and diversity of audience studies in the advent of digital media.

• Details the study of audiences and how it is changing in relation to digital media
• Recognizes and appreciates valuable traditional approaches and identifies how they can be applied to, and evolve with, the changing media world
• Offers diverse perspectives from which being an audience, theorizing audiences, researching audiences, and doing audience research are approached today
• Argues that the field works best by identifying particular 'audience problems' and applying the best theories and research methods available to solving them
• Includes contributions from some of the most outstanding international scholars in the field

Part I

Being Audiences

1

Readers as Audiences

Wendy Griswold, Elizabeth Lenaghan, and Michelle Naffziger

“Reading,” an instantly recognizable and socially valued activity, has boundaries that are difficult to discern. Changes in both the delivery of written words and the breadth of access to them have drawn attention to the instability of concepts like “the reader” and “the book/text.” There is nothing new about this. When a letter from a student abroad in London arrived in a colonial Nigerian village, a literate community member would transmit its contents to the nonliterate parents. Who is the reader here? Is it the person who mechanically translates the letter from written to oral form, or the parents who memorize the contents and scrutinize the words for what is said and left unsaid? What is the text, the words on paper or the set of connotations and implications drawn by the parents? Online reading and electronic media present such questions in a different technological form and context, but they remain the same questions. The analyst may take an expansive or restrictive view of the process and practices, but the absence of bright lines between reading and some other activity (e.g. scanning blogs or downloading podcasts of news reports) is a constant.

That being the case, the following discussion is shaped by several choices. First, we are not focusing on literacy – as in who develops the capacity to decode writing – but on the practices of reading. Second, in keeping with most of the social scientific and indeed the popular uses of the term, we define reading to be leisure time reading; literacy is required for an increasing percentage of occupations worldwide, but to say someone is “a reader” or “likes to read” refers to their leisure pursuits rather than to their occupational requirements. Third, we draw primarily on the research involving traditional genres, especially “the book.” While the ways in which texts can reach their potential audience are rapidly evolving and multiplying, books continue to be the model that new media emulate, as when electronic reading devices, like Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle, replicate the printed page.

A reader is an individual, and readers are aggregates of individuals, but an audience is a collectivity, a mass phenomenon whose attributes are not the sum of individual components. So what might conceiving of readers as “an audience” offer us? Conceptualizing readers-as-audience encourages an emphasis, first, upon the social, economic, and political context in which reading takes place; and, second, upon the agency of readers as constructors of meaning, images of passivity having been superseded by those that emphasize interpretive agency.¹

Cultural studies, to take a prominent disciplinary example, has looked at readers in context since its mid-twentieth-century inception. Hoggart (1957) considered television, along with “degraded” media such as magazines, a threat to the traditional rhythms and values of British working-class life, while Wertham (1955) argued that comic books endangered the sensibilities and morality of young Americans. By the mid-1980s, the image of vulnerable readers gave way to an emphasis on resilience and resistance (Willis 1977; Morley 1980; Fiske 1989). This made way not only for readers to be understood as more active interpreters of texts, but also for less canonical interpretations of texts to gain legitimacy, as in Radway’s (1984) seminal look at how women readers of romance novels rationalize their practice and understand its meaning in ways not suggested by the ontological boundaries of the text itself.

Both linguistic and cultural studies theories find contemporary analogs in reader response criticism and reception studies. Emerging directly from the structuralist and poststructuralist movements (including Barthes 1968/1977), reader response criticism emphasizes the individual reader’s role in constructing the meaning of texts. Reception studies, while also emphasizing the individual’s role in meaning making, go to greater lengths to situate individual responses within a larger cultural context. In its earliest incarnations, both reader response criticism and reception studies found inspiration in the work of Jauss (1982) and Iser (1974, 1978), whose phenomenological approaches to reading were seen as a departure from the Marxist emphasis on production (see also Fish 1980). Feminist and ethnic studies scholars, rejecting the concept of the “universal reader,” have explored discrete, marginalized text communities (Radway 1997; Bobo 1992; Currie 1999; Sonnet 1999, 2000).

An audience perspective, then, suggests that the analyst might conceive of readers, or of a readership, as a collective body. The readers-as-audience may share socioeconomic and/or demographic characteristics, may be targeted as a group, and may respond to or resist literary messages. Furthermore, members of the collectivity may influence one another through interaction or because of a shared identification. The scale of the audience (from universal to micro) is an empirical question, as is the degree of agency the group exercises. Beyond what they share with all audiences, readers have specific and defining attributes as well. These include both the material conditions that reading entails and the social practices and institutions surrounding reading. An audience for a live concert, for example, is interacting with a transient cultural object compared with a book’s stability and availability; a theater audience has the potential for collective effervescence while a reading audience is an abstraction from what are typically private engagements with texts. Following is a consideration of how these specific attributes impact the readers-as-audience model.

Books as Material Objects, Reading as Physical Practice

Taking into account the material properties of books means considering how the physical act of reading is directly tied to the physicality of books themselves. The burgeoning field of book history contains a number of steps in this direction. McKenzie (1985) and McGann (1983) helped to move textual studies beyond the impulse to create essentialist distinctions between different types of texts (i.e. print vs. digital) and back toward a rhetoric of material forms. McGann, in particular, has specified what he terms “the poetics of the book” to discuss the production and distribution of books in terms of their material properties (page format, paper, typeface etc.). As Chartier (2002) has since argued,

Readers, in fact, never confront abstract, idealized texts detached from any materiality. They hold in their hands, or perceive, objects and forms whose structures and modalities govern their reading or hearing and consequently the possible comprehension of the text read or heard. (p. 48)

Chartier, like McGann, emphasizes the importance of the institutional structures governing the reception and production of books, concluding,

We must insist that there is no text outside the material structure in which it is given to be read or heard. Thus there is no comprehension of writing, whatever it may be, which does not depend in some part upon the forms in which it comes to the reader. (p. 51)

The material culture approach, which focuses on these forms, offers a position from which to theorize the physical role of the book, even though it sometimes concentrates on the book-as-object to an extent that obscures the complexities of the surrounding social world. Other studies maintain a balance between attention to the physical properties of the book and the social world in which books circulate.² Some of the most successful efforts look at archival evidence from the beginnings of book printing and circulation to explore the role of books in the development of society and culture (Johns 1998; Swann 2001; Andersen and Sauer 2004; Brown 2007; Chartier 2007). In addition to detailing what books were printed and read in the burgeoning print cultures of early modern Europe and colonial America, these studies also detail how books were purchased, circulated, and displayed in both private and public places. This attention to the consumption and social rituals surrounding books, necessarily, pays close attention to their representation as material objects.

Another trend in recent research has responded to the perceived threat that digital content poses for the book as physical object by focusing on how the material forms of both historic and contemporary texts carry meanings that cannot be found in their digital reproductions. Journals such as Modern Intellectual History and PMLA, for example, have published special issues on book history that, according to editorial introductions, were inspired by just these concerns (Price 2006; Bell 2007). Lerer’s (2006) epilogue to PMLA’s effort explicitly addresses this growing attention in both the scholarly and popular understanding of books. He counters decades-old predictions of the book’s demise with centuries-old accounts of the joys of reading in bed, suggesting that he “can’t imagine curling up with a computer” and elaborating, “I can imagine falling asleep in front of a screen but not ‘over’ one, the preposition over powerfully carries with it both the physical place of the reader and the imaginative space generated by that place” (p. 234, emphasis in original).

Lerer’s attempt to distinguish the book from its digital form, based entirely on its physical properties, is echoed in the more popular accounts of journalists and bloggers, whose chronicles of the latest e-book ventures suggestively call into question the sorts of casual (though valued) facets of reading culture that might be lost to e-reading technology. These accounts include the serendipitous pleasures of digesting the titles consumed by fellow readers in coffee shops or on public transport, judging the tastes of potential lovers from the books in their collection, or taking in the smells and sights of public research libraries (Crain 2007; Grafton 2007; Dominus 2008; Donadio 2008). The significance of the loss of such encounters and the gains of digitalization is explored by professional organizations such as the (now) transatlantic Institute for the Future of the Book.³

Together, both print and digital as well as the academic and popular attempts to examine the significance of the physical form of the book point toward a contemporary desire to acknowledge and understand the importance of books as material objects. The consequences of such study not only help us to understand the role that books play in the larger social milieu in which reading takes place, but also indicate that the value of reading may not be solely determined by the content of books alone. Rather the materiality of books might determine both the propensity for, and the pleasure in, reading.

Books as Social Objects, Reading as Social Practice⁴

Historically a culture’s “reading class” (Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright 2005) has been populated by a small minority, usually of men engaged in commerce or in religious or government administration. So a reading class is not the same as a broad-based reading culture, and indeed reading classes often flourish without reading cultures. Qing Dynasty China, for example, was administered by a reading class populated by the bureaucrats known as the literati, while most Chinese were illiterate. The manuscript culture of medieval European monasteries and the Koranic interpretation of conservative Islamic cultures of the past and present offer clear examples of elite reading classes separate from reading cultures. Readers, therefore, have been a privileged minority throughout most of human history. Although written records and communications became established in certain institutional niches, most people continued to occupy themselves with basic tasks – farming and hunting, tending children, and fighting – for which reading and writing were not much help. Reading was mainly useful for activities involving coordination and memory – administration, trade, and organized religion – and early readers were the people involved in these activities: rulers and their staffs, merchants, and priests. Even in so-called literate societies, the vast majority, including almost all women, almost all rural people, and most slaves, did not read.

Every society that has writing has a reading class, but not everyone who can read is a member. All societies with written language have a reading class, but few have a reading culture. A reading culture is a society where reading is expected, valued, and common. A reading class has a stable set of characteristics that include its human capital (education), its economic capital (wealth, income, occupational positions), its social capital (networks of personal connections), its demographic characteristics (gender, age, religion, ethnic composition), and – the defining and noneconomic characteristic – its cultural practices. Only during the past two centuries, and only in northwestern Europe, North America, Japan, and a few cities elsewhere, did reading become routine. It took the Industrial Revolution for reading to become a common leisure time activity, because when industrialism began to give way to the postindustrial society, reading became a vehicle to achieve secure employment in better jobs. In this handful of places, the reading culture also became a “reading audience” in which the majority of the adult population participated. So while the term readers could refer to each and any of these reading formations, it may be useful to reserve the term reading audience for readers whose reading experiences settle on a particular type of reading material.⁵ For some material the reading audience may both be considerable and be largely independent of the reading class. An example is the immense reading audience for evangelical Christian fiction (E. Smith 2007). For other materials, such as academic research texts, the reading audience may be quite tiny.

In countries with essentially total adult literacy, something like half of all adults read books now and then, and something like 15% are heavy readers, the heart and soul of the reading class.

Surveys of reading conducted in various high-income countries over the past 50 years have repeatedly found that about 80 to 90 percent of the population reads something; 50 to 60 percent of the population reads books as a chosen leisure activity; and 10 to 15 percent of the population are avid readers, who borrow and buy the lion’s share of books, magazines, newspapers, and other media consumed. (Ross, McKechnie, and Rothbauer 2006, pp. 17–18)

The NEA (2004) survey found that about 17% of Americans are frequent readers (reading 12–49 books/year), while only 4% are avid readers (reading 50+ books per year). Internationally, these figures vary somewhat – Scandinavians and Japanese are particularly heavy readers, while southern Europeans read less – but the basic pattern is roughly the same in developed countries: most people can read and do so as their work or daily lives require, about half read for leisure, and a few read a great deal.

The demographic patterns for developed countries are consistent as well. Readers in general (the 50% or so who read books) and the reading class (the 15% or so who read a lot) are highly educated; their amount of education is by far the strongest predictor of whether or not someone reads. They also tend to be urban, affluent, middle-aged, and female. The picture is often different in developing countries, where male literacy is invariably higher than female literacy and where older cohorts may have considerably less education than younger ones. Developed or not, individual countries often vary along religious and ethnic lines too; some minorities (e.g. African Americans) read less than average even when education is controlled, while others (Jews in North America and Europe) read more.

Readers have distinctive social characteristics as well. They tend to be very involved in cultural and civic life. Surveys show that readers have high rates of participation in the arts. Perhaps more surprising, given popular images of bookworms as introverts being lost in their reading, readers score higher than nonreaders on virtually all measures of civic and political participation: voting, membership in associations, and volunteerism. It is this tendency toward active participation, along with the characteristics of education and affluence, that give the reading class power and influence far beyond its relatively modest numbers.

So while elegies for the “death of the book/print/reading” hearken back to a time when the book/print/reading lived and flourished, taken in historical perspective, this period was a mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century anomaly. Today, as the use of electronic media increases, we are seeing a return to the norm: a thin slice of “readers” cut from a loaf of nonread...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Being Audiences
• Part II Theorizing Audiences
• Part III Researching Audiences
• Part IV Doing Audience Research
• Index