Audiences, Citizens, and Publics: Divergent Conceptualisations (original) (raw)
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On the Relation Between Audiences and Publics
2005
Cite this version: Livingstone, S. (2005) On the relation between audiences and publics : why audience and public? [online] London: LSE Research Online. Available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000437 First published as: Livingstone, S. (Ed.), Audiences and publics : when cultural engagement matters for the public sphere. Changing media -changing Europe series, v. 2. Bristol, UK : Intellect Books 2005, pp. 17-41
This review surveys the literature on publics: political sub- jects that know themselves and act by means of mass-mediated com- munication. It examines classic accounts of how publics form through interlocking modes of social interaction, as well as the forms of social interaction that publics have been defined against. It also addresses re- cent work that has sought to account for contradictions within theories of the public sphere and to develop alternative understandings of public culture. Historical and ethnographic research on this topic reveals that some concept of publicity is foundational for a number of theories of self-determination, but that the subject of publicity is irrevocably en- meshed in the very technological, linguistic, and conceptual means of its own self-production. Research on publics is valuable because it has focused on this paradox of mediation at the center of modern political life.
The public manifestations of the audience
Matrizes, 2011
Mobile communication has confirmed our entry in the Post-Network Era (in particular, but not exclusively, through television programming). This state of affairs has not only challenged the economics of the television industry by rendering the "capture" of audiences (principally through programming) more complex, and random, but also the basic notion of audience itself. In so doing, this Post-Network Era has reactivated , but in a more dialectical fashion, the earlier debate that accompanied the spread of cultural industries and the introduction of the Network Era, when and where "audiences" became a substitute for "publics", "ratings" for "popular approval", and "opinion polls" for "public debates". The present Era offers the occasion to reflect on how "audiences" were and are constructed, how they manifest themselves, and what impact these constructions and manifestations have held on our conception, and research, of "publics" (as in the French tradition of "les publics" and "auditoire"), of "mass" and "mob".
Representing Audiences: Audience research, public knowledge and policy
This article explores the difficult relationships between academic audience research, media coverage, public knowledge and policy-making. Drawing on the author’s personal experience and on instances of media reporting of issues concerning media audiences, it discusses some of the dilemmas that arise when intervening in debates that are often conducted in narrow and polarized terms. It argues that notions of ‘media panic’ are not sufficient to conceptualize what is taking place here, and that we need a broader analysis of the ways in which public issues are framed and defined, and in which public knowledge is established and circulated. The article concludes by discussing some of the difficulties academic researchers experience when attempting to present their work and to engage in public debate through mainstream media channels.
Hartley/A Companion to New Media Dynamics, 2013
Blackwell Companion to New Media Dynamics (pp.104-121). Oxford: Blackwell.
The End of Audiences?: Theoretical Echoes of Reception Amid the Uncertainties of Use
2013
The report of my death was an exaggeration. (Mark Twain, 1897) Once, ordinary people occupied much of their leisure time sitting on the sofa, often together with others, watching prescheduled hours of mass broadcast television or reading a national newspaper, whether in a concentrated or distracted manner and, later, talking about it over supper or the next day. Today, people gaze at their computer or mobile phone screen, often alone, while multitasking social networking, music downloading, peer-to-peer (P2P) chatting, searching for information, or playing games and, simultaneously, discussing their experiences with others elsewhere. Just a couple of decades divide these two time periods, hardly time for people to change in their fundamental interests and concerns. Yet their everyday habitsand their communicative possibilitiesare considerably altered, reflecting the historic shift from mass to networked society, from push to pull media, from one-way to multiway communication. So, are they still audiences? In this chapter, we argue that this question matters; conceptualizing people as audiences (not instead of but as well as publics, masses, consumers, or users) builds insightfully on the history of audiences and audience research to reveal continuities and changes in the mediation of identity, sociality, and power.
Deconstructing the Audience: Who Are They and What Do We Know About Them
Annals of the International Communication Association, 1987
UDIENCE analysis has always been one of the most active areas of mass communication research. Although specific conceptions of the audience have been challenged and subsequently modified as a result of different research findings, the category of the audience itself has never been radically problematized. Instead of trying to refine our understanding of the nature of the audience (whose composition, to make the matter more complicated, is as changing as the media, communication technologies, and research methods that target it), this chapter attempts to deconstruct (Chang, 1985; Chang, in press a; Derrida, 1976, 1978) the dominant notion of audience in mass communication research by questioning its usefulness as a theoretical category or concept whose supposed referent, as I will try to show, is an essentially "discursive" reality. 1 I will then propose an alternative way of viewing the familiar object preViously labeled audience as both constitutive of and constituted by various "discursive practices" and ideological determinations involved in the social production and reproduction of meaning. Such a discursive notion of the audience might work toward displacing what I call the "psychological/sociological image" of the reader/audience implied in the sender-media-receiver model of communication process.