The Social Use of Media
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The Social Use of Media

Cultural and Social Scientific Perspectives on Audience Research

Helena Bilandzic, Geoffroy Patriarche, Helena Bilandzic, Geoffroy Patriarche

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eBook - ePub

The Social Use of Media

Cultural and Social Scientific Perspectives on Audience Research

Helena Bilandzic, Geoffroy Patriarche, Helena Bilandzic, Geoffroy Patriarche

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About This Book

This collection of essays provides an overview of research on the social uses of media. Drawing on long traditions in both cultural studies and the social sciences, it brings together competing research approaches usually discussed separately. The topics include up-to-date research on activity and interactivity, media use as a social and cultural practice, and participation in a cultural, political and technological sense. This book explores three general areas of current scholarly study of the social aspects of media use. First, the introduction of interactive and so-called social media has had repercussions for the definition of media use, reception and even our perception of media effects. Second, the recognition that media constitute social practice, which utilizes media for its own goals, has been highly influential in communication research. Third, media provide many opportunities for participation in cultural and political issues. Yet media also shape participation in certain – and sometimes constraining – ways.

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Year
2012
ISBN
9781841507446
Topic
Law
Edition
1
Part I
Audience Activity and Interactivity
Chapter 1
Mode of Action Perspective to Engagements with Social Media: Articulating Activities on the Public Platforms of Wikipedia and YouTube
Seija Ridell
Introduction
One of the conspicuous features of the Web is that communication online does not flow, like in the traditional mass media, vertically from professional producers to the receivers (‘from one to many’) but horizontally and reciprocally between peers (‘from one to one’ or ‘from many to many’). Some researchers have interpreted this to mean that there are no longer ‘clear distinctions between production and reception’ (Press and Livingstone 2006: 184). This, again, has led some to the conclusion that in the Web environment audiences have turned into content producers. Livingstone, for one, states that ‘audiences and users of the new media are increasingly active – selective, self-directed, producers as well as receivers of texts’ (2004: 75; see also 1999: 64). Ross and Nightingale speak of ‘online audiences as users, producers and consumers of the media’ (2003: 159). In her content analysis of blogs, Papacharissi similarly considers ‘audiences as producers of media content’ (2007: 21). Bowman and Willis say that with online there are ‘many ways that the audience is now participating in the journalistic process’ (2003: 3).
The view that digital network media have brought forth new forms of audience activity is particularly common among cultural audience studies scholars. In contrast, Internet researchers quite often seem to regard the whole notion of audience as unimportant or even superfluous when examining people’s engagement with the Web. For them, several dimensions of digital media rather ‘question the fundamental assumptions about the nature of an audience’ (Patriarche 2007: 2). One of these dimensions is that same people (can) act as producers and consumers of online materials. While for the former this development has meant that audiences now act as producers, the latter are inclined to conclude that there are no audiences on the Web. Gillmor talks of ‘the former audience’, referring to people who once made up an audience but who after ‘the lines will blur between producers and consumers’ online will not compose one anymore (2006: xxiv, xxv). Speaking of digital games, Coleman and Dyer-Witheford state that after ‘the breakdown of division between producers and consumers’ there ‘are no audiences, only players’ (2007: 947). For Bruns, ‘the audience is dead’ (2008b: 254). This is because digital networking ‘enables all participants to be users as much as producers of information and knowledge’ (Bruns 2007).
I find equally problematic the view that audiences are simultaneously receivers and producers and the view that audience has disappeared, especially as both consider audience as an acting group- or mass-like entity. The former view endows the audience creature with additional functions to render it feasible in the new circumstances, while the latter view rejects the usefulness of audience in the digital context (without, however, rejecting the notion of audience itself as a fixed entity more generally). My proposal in the chapter is that this oppositional trap can be relaxed by redirecting attention from audience(s) as actor(s) to people’s activities as audiences. I suggest that people act as an audience every time they assume the position in which they receive and interpret a cultural performance or media representation. People may do this both in relation to the mass media and to the Web, but whereas the mass media provide predominantly the position of receiver for ordinary people, the Web supplies lay people with a greater diversity of positions or roles for engagement – positions between which people can and do constantly move. One of these roles online is the role of an audience. In the following, this idea will be elaborated by employing the action-theoretical thoughts presented in Max Weber’s and Alfred Schutz’s interpretive sociology (see also Pietilä and Ridell 2008). I will use YouTube as my primary example and also illustrate theoretical points with references to Wikipedia. As part of the discussion the specificity of acting as an online audience will be delineated. It is necessary to begin, however, by taking a more nuanced and critical look at the view of audiences as producers.
Problems of Seeing Audiences as Producers
The talk of audiences as producers implies, first of all, that audience is something that exists independently ‘over there’. And at the first glance it seems indeed indisputable that, say, the spectators of a play in a theatre form a real entity. After all we can witness theatregoers with our own eyes. But is it really an audience that we see in the auditorium? No. What we see instead are people who have come together to attend a cultural performance and who behave for the occasion in a certain culturally learned manner, following the prescriptions of this specific performance-related role (cf. Schechner 1988: 189). It is this manner of behaving and the internalized rules that structure it or, as I prefer to say, the specific mode of action that allows us to talk of the given group of people as an audience. Hence, ‘audience’ is a concept that is used to get hold of a particular phenomenon in social reality. Obviously, there are different ways of defining this concept.
Rather than speaking of audiences as real beings capable of acting (productively or otherwise), then, it is more to the point to say that it is real people who act. Weber rejected the view of collectives as acting bodies by stating,
[All] collectives must be treated as solely the results of the particular acts of individual persons since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action. […] There is no such thing as a collective personality which ‘acts’. (1947[1922]: 101–102)
It should be noted that individuals’ activities always take place within the confines of various structural conditions. The fixity of these conditions and the recurrent, often routinized, patterns of individual acts constrain the activities into a standard mode of action, even if the activities may also mould their conditions and thereby alter their mode. The structural conditions of people’s acting as mass media audiences consist, among other things, of media industry’s production and distribution machinery, its ownership and legal regulation, the output of media representations, the contexts of reception as well as genre-related and other conventions of meaning-making. As regards the Web, the structural conditions may appear less obviously restrictive, but they are in no sense absent (Galloway 2004; Lessig 1999). A mode of action, then, consists of a structural dimension, on the one hand, and of the structurally framed activities, on the other. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the activity side and leave the structural conditions to the margins.
Acting as an audience – or the activity of audiencing, to use a term coined by Fiske (1994; Fiske and Dawson 1996) – differs fundamentally from performing or presenting and, in the (mass) mediated context, from the production of media content as a mode of action. Characteristic of media audiencing is the engagement with produced materials, not their creation. When people, who at a certain moment act as an audience, begin to generate content, they move from the mode of action characteristic of audiencing to the mode characteristic of producing.
The difference between audiencing and producing as activities must be plain also for those who speak of ‘audiences as producers’. Why do they still use this phrase? One reason presumably is the radical distinction between producers and receivers that the machinery of the mass media has imprinted on people’s minds. Another reason may be the common sense conception of audience as a real social group. These views make it easy to think that people who step out of the audience group to produce content move only temporarily out of their ‘proper’ place or that they remain at that place even when they do something that clearly differs from audience activity. As members of media audience, they are seen as amateurs as compared to media professionals who belong self-evidently to the category of ‘proper’ producers. This makes the talk of audiences as producers understandable in itself. This kind of talk, however, conflates the differences between these two as distinct modes of action and renders it difficult to examine their specificities and the specific ways they interrelate in online environments.
Remarkably enough, those who conceive of audience as irrelevant on the Web miss the fact that the audience is, as Patriarche (2007: 2) points out, far from being outdated in the era of information and communication technologies. Indeed, provided that audiencing is understood in terms of a specific mode of action that differs from other modes through which people engage with the media, the concept of audience is equally necessary in Web research more generally and in exploring the social media websites in particular, as it continues to be in the study of the mass media.
‘Produsage’ or Articulation?
Before proceeding further it is useful to consider whether the concept of production, for its part, is appropriate in the Web environment. Bruns, in particular, has questioned the term’s habitual use in this context on the basis that ‘production’ – similarly to ‘audience’ – refers ‘back to the heyday of the industrial age’ (2008a: 2). For Bruns, a concept with such a connotation is unsuitable for describing people’s online activities as these do not conform to the centralized industrial logic. Quite the contrary, these activities have the nature of ‘collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement’, as he states about Wikipedia (Bruns 2008a: 2). Bruns introduces instead the neologism ‘produsage’, an amalgam of the terms ‘production’ and ‘usage’, and justifies it by saying that online ‘people are in a hybrid position where using the site can (and often does) lead to productive engagement’ (2008a: 2).
Bruns’s suggestion is interesting but at the same time highly problematic. To start, precisely as in the case of ‘audience’, the range of meanings of production is not exclusively industrially framed. There are several forms of offline production that do not follow the industrial logic: amateur production, voluntary production and collaboratively coordinated creative production, where revisions are made constantly in pursuit of continuous improvement. A pertinent example of offline production not conforming to the industrial logic is the bee-like work where people (as users) produce collaboratively and voluntarily, improving in rotation what they use. Moreover, why should we not call production any activity that brings about something, however minor this may be?
In addition, the ‘use’-based suffixes in the hybrid terms ‘produser’ and ‘produsage’ remain unspecified and therefore problematic. For Bruns, ‘using the site’ can ‘lead to productive engagement’ (2008a: 2), but it is not clear what he means with this as he does not define the term ‘using’. For example, when one seeks information from Wikipedia for some offsite productive work, ‘using the site’ means audiencing it. But when one uses the tools offered by Wikipedia for altering, expanding or correcting the existing content, the activity of ‘using the site’ is connected to on-site producing. With its implication of both audiencing and producing, it would be reasonable to consider ‘using’ as a general umbrella term that refers to all kinds of activities related to websites. Audiencing and producing could then be conceived of as distinct subcategories under this umbrella. This solution would grant the concept of audience the place it deserves both in the Web environment and in the realm of the mass media. Moreover, it would become possible to discern more clearly the specific features of both audiencing and producing.
I employ in this chapter the concept of articulation, understood in the spirit of interpretive sociology, to tackle the problem created by the suggested blurring of boundaries between different online roles and activities. As a background for this idea, let us think of an individual actor who is striving to reach a goal. To speak in Schutz’s (1967[1932]) terms, the actor has planned more or less consciously a project, the in-order-to motive of which is determined by that goal. The goal is the ‘why’ of the actor’s effort and the source of the subjective meaning he or she attaches to the overall activity. When carrying out this project the actor often must accomplish activities representing different modes of action. These activities become articulated, that is, associated more or less loosely as subservient components or subprojects, into the span of the overall project. In other words, the actor realizes the overall project in a piecemeal fashion by articulating these activities with one another. This holds true not only for an individual actor but also for jointly pursued projects. From this perspective, it seems fruitful to talk about articulations between producing and audiencing within projects people carry out individually or jointly offline and online.
Let us take a look at Wikipedia content development, for example. I will consider these activities first as an individual process and approach them in the next section from a communal viewpoint. The overall objective and in-order-to motive of Wikipedia content development is, in Bruns’s words, the ‘building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement’ (2008a: 2). Ideal-typically, the plan of an individual project intending to contribute to this goal is composed of two subprojects. The first consists of audiencing the Wikipedia site. The objective of this activity is to check an entry or entries for potentially problematic points. In the plan the expectation is that such points will most probably be detected. Their anticipated detection functions as a because-motive for starting the second subproject, which consists of production. Its objective is to compose a revision that removes the spotted problems. In this example, audiencing is articulated as a subservient subproject into production because it serves as a way to locate problems, while producing, as the problem-erasing subproject, completes the primary project. It is of course possible that, in actual practice, no defects will be detected, and there will not emerge a because-motive for starting the productive subproject.
People visit Wikipedia in most cases presumably for some other reasons than to contribute to its content development. For example, they may consult the site to find helpful information for an off-site problem. The problem provides, then, a because-motive for planning a subproject that consists of audiencing the site for the needed help. It may happen, however, that during their acting as the site’s audience people notice on it something that, in their opinion, needs to be improved. If they feel themselves competent and interested enough to do the improvements, the observation provides a because-motive for planning a side project, the in-order-to motive of which is the development of the site by producing the needed revision. In this example, audiencing which is articulated as a subservient activity into the actor’s primary project functions also as a triggering instance for the side project that consists of producing. The side project, for its part, is articulated as a subservient activity into the overall content development project of Wikipedia.
What these examples demonstrate, first of all, is that audiencing a website and producing content on it are different as physical and mental activities representing distinct modes of action. Second, the examples make visible that also the objectives and in-order-to motives of these activities differ quite profoundly even when they become connected as subservient activities within one and the same project. Thus, instead of one hybrid performance, it makes sense to talk about a structured complex of articulations.
Articulating Activities Collectively
Bruns (2007) emphasizes that content production in Wikipedia proceeds through collaborative processes within communities of participants who ‘engage with fellow users to discuss and coordinate these efforts’. Ideal-typically, the plan of a collaborative communal project intending to contribute to Wikipedia’s content development is composed of three subprojects. The first consists, similarly to the individual example in the previous section, of audiencing the Wikipedia site’s content. If somebody notices a problematic point during this activity, this observation gives rise to a because-motive for him or her for producing an announcement of the observation. This is the initial step in the second – communally oriented – subproject that consists of interaction between the participants in which they act mutually as producers of utterances and as audiences for them. The in-order-to motive here is to negotiate a solution to the problem. The acceptance of a solution functions as a because-motive for the planning of the third subproject, the production of a revision according to this solution. In this example, acting as the Wikipedia site’s audience serves the interaction and is articulated with it...

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