Abstract
In an increasingly dispersed and complex digital media landscape, Annette Hill’s book offers insights into producer practices, audience behaviours and platform environments and examines how they all work together to create Media Experiences. Hill takes the approach of envisioning the media environment as an imaginary landscape where producers create roads for audiences to follow and audiences simultaneously follow these roads and create their own paths. It is a useful metaphor that highlights how Media Experiences explores television engagement as a co-creation between audiences and producers.
The book continues the important work of bridging the gap between audience and industry studies, taking an interdisciplinary approach to explore the symbiotic relationship between the two and showing how that can results in varying types of engagement with television content. In this vein, Hill is working within a similar field as John L Sullivan’s Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power (2013) and Nico Carpentier et al.’s Audience Transformations: Shifting Audience Positions in Late Modernity (2014). However, the book’s focus on audience agency and pathways means it also adds to scholarship around audience behaviour, similar to Kristyn Gorton’s Media Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion (2009).
Methodologically, the book draws on interviews and observations taken from the data gathered from the Media Experiences project, an industry–academic collaboration which gathered data primarily from Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom, with additional data from Japan, Colombia, the United States and Mexico. Interviews were conducted with producers, actors and performers, below-the-line workers, participants and audience members. The range of perspectives gathered means that each chapter can approach a case study from varying directions and present a complex but comprehensive map of the imagined media landscape around each television programme. The range of countries included in the data set also allows for exploration of some truly transnational audiences.
Media Experiences consists of 10 chapters covering a number of case studies which explore different modes of engagement, and therefore different audience pathways through the media landscape. In Chapter Three, the original crime drama Bron/Broen (2011–2018) and its two international adaptations, The Tunnel (2013–2016) and The Bridge (2013–2014), are used to introduce and examine the ‘roaming audience’, an audience with the ‘agency to navigate television storytelling’ across a myriad of different media, places and times (pp. 30–31). In Chapter Four, Got to Dance (2009–2014) is used to examine the ‘spectrum of engagement’. The spectrum includes positive engagement, such as identifying with characters, voting for participants to succeed and expressing support on social media; negative engagement, which can include voting for participants to be eliminated and posting disparaging remarks on social media; and disengagement, when viewers ‘switch off’ halfway through a series or ignore it entirely. Chapter Five looks at how serial temporal engagement can deepen emotional engagement, using the character of Saga Noren in Bron/Broen to look at how audiences began to empathise with a character over a number of seasons. It adopts a cultural approach to examine how producers, audiences and artistic performers ‘all perform specific practices that in the end come together in a co-production of intense engagement’ (p. 12).
Chapter Six analyses the practices of ‘illegal audiences’ watching Utopia (2013–2014) via the internet; Hill argues that by examining the ‘lived reality of the unmeasured audience’ (p. 12), we can consider these audience members as ‘self-informing media citizens, consumer choice advocates, de-centralised media sharers, and activists’ (p. 13) who want to navigate television programming through a pathway free of commercials and subscription fees. Chapter Seven again uses Got to Dance and explores ‘embedded engagement’, a form of engagement which develops as audiences engage with television content over a long period of time so that it becomes embedded in their everyday lives.
While these chapters begin by focusing on specific programmes, their arguments can be expanded or adapted to sustain broader discussions. Chapter Eight uses the format of MasterChef, particularly Celebrity MasterChef UK (2006–2018), MasterChef Danmark (2011–2018) and MasterChef Sweden (2011–present) to explore the relationship between audiences and authentic reality television, arguing that audiences make their national version of this global format into a ‘social ritual’ and a ‘dinner companion’ (p. 162). While an interesting observation on the role of food-related media in people’s lives, this chapter does seem to have a narrower scope than the others, with its conclusions and arguments based in a specific format. Similarly, Chapter Nine (the final case study chapter) also seems to have a more specific focus, looking at warm-up acts that perform during the filming of a live reality television competition, such as Got to Dance, but are not aired on television. It offers insights into invisible jobs within the television industry, and into the inherent paradox of training people to not be a star, but, as with Chapter Eight, it feels slightly disconnected from the other case study chapters because of its specific focus. But these criticisms are very minor and overall the chapters are rich and engaging, offering valuable insights into various kinds of audience engagement.
Hill leaves the reader with exciting new ways of envisioning the audience/producer relationship in the digital age and some new definitions of what ‘engagement’ means in television. Overall, Media Experiences makes a vital contribution to audience and industry studies. Commendably, and unusually now, it is published in a paperback version and as a cheaper e-book.