Audience Transformations

Shifting Audience Positions in Late Modernity

Nico Carpentier, Kim Christian Schrøder, Lawrie Hallett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138100961
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134064540
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of the audience is changing. In the twenty-first century there are novel configurations of user practices and technological capabilities that are altering the way we understand and trust media organizations and representations, how we participate in society, and how we construct our social relations. This book embeds these transformations in a societal, cultural, technological, ideological, economic and historical context, avoiding a naive privileging of technology as the main societal driving force, but also avoiding the media-centric reduction of society to the audiences that are situated within. Audience Transformations provides a platform for a nuanced and careful analysis of the main changes in European communicational practices, and their social, cultural and technological affordances.

1 Audience / Society Transformations

Nico Carpentier, Kim Christian Schrøder and
Lawrie Hallett

1. SOCIETAL TRANSFORMATIONS

There is a long history of sociological and philosophical work that has been mesmerised by social change. In particular, the transitions from traditional society to modern society (and, thereafter, to late modern—or postmodern, as some would say—society) have attracted considerable attention. For instance, early sociology, as Tonkiss (1998, 36) remarks, “evinced a fascination with the rapid social changes brought by industrialisation and technical innovation.” In philosophy, the Hegelian dialectics celebrated the unavoidability of change, while Marxist historical materialism explored the conditions of transcending constitutive social relations, and the Darwinist concept of evolution introduced a more diachronic perspective on change.

20th (and 21st) century social theory has not lost this fascination. On the contrary, contemporary social theory is structured through a wide variety of social change concepts, which emphasise the processual nature, as identified through the use of the “ion” suffix. For instance, Giddens (1991) Bauman (2000) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) have extensively argued that the present era is characterised by processes as detraditionalisation and individualisation. Based on the Weberian approach, rationalisation, professionalisation and bureaucratisation are still deemed key processes that help to describe how the (late) modern condition came into being. The same can be said in relation to other concepts such as industrialisation, urbanisation, democratisation, commercialisation, globalisation, and even mediatisation.

The above list of social change concepts—especially when its various elements are combined—offers a good overview of the many societal transformations that have resulted in the contemporary social condition, and it offers a context that is instrumental in the understanding of more specific processes, such as the audiences' usages of media. At the same time, we should be wary of accepting these broad social change concepts at face value, and acknowledge the many complexities and contradictions they also, inevitably, hide.

Firstly, when discussing transformations, we should keep in mind that the “trans” prefix—as one of us has argued elsewhere (Carpentier and Van Bauwel 2010)—refers to the oscillation of continuity and discontinuity, with a simultaneous coexistence of what is and what has been transgressed. Social change does not annihilate the past, but, rather, modifies and rearticulates parts of it. Moreover, the social is characterised by diversity, and encompasses many coexisting practices, some premodern, others modern, late modern and postmodern.

Secondly, analyses of transformation sometimes find it difficult to escape from the discourse of progress, and its essentialising normativities. Here both utopian (where progress is seen as desirable) and dystopian (where progress is blocked) perspectives bring in strong normative claims, embracing or rejecting processes in their entirety and thus standing in the way of more nuanced analyses. A further (and related) problem is the tendency to define processes of social change in linear ways, ignoring the complexities of these processes, and the many discontinuities that characterise them. For instance, as Foucault (1969/2002, 9) has argued, discontinuities should not be seen as “stigma of temporal dislocation” but should become (and indeed have become) “one of the basic elements of historical analysis.”

Finally, and almost paradoxically, the emphasis on social change has also had consequences for the ways in which continuity has been thematised and theorised. Sometimes, the strong focus on social change (implicitly) supports the idea that (late) modernity is characterised by permanent movement and instability, and that, consequently, continuity has ceased to exist. In other cases, the term continuity becomes embroiled in a language game within which it becomes articulated with the maintenance of social order and conservatism. Both positions lead to myopia.

All of the above implies that we have to advance prudently in dealing with social change, and strike a balance between discontinuity and continuity, nonlinearity and linearity, homogeneity and diversity, critique, celebration and hope. Nevertheless, the processes mentioned above provide us with an overview of the contemporary configuration, and of the actual changes that have taken place over time, and that still impact upon, and characterise, the contemporary (western) world. These processes are the contexts within which a series of audience-related transformations, studied in this book, are situated.

Audiencehood is intimately intertwined with our social realities, and cannot be detached from them, even when we focus solely on one specific field of the social, namely media usage, which has been characterised by a series of structural changes at the level of the technological, organisational, cultural, political, economic and social. Embedding these audience-related changes in the broader context of social change will allow us to qualify them. Such an approach will enable us to avoid some of the above-mentioned fallacies and, especially, temper the overenthusiastic, as well as the bleaker, voices that celebrate or bemoan the idea of total change, ignoring the structural stabilities (one could also say, hegemonies) that also characterise both media usage and the broader social context of which it is part.

Embedding audience-related changes in the combined ensemble of social spheres also prevents the reductionist privileging of one specific sphere. Although the economic sphere is also sometimes awarded such preferential treatment, it is particularly the technological sphere that now seems prone to becoming articulated as the driving force of societal change (and audience practices). Media technologies are indeed ubiquitous, but care needs to be taken not to turn them into a fetish, and thus fall into the trap which Freud (1905/1977, 62–63) labelled overvaluation. Especially when technology is seen to be part of, or even a driving force for, a rational-linear process of societal self-improvement, it often also becomes articulated within a discourse of progress. Here we should not forget that technology is embedded within society's power struggles and can come at a very high cost to some specific groups, or to all. To use one of McLuhan's (1964) concepts: Technology acts as the extension of man, but new extensions can also bring about numbness and amputations.

At the heart of the technology-as-progress discourse lies “a profound sense of optimism, that a rapidly expanding base of knowledge would contribute to an increase in the quality and virtue of the social and human condition” (Custer 1996, 66). When applied to technology, this discourse of progress is often fed by a technological-determinist logic, where technology is seen as an independent force that has the potential to realise utopias (or lesser forms of human betterment). This technological-determinist logic is sometimes used also in an inverse, dystopian way, where it becomes articulated as a threat to progress. The Frankenstein version of this logic claims that “what began more than a million years ago as a human creation has taken on a life of its own, with technology advancing according to its own dynamic, and unrestrained by social arrangements, culture, and thought” (Volti 2006, 271). This argument (in both its versions) is inherently problematic—as Volti points out—because it ignores the embeddedness of technology in the social: “New technologies bring changes to many aspects of society, while at the same time social forces do much to stimulate and shape these technologies” (Volti 2006, 272).

It would be equally problematic, nevertheless, to deny any impact of technology on society. Here, we should bear in mind Williams's (1974/2003, 133) remark that “while we have to reject technological determinism, in all its forms, we must be careful not to substitute for it the notion of a determined technology.” This argument can be taken a step further, in order to point to the constitutive role of technology within the social, for a diversity of audiences, together with a wide variety of other societal forces. We should not forget that technology plays a significant part in the construction of humanity itself, and as Derrida (1993, 15) remarked, “the natural, original body does not exist: technology has not simply added itself, from the outside or after the fact, as a foreign body.” Mackenzie (2002, 5) raises a similar point, when he says that “[…] we can think, signify, make sense and represent who we are in part only because of technology.”

We can of course make a similar point in relation to media audiences, who are only audiences because they interact with media technologies. For example, driven by both social factors and technological developments, the nature of broadcast radio and television audiences has diversified dramatically. Although technological developments, particularly in the digital domain, can provide increasing opportunities for broadcasters (Hallett and Hintz 2010), the ways in which technologies are developed and subsequently implemented are also influenced by social considerations, including the increasing fragmentation and individualisation of audiences.

2. CHANGING AUDIENCES

Our choice of the audience as a starting point implies that we do not subscribe to the idea that the audience concept has become outdated and should therefore be abandoned. There are many ways to deal with the concept of audience: one can (1) chart the multitude of definitions of the audience by linking them to specific research traditions—the approach Jensen and Rosengren (1990), for instance, use; (2) defend one specific articulation with great effort—as, for example, Webster and Phalen (1997) do for the mass audience and Carey (1987) does for the articulation of the audience within the public sphere; or (3) study the audience as a discursive construct. An early version¹ of this last approach can be found in the work of Allor (1988a, 228), who concludes in his discussion of the different articulations of the concept of audience that “the audience exists nowhere; it inhabits no real space, only positions within analytic discourses.” After Hartley's (1988) critique, Allor (1988b, 252) changed this thesis in “the audience exists everywhere,” without giving up on his discursive approach towards the audience.

Abandoning the ‘outdated’ concept of the audience has previously been proposed elsewhere. It is, for instance, a point of view that McQuail seems to adopt at certain times,² when he writes that “there is no doubt that the audience concept is in many ways out-dated and its traditional role in communication theory, models, and research has been called in to question. We can (and largely do) go on behaving as if the audience still exists ‘out there’ somewhere, but we may be largely deceiving ourselves” (McQuail 1997, 142). A stronger formulation of the argument can be found in Rosen's essay “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” where he argues that the (commercial) media system has lost control over its audiences, as it has been (re)transformed into “the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable” (Rosen 2008, 165). He describes this change as follows:

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another and who today are not in a situation like that at all. (Rosen 2008, 163)

One of the key arguments in this last option is the fragmentation or hybridity of the audience: McQuail (1997, 150) speaks of a “myriad kind of audiences,” Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998, 68) of the “diffused audience” and Ang (1991) of the “elusive audience.” Biocca (1988, 127) refers to “the breakdown of the referent for the word audience in communication research.” This was further strengthened by the popularisation of the concept of the user in digital media studies. Although not a new concept,³ digital media studies embraced this concept out of a discomfort with the link between audience and mass communication, as exemplified by Lievrouw and Livingstone's (2002, 10) introduction to The Handbook of New Media:

[…] there is an uncertainty over how to label people in terms of their relationship with new media. The term audience, which was and to some extent still is satisfactory for mass media research, fits poorly within the domain of new media. In a number of important ways, audiences are becoming ‘users’. […] the term ‘user’ […] better covers this variety of modes of engagement.

Arguably, one of main reasons why the notion of the user became popular was because of its capacity to emphasise online audience activity, where people were seen to ‘use’ media technologies and content more actively. However, this preference of the user concept also comes at a price, as it complicates the notion of the audience in two (almost contradictory) ways. The semantic process of linking the user to activity emphasised the passive connotations of the signifier audience and problematically privileged online media worlds (and their [prod]users) as sites of audience activity. However, paradoxically, when user, producer and audience become more conflated, the user-component dominates the chain of equivalence, and all audiences become articulated as active participants. This, in turn, renders passive consumption either absent or regrettable; a process that explains why there are so few reception studies of online content.

Napoli (2010) has t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in European Communication Research and Education
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Audience / Society Transformations
• Part I Using the Media
• Part II Unpacking the Audience's Complex Structures (Generations, Minorities and Networks)
• Part III Participation in and through the Media
• Part IV Prerequisites of Participation: Access, Literacies and Trust
• Contributors
• Index