News of the demise of the audience, much like the death of the author, has been greatly exaggerated. Recall Jay Rosenâs (2006) description of âthe people formerly known as the audience,â whom he characterized as âthe writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak.â Rosen was certainly not alone in celebrating a notâyetâachieved emancipation of the spectator from the constraints of the mass media era. Hereâs Clay Shirky (2005): âEvery time a new consumer joins this media landscape, a new producer joins as well, because the same equipmentâphones, computersâlets you consume and produce.â
Some of this anticipated shift has happened. More than 300 hours of videos are posted on YouTube every minute, many of them coming from amateur, semiâprofessional, nonâprofit, educational, activist, religious, and governmental producers producing media for noncommercial purposes but also involving content from commercial producers that has been appropriated, remixed, and recirculated, often at the hands of their most dedicated audiences.
Rosen asked, âIf all would speak, who shall be left to listen?â Well, so far, we are still spending much more time listening (and watching) than speaking, though we may do so across a broader range of media platforms. Prioritizing production behaviors and separating them off from the other things audiences do overlooks the ways that curating, sharing, and discussing media content are themselves active practices that create meaning and context, even if they do not necessarily âproduceâ new kinds of media texts. In this changing realm, broadcast networks still have an enormous capacity to set the cultural agenda, determining which stories, performers, and topics engage the public. But conversations on social network sites also have an expanding capacity to set cultural and political priorities, often reframing and critiquing, making demands upon broadcast content, and increasing the visibility of some clips as users circulate them across their range of online connections (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013).
Those working in the media industry tend to imagine audiences primarily, if not exclusively, as markets for their products. As Ien Ang (1991) notes, the actual people watching television are âinvisibleâ to media companies, a mass âhidden behind the millions of dispersed closed doors of private homes, virtually unmanageable and inaccessible to the outsiderâ (30). The industryâs imagined âaudienceâ consists of individual consumers, each making independent decisions about what to watchâan audience that can be predicted based on demographics, counted through various audience measurement tools, commodified, and sold back to advertisers. Coming together via social media has increased the visibility of media audiences, making it easier to identify others with shared interests and coordinate their activities in pursuit of common cause. At the same time, todayâs media audiences are more fragmented and dispersed, making it harder for broadcasters to anticipate viewer loyalty and harder for Madison Avenue to calculate who is seeing their spots and under what conditions. Media audiences are thus at once more networked and more dispersed than previously imagined.
For the past two decades, fandom studies have provided us with an alternative set of models and concepts through which to understand media audiencesâstressing their active participation within their own networked communities, foregrounding their own creative transformations and ideological negotiations with mass media texts, and imagining ways they speak back to texts, producers, and fellow fans, asserting their own agenda about what kind of popular culture they want to consume. This chapter will stake out a particular perspective on fans, informed by Cultural Studies writings about negotiation and framed by contemporary debates about participatory culture. And in order to illustrate this model, I will be describing how fandom is helping to work through contemporary debates around diversity and inclusion, race and gender in American society.
Negotiated Readings
From the start, Cultural Studies research assumed that media audiences were not simply markets and that a range of social and cultural factors, not just personal whim, determines what media we consume, under what circumstances, and with what consequences (Tulloch 2000; Brooker and Jermyn 2003). Stuart Hallâs (1973) essay âEncoding, Decodingâ (reprinted in 1980) argued that there could be no simple mapping between the ways producers encoded messages and the ways consumers made meanings; meaningâmaking takes different shapes depending on viewersâ social positioning. Hall argued that social and semiotic codes (often, unexamined assumptions) inform choices about what content to produce, circulate, consume, and reproduce. For Hall, popular texts do not speak univocally:
Hall rejects, on the one hand, the idea that the people are simply dupes of a powerful media industry and, on the other, what he describes as the âheroic alternative,â a âwhole, authentic, autonomousâ popular culture outside âcultural power and domination.â Rather, Hall writes: âPopular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partially where hegemony arises, and where it is securedâ (518).
Hall (1973) describes the ways different consumers relate to mass media messages. Some read them fully within the terms of dominant ideology; others resist or reject them outright; but many will negotiate, taking them apart and taking part in them in equal measure because they are imperfectly aligned with their experiences. Writes Hall:
Audience researchers (Morley 1980) who tested Hallâs model through focus group interviews found that many more actual readings are negotiated than dominant or oppositional; diverse audiences have to retrofit media content to the contours of their lives. Such audiences have agency, but they do not have autonomy; various forms of power shape what meanings they can assert. These readers, viewers, and listeners embrace textual elements they recognize and value, but they also encounter problematic aspects that produce a discomfort that has to be addressed before they can claim ownership over these representations. Each of us is positioned somewhat differently in relation to dominant representations, negotiating different identities and identifications within ourselves, as Hall (1992) notes, but those whose gender, class, racial, and sexual identities fall within dominant groups find it easiest to forge identifications with mass media texts; they are the recipients the producers anticipated, while others have to fight for inclusion into the community of readers who are able to relate meaningfully with a particular story and its characters.
Letâs consider an example: Alanna Bennett (2015) posted an illustrated story on BuzzFeed Community which described her experiences growing up as a mixedârace Harry Potter fan who felt a strong attachment to the character of Hermione:
Alanna found Hermione a point of identification on some levels, but her connection with this character was not fully authorized:
Here, performance in its everyday formsâfrom quoting a line from a television episode to impersonating an onâair personality to designing a Halloween costumeârepresents a creative extension of the reading process, a way readers take media content and make it their own. Bennett notes that Hermione as described in J.K. Rowlingâs books is much more racially ambiguous than in the Warner Brothers movies, but cultural norms still left her having to negotiate another space for herself in the fandom: âThereâs nothing there to indicate she didnât look just like me, yet I always pictured a white face under that bushy head. I always pictured her notâme.â It is the nature of white privilege, however, that characters are sometimes assumed by white audiences to be white (âmeâ), even when they are explicitly marked as people of color (ânotâmeâ) in the source material. For instance, white fans protes...
