Meanings of Audiences

Comparative Discourses

Richard Butsch, Sonia Livingstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415837309
• eBook ISBN: 9781135043049
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In today's thoroughly mediated societies people spend many hours in the role of audiences, while powerful organizations, including governments, corporations and schools, reach people via the media. Consequently, how people think about, and organizations treat, audiences has considerable significance.

This ground-breaking collection offers original, empirical studies of discourses about audiences by bringing together a genuinely international range of work. With essays on audiences in ancient Greece, early modern Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Zimbabwe, contemporary Egypt, Bengali India, China, Taiwan, and immigrant diaspora in Belgium, each chapter examines the ways in which audiences are embedded in discourses of power, representation, and regulation in different yet overlapping ways according to specific socio-historical contexts.

Suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, this book is a valuable and original contribution to media and communication studies. It will be particularly useful to those studying audiences and international media.

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INTRODUCTION

“Translating” audiences, provincializing Europe

Richard Butsch and Sonia Livingstone

This book seeks to highlight the importance of developing a comparative understanding of discourses about audiences. The focus is on discourse, as distinct from the complementary and more usual focus on audience composition, interpretation, and practices. We examine terms – comparative “keywords” (Williams 1976) one might say – and the discourses of which they are a part in cultures across the globe. But it is not simply an exercise in translation, nor simply a study of audiences. It is also a concerted effort to grasp the construction of meanings and power across diverse cultural contexts.

We chose this topic because audiences, discourses about them, and cross-cultural comparisons of these discourses are important not only for audience studies and global media studies, but also for policy and practices beyond the academic. First, in the media-saturated environments that are now even beginning to envelope rural peoples and poorer nations, the sheer number of hours spent at audiencing each day seems to make it self-evident that media use cannot be treated as a peripheral activity (Fiske 1994). Second, talk about audiences, public discourse, is itself important and revealing, often characterizing audiences not simply as aspects of leisure and entertainment, but in ways that link them integrally to politics and citizenship, economics and prosperity, education and cultural improvement, morality and family life. Moreover, discourses are tools of power, means of social control. They define reality and provide bases and justifications for people's actions and institutional practices. And media constitute the modern institution of discourse where audiences are defined and framed. Third, in today's globalized world we need to become aware of representations of and discourses about audiences across diverse cultures and languages around the world, today and back into the past. Awareness of such discourses may provide new insights about audiences and audience studies. To do this we bridge audience studies and global media studies, both relatively recent and productive areas of inquiry. While both have made great strides in the last two decades, further advance for each can benefit from linking the two.

Developing such a comparative approach to discourses is not simple, but faces daunting difficulties. Not least among these is the fundamental task of translation and anthropology: how to communicate the nuance, context, and holistic experience of one culture to those from another culture. A related task is de-Westernization, to peel back Western influence in these very discourses, to attempt to reveal ways of seeing that are distinctive to these other cultures, and independent of ideas and categories imported from the West through political, economic, or cultural hegemony.

Our method was to seek new empirical evidence in diverse nations, cultures, and languages. We began straightforwardly by inquiring into terminology used at different times and places, by governments, private capital, religions, social movements, or others, to describe and characterize audiences. Answering these apparently simple questions and explaining in English their meaning and significance was in itself empirically effortful. We further considered with what consequence and to whose benefit some discourses prevailed. Our hope is that significant insights can be gleaned about these cultures and their perceptions of audiences, while minimizing any loss of nuance from the translation into English. For the reader, the potential to read across from one chapter, one period, and/or one part of the world to another is likely to prove productive for future research.

We recognize that, as English-speaking Westerners, we bring a problematic dimension to a project focused on cultures outside the West. Indeed, it is with care that we specify certain continents, nations, and cultures as “non-Western,” or “other,” or “native.” We do not intend the historical baggage these terms carry, but use them for want of terms without baggage. Nevertheless, we ask you to bear with us, for we think this project important to the continued vitality of audience studies, for the critical analysis of people embedded in their often heavily mediated societies, and for the ongoing effort to understand the flows, connections, and conflicts among cultures, including our own. Note that in this project we use the term “Western” not to indicate geography, but as shorthand for the shared cultural traditions of modern Western Europe and North America. We have sought to transcend and peer beyond those traditions to learn new ways of understanding audiences comparatively and transculturally.

Yet as revealed by the chapters that follow, there are many apparent similarities across cultures in their conceptions of audiences. This could be due to the universality of the concepts or to the advanced state of processes of globalization. Discourses of “crowd” and “community” emerge as very widespread phenomena. The concept of publics, strongly tied to the idea of democracy, seems less universal and more culturally specific. Although the concept of audiences itself seems likely to be universal, we learn in this volume that there were no ready-made terms for this in Chinese or Arabic. Indeed, using Google Ngram and the Oxford English Dictionary, in English the term “audience” only became predominant recently. “Spectator” was far more common than “audience” in nineteenth-century books. Moreover, “audience” still was used primarily in its older sense of an authority giving an audience. “Spectator” begins to decline after the turn of the century, reaching a lower plateau about 1920. It is only in the 1920s that “audience” approaches closely the frequency of “spectator,” and only exceeds it in the mid-1930s. This shift appeared about the same time as cinema and then radio, and with systematic efforts to measure radio audiences. “Listener” appears on the scene in the 1920s along with radio, and “viewers” in the 1950s along with television. This within-culture variation seems to suggest that this terminology is culturally specific and the similarities to be observed across cultures have more to do with globalization than with universality. Arguably, future efforts to discover unique and different perspectives should focus on communities, villages or tribes as yet less touched by global influence, including modern media. However, in starting this project, it was far from obvious what patterns of similarity or difference would be revealed across the cultures already included in this volume.

Understanding audiences and discourse

Audience studies have flourished with the rise of a new paradigm of active audiences that re-established them as actors in their own lives, and placed media in the context of both the micro-climate of social interactions among family, friends, and community, and the larger landscape of cultural hegemony and resistance. It has become an established and rich field of knowledge; the field has now reached a plateau and awaits fertile new areas of inquiry. We believe that the study of discourses about audiences is one such promising area of inquiry. Among other things, this focus promises to integrate the study of audiences more broadly into other areas of society, such as inequality, and political, economic, and other social institutions and related issues.

There is a surprising amount of public discourse about audiences that one finds when one begins to look for it. And such discourse is consequential. When seeking historical documentation of audience composition and behavior in the US for The Making of American Audiences, it was often clear that many passages discussing audiences were not dispassionate, objective descriptions, not simply an historical record, but rather were insistently normative discourses about the audiences (Butsch 2000). Pursuing this research further for The Citizen Audience, it became evident that much American characterization of audiences – as crowds, masses, publics, consumers – could be understood as measuring audiences against a standard of good citizenship (Butsch 2008, 2011). Nineteenth-century stage audiences were characterized as disorderly crowds, and mid-twentieth-century television audiences as an inert mass of isolated individuals. Talk about audiences is expressed in moral panics and censorship debates about media, or as fear of the “masses” and of deviance and social disorder, or anxieties about “dumbing down” or cultural decline. Scholars have not been neutral here, their often pejorative claims about audiences legitimating wider anxieties about audiences (Livingstone 1998). Discourses on nationhood and nationalism create imagined communities (Anderson 2006 [1983]) by telling media audiences who they are and how they should behave as members of the nation, in particular in their role as audiences. American advertising for radio sets in the 1920s constructed radio listeners at first as men and teenage boys, and later as housewives. Public forum programs of the 1930s and 1940s framed audiences as responsible publics deliberating on the issues of the day. The tradition later extended to television (Livingstone and Lunt 1994).¹

We must also be aware of the culturally and historically contingent nature of discourse. What a term means in one language, culture, and time is not necessarily equivalent to its use elsewhere. Concepts no more stand still than does the world to which they purport to refer, so a global comparative frame must encompass not only place, but also time. While we begin with a place, and a language, as a way into cultural analysis of audiences, we also include an historical perspective, explaining “now” by locating it in a shifting and complex story of changes in both formal institutions and the practices of everyday life.

Even within present-day Europe, key concepts are differently inflected in different languages. The Audiences and Publics project (Livingstone 2005) began through an innocent misunderstanding – a French colleague looked puzzled at the English speaker's talk of “the audience”: does she mean “le public,” she asked her companion. But if “the audience” is to be translated as “le public,” what of the distinction, important in English, between audience and public? A lively discussion ensued to map the French lexicon where, to summarize simply, “audience” is an invention of the commercial ratings industry, “public” is the collectivity who watches television, and “l'espace public” captures the English concept of the public sphere (originally, the German Offenlichkeit). Having considered the French language, the English “translation” can be seen afresh as failing to demarcate “audience” as a vital collectivity engaged with the popular, from “audience” as measured by audience ratings; the public, however, maps neatly onto the public sphere, aiding the adoption of Habermas' concept within English language social theory through its very familiarity.² But herein lies another difficulty, between British English and American English, for although both readily accommodate not only “public” but also “public sphere” to their strong democratic traditions under modernity, to British ears “public” is less opposed to “audience” than in the US, because of its strong tradition of public service broadcasting, while in the US commercial system, “public” as a descriptor of audiences turns them into customers – and thus Habermas' gloomy prognostications about the mediated public sphere were heard with more skepticism on one side of the Atlantic than the other (Calhoun 1992; Weintraub 1997). If even English, French, and American scholars struggle to reach conceptual understanding, despite their considerable shared history and culture, what of more distant and disparate cultures? Anthropologist Stephanie Donald (2000), for example, noted that concepts of civil society and public sphere must be redefined in the context of Chinese culture and history. Such problems of translation likely occur with other terms, such as crowds, masses, and consumers, commonly used in English discourse depicting audiences (for a classic analysis, see Blumer [1946] 1961).

This challenge spurred us on in this project, as we became aware of an even greater need and potential benefit for cross-cultural understanding. We could not accomplish this alone. Therefore we recruited contributors familiar with both Western English scholarly discourse on audiences as well as discourses within another culture who thus could act as cultural “translators” for us and for our readers.

A comparative sensibility

The core of this project was to understand audiences through the eyes of cultures other than those of Euro-American Western audience studies. We looked to other cultures as a source of ideas to renew and expand our vision. Therefore, our purpose was to deepen the connection to global studies to bring cross- and transnational issues into the study of audiences (a project already begun by, for example, Juluri 2003; Lull 1988; Mankekar 1999; Naficy 1999). This meant, first of all, revealing concepts, categories, and representations of audiences distinctive or “native” to those cultures. The intent was to raise awareness of such difference and of the fact of the historical and cultural contingency of all discourses about audiences, Western discourses included. Second, it meant revealing the distinctive interpretations attached to Western representations of audiences that have been borrowed and incorporated into discourses in other cultures. It also meant acknowledging post-colonial critique and accepting the challenge of de-Westernizing media studies. Many others have addressed these issues (Chen 2006, 2008; Craig, Covarrubias, Miike, and Kim, all in Communication Monograph, 2007; Curran and Park 2000; Wang 2011). However, while acknowledging the need for de-Westernizing theory (and for provincializing Europe; Chakrabarty 2008 [2000]), this book is not an attempt to create distinct audience studies for different nations, but to extend audience studies generally by expanding our empirical base beyond the West and modernity, and inviting scholars from all quarters to use the resulting insights comparatively.

Post-colonial studies have their origins in colonial independence movements.³ These movements sought not only political and economic independence, but also psychological and cultural independence (Fanon 1963; Memmi 1965). But these latter aspects were particularly difficult to achieve, even after political independence. To dissect what was colonial legacy and what was “authentic” native culture in thinking, language, and culture was and is not so simple, and all the more so the more employment, language, and education became implicated in the colonial enterprise. Post-colonial studies began this intellectual independence by first rewriting colonial histories, trying to sort out fact from ideology (Chatterjee 1993; G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: “translating” audiences, provincializing Europe
• 2 Publics and audiences in ancient Greece
• 3 When curiosity met printing: audiences and new media in early modern history
• 4 Shoppers, dupes and other types: the television audience in post-Soviet Russian discourses
• 5 Between unruliness and sociality: discourses on diasporic cinema audiences for Turkish and Indian films
• 6 Producing loyal citizens and entertaining volatile subjects: imagining audience agency in colonial Rhodesia and post-colonial Zimbabwe
• 7 A consuming public: movie audiences in the Bengali cultural imaginary
• 8 “The mass wants this!”: how politics, religion, and media industries shape discourses about audiences in the Arab world
• 9 Egyptian audiences of musalsalat in the eye of the beholder
• 10 Senior audiences and the revolutionary subject in the People's Republic of China
• 11 The articulation of audience in Chinese communication research
• 12 From qunzhong to guanzhong: the evolving conceptualization of audience in mainland China
• 13 Active citizenship: the politics of imagining internet audiences in Taiwan
• Index