Abstract
Often, while reading a book that you are going to review, the review beings to shape itself in your mind as you go. An overall impression of the book forms itself, you note interesting examples and decide on a tone of voice. In this case, reading the Handbook of Media Audiences, none of these things happened. It was as if there are parallel worlds in both of which media audience studies are conducted and I was reading the Handbook of the other world.
The Handbook of Media Audiences tries to bring together work from separate fields, which apparently do not feel like separate fields to the editor and the contributors. On the one hand, there is a mainstream research tradition of doing audience research that I would associate with the social sciences; on the other hand there is the more multidisciplinary approach that could be labelled “cultural studies.” While I too thought that these two traditions had approached closely after tumultuous debate in the 1980s and 1990s about the merits of qualitative versus quantitative methods, I now wonder whether that is really the case. The Handbook in any case offers its own mix of research approaches that I can only understand as mainstream rather than critical or cultural studies.
It is also entirely possible that I have an exaggerated view of globalisation and the permeability of borders. The integration of audience studies may not have proceeded across them as much as I think it has. Counting the contributions by the present work environment of the authors, it turns out that United States of America and United Kingdom-based authors form a majority (12 and 9 contributors to chapters respectively), with 7 authors working in Australia and 5 in continental Europe (where I am located). Not a bad tally given the relative sizes of their academic communities and the fact that Virginia Nightingale, the editor, works in Australia.
Handbooks are made in sizable numbers, the last couple of years. Costly thick tomes in all sorts of areas are published by Wiley-Blackwell, by Routledge and doubtlessly by Sage as well. Getting these books out in print before academic libraries fully migrate to the digital era seems to be something of a priority. At prices around 200 dollars they are definitely not meant to be used as textbooks or as an interesting buy for the reader of monographs. This type of publication depends on libraries buying them, based on the name of the editor and the contributors. They are the only guarantee we get for the quality of the collection as there is no peer-reviewing. The chapters will not net the contributors much credit in the publish-or-perish system. Rather, they will be paid a—usually not too sizable—fee. The good thing about this system is that it is in the interest of the editor and the contributors to showcase their work. Writing a 7000 word chapter requires a sizable chunk of time that will have little relevance to the amount paid to authors “per hour” as it were. The real benefit is in advertising yourself.
So what is show-cased here in over 500 pages and 26 chapters, collected in 4 parts (Being audiences, Theorizing audiences, Researching Audiences and Doing audience research)? Surely the most relevant issue for media audience researchers today is the fact that the entire research tradition needs to rethink itself with the competition broadcast media now face from internet-based platform and network media. These “new” media follow a decidedly different logic and it is questionable whether “audience” is at all a term that applies. The Handbook reader interested in getting a clear sense of whether there is a future for audience studies and what it might look like, will be disappointed. A number of chapters address the new “double” media logic that “the people formerly known as the audiences” (Jay Rosen’s expression, quoted by Green and Jenkins, in this volume, p. 109) experience, make use of and contribute in everyday life, but there is no unified overall view. This may be due to the fact that the book appeared last year and that chapters were finished much earlier, the production process will have been long. As a result some of the chapters are somewhat dated, which could not have been helped by either the editor or the contributors though it would have been good to address the fact that audience researchers will have to recalibrate regularly in the years to come.
User-generated content is addressed in some of the chapters in Part 1 and 2 of the book. Media logic is the topic of one of the chapters I really liked, by Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins. ‘How audiences create value and meaning in a networked economy’ offers Susan Boyle, winner of Britain’s got talent as an example of the new media economy. She is “cocreated” by those of us who streamed her YouTube video (86 million times at the time of writing, note Green and Jenkins) and the producers of the talent hunt programme. There are many interesting sides to the phenomenon of nonstandardized persons winning these programmes. I heard what I remember as a Norwegian runner-up in Pop Idol described as being the ideal candidate for Idol of the Middle Earth. Disappointingly, the contest was won by an all-American “girl next-door” type. The jury qualification “idol of the middle earth” since then has led its own life, spawning a whole range of spoofs and jokes on YouTube and websites such as 9Gag. While this is exactly what Green and Jenkins mean by “spreadability” as the new key word for media logic, their interest is in the economy behind the new media order and how to hold on to a notion of human agency and integrity in understanding it. They argue that it is easy to go along with terms such as “virus” often used to describe how internet media work, which totally absents human beings and their agency. Or “copyright infringement,” which suggests a crime where there is really a new type of gift economy. The real challenge in understanding today’s media logic, however, is to move beyond a simple collapse of the notions of producer and consumer. Spreadability does more justice to the cocreation and participation of audiences today. It understands consumption as participation, and participation as carrying “multiple and perhaps even contradictory valences.” This is not media consumption under a different name, it is small choices by individuals (such as mere mouse clicks) making the life of media corporations much harder than it was under broadcast logic. Questions of circulation and appraisal will have to be integrated in the audience studies of the future.
In this review, I am skipping Part 3 almost entirely. Called “Researching audiences,” it will have been intended for those teaching media audience research and for (fairly advanced) students getting a grip on a particular method or research tradition in audience research. Unfortunately, it sits uneasily with the “showcase your own work” logic of handbooks. I at least had to dig deep to frame discussion offered of marketing research, ratings, effects research and cultivation analysis. Being more familiar with the work of Fatimah Awan and David Gauntlett, who contribute a chapter on creative and visual methods, and with media ethnography (a chapter by Patrick Murphy) these last two made for easier and more pleasurable reading.
Part 4 starts with Chapter 20 in which Sonia Livingstone and Kirsten Drotner discuss the media culture of children and young people using engaging examples. Their point is as follows: Stop assuming that children and young people are globally uniform groups and recognize difference and diversity, both locally and nationally and across the globe. Kristina Busse and Jonathan Gray tackle the thorny question of subcultures: Are they exemplary or extraordinary audiences? Surprisingly they do not appear to see fan use as a different practice than incidental, everyday media use. Fortunately they also offer insight in the much more timely and interesting issue of how fans and fandom are taken up in the marketing logic of the media industries. Whereas early collections such as the 1992 Lisa Lewis edited volume on fandom that is quoted (in a reference to a Joli Jensen article) could offer authenticity as part of what made fandom interesting and appealing to media scholars, that is not a route that today’s scholar of fandom can go.
In the same part of the book Mirca Madianou tackles the question of how not to reify and essentialize ethnicity in research without bypassing such forms of difference and their meanings altogether. The chapter’s suggestion to focus on practices rather than identity is not new but argued with great spirit. Elizabeth Bird discusses news consumption. It is an increasingly tricky research area because news has become a continuous presence via old and new media platforms, and sits across entertainment and information. Interestingly the chapter reworks and extends a chapter for an earlier handbook: The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism . . . . Also offered here is a useful closing chapter on media sports and its audiences by David Rowe.
The most intriguing chapter of the collection is Annette Hills’ “The audience is the show” which takes the audience for clairvoyants and magicians as its main example. By historically situating the audience, she shows the considerable discipline involved in changing the rowdy 17th and 18th audiences of theatre and shows to the attentive “bourgeois” audience for performance arts with which we have come to be so familiar What tends to be forgotten is how in the earlier, rowdy practice of theatre going (everybody coming and going as they wished, eating, drinking and having sex) was also about watching 18th century opera goers. Many did not come for the music but to watch the aristocracy doing whatever caught their whim in their theatre boxes. Bedlam reigned, says one of the authors quoted by Hill. Only after managers increased the comfort and safety of the theatre space, and had banned drink, tobacco and prostitution, theatre-going became something we would recognize today. The-audience-as-show may have been briefly lost to us but it came back with a vengeance. First, argues Hill, as the audiences of talk shows that involved a great deal of spectacle such as the Jerry Springer Show, but also, today in the orchestration of user-generated content on all sorts of internet platforms, or in how audiences have a crucial role in talent hunt show programs.
The strength of Hill’s chapter is that she looks for the mechanisms that drive “the-audience-as-the-show” rather than (as I did here) suggest that older media functions are and will be taken up by newer media. Hill quotes her own research on clairvoyants and magical entertainment to show how audience members willingly suspend disbelief. They well know that performers use the attention of their audiences to hide tricks and may make life as difficult for them as they can, but ultimately they comply in coproducing the show as strong form of entertainment. The same mechanism of changing sceptics to believers pertains in politics, Hill suggests. Doing so, she shows how it pays to be attentive to audiences and audiencehood, over thinking that being a media audience would be so very different from other types of audiencehood.
I would of course say this as an audience researcher who squarely situates herself in the tradition of cultural studies and thus, at the very least partially, outside of media studies. Questions of meaning making, of exploitation and resistance, of unequal social power relations and identity construction should be central to audience research from my perspective. In point of fact, all of these key words and the political engagement that goes with it can be found in the 26 chapters of the Handbook of Media Audiences. Apparently, it is the media-part that confused me: My parallel world is called “cultural studies.” I apologize for confusing readers, should I have done so, and suggest to those who reckon that audience research is first and foremost cultural studies, that this may not be true, or at least not without adding a number of qualifications.
The remaining question then is the following: Should your library buy this book? That, after all, is what we are meant to do with it: Recommend it for being bought (or not). If you are in the United States of America or in Australia, that would make sense. If you happen to be in Europe or in Asia, there will be far less points of connection and little recognition of work done in familiar areas. Those familiar with the various traditions in media audience research might relish the challenge of positioning their own work here and take up the implied invitation to start building the media audience studies of the future. That much at least is clear: Whether or not this Handbook sits in a parallel world, it leaves the playing field for future work on media audiences and the media in everyday life wide open.