Audiences have assumed an increasingly active role in the media culture. As noted in Module 4 in the discussion of “diffused audiences” (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998), audiences have become active performances through participation with the media. They engage in fan-club chat exchanges about favorite television programs. They burn music CDs and share those CDs with peers. They participate in “blogging” on-line exchanges of opinions. They organize viewing events around going to films or viewing at home, such as “Super Bowl” parties. They visit theme parks, attend concerts, or shop in malls, experiences that are highly mediated by media. Through their participation with the media as participatory spectacle, audiences are constructing modes of escape, daydreams, and alternative identities (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998).

Given their more active, interactive participation with media researchers moved beyond the traditional “uses” or “cause/effect” model of media studies described in Module 4 to study the particular ways in which audiences experience the media in their everyday lives. These researchers are particularly interested in “fan subcultures” in which fans construct their identities and stances consistent with the culture of, for example, a Star Trek fan club

Summary of fan subculture research

David Morley: history of audience research

Reception studies of media

These participatory uses of the media have become constitutive of everyday life, as in the act of listening to the radio while one works. Engagments in “mediascapes”(Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998; Attallah & Shade, 2002) as activities could be characterized by a number of phenomena associated with audience response and stances that could be studied in media ethnographies:

Audience stances mediated by commercialism in a global economy

Because these “mediascapes” are shaped by commercialism and commercial interests, audiences are socialized to adopt values of consumerism as part of globalization driven by conglomerate media corporations (Attallah & Shade, 2002). Simulations of different cultural contexts are designed for commercial purposes as opposed to providing actual experience of cultural difference. Visitors in shops in Disney World representing different countries of the world, unlike visitors to real countries, have no interaction with the culture that produced the products sold in these shops (The Project on Disney, 1995). As a result they may perceive the real world as a “global marketplace…where goods flow freely and are free exchanged” (p. 42), a distorted version of reality in which people must produce products within the constraints of economic forces and barriers.

As a result of this commercialization, markers of class, race, and gender become less important in defining one’s identity than lifestyle or appearing “cool” through the uses and display of products. This focuses audiences’ attention on self-definition or the “project of the self” constructed through appearing to be “cool” based on commodity use. In order to learn what is considered to be “cool,” audiences perceive the world as an “object of spectacle” in which experiences are treated as part of seeing and being seen (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998). Audiences adopt the stance of a “possessive gaze” that focuses on surface images and brands associated with “coolness.” For example, in the experience of shopping at a mall, they perceive products in terms of how those products will enhance their own image. That shopping experience is mediated by advertising and brand images throughout stores designed to foster that “possessive gaze” stance — for example, with models wearing certain clothes or having shoppers participate in “entertainment retail” uses of products.

Advertisers and marketers targeting the adolescent market have increasingly turned to ethnographic methods to study what adolescents perceive to be “cool.” As documented in the PBS program, Merchants of Cool, (entire program on-line) they then use that information to promote products by connecting those projects to images and practices associated with “coolness.”

In commercialized virtual worlds, “reality” is often mediated by the producers’ own ideological versions of history and community, often masking complex cultural or political issues. Members of The Project on Disney (1995) found that history in Epcot exhibits in Disney World was portrayed primarily as a continuous improvement of the world through technology and corporate agents (who are also sponsors of the exhibits.) For example, in an exhibit on “The Land” sponsored by Kraft, “no relationship to the land other than commercial use by business is posited as possible or event desirable” (p. 59). In an exhibit on “Universe of Energy,” sponsored by Exxon, there is no reference to energy shortages, oil spills, or solar power. Representations of American history emphasize “unity” and “equality” achieved through global capitalism while masking over references to conflicts associated with gender, class, or race, or cross-cultural differences between societies. The future is portrayed as a world populated by intact, heterosexual families — “in ‘Tomorrowland Theater’ the chorus tells us that ‘Disney World is a wonderland for girls and boys and moms and dads’” (p. 69.) The prevailing narrative in these historical representations is one of “capitalist expansion masquerading as science fiction in which the heroes of the next century are not people but machines, with faith placed not in courage but in technology” (p. 86).

Participation in virtual worlds

Audiences are devoting more time to participating in virtual worlds. A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (1999) found that, on a daily basis, children ages 10-17 spend 2½ hours watching television, and another 2 hours with video games, computers, music, or the VCR. In the “mediascape,” there is a blurring of the distinction between fiction and real in which audiences have difficulty knowing what constitutes “reality” and what constitutes “fiction.” For example, in responding to “reality” television shows, they are viewing “real” people engaged in staged events. They may respond to these people as if they are “real,” yet also know that they are viewing what could be a fictional, staged drama the accentuates sensationalized conflicts for entertainment purposes. These leads to the popularity of fan club experiences in which “real” fans adopt the fictional roles of characters in programs. Star Trek fan club members construct their own identities as “Trekkies” by using the Star Trek register, wearing costumes, or display their knowledge of programs or the actors’ and actresses’ personal lives (Jenkins’ (1992). Soap opera fans display pictures of soap opera actors in their bedrooms, write letters to the actors, or attend social events to meet the actors (Harrington & Bielby, 1995).

One conception of the virtual is that it is a Xerox copy or “never anything more than a pale imitation of the real: a mere simulation” (Doel & Clarke, 1999). From this perceptive, the virtual may never measure up to the complex reality it attempts to imitate. This conception of the virtual as false imitation or approximation of reality presupposes a correspondence theory of representation — that artistic or technological forms need to bear some relationship to reality, a questionable assumption. Another conception of the virtual is that it is not a copy of reality, but is a more attractive alternative to the everyday, hum-drum “lived” world (Doel & Clarke, 1999). From this perspective, the virtual is celebrated as an improvement over or even a solution to reality. As Doel and Clarke note, “the virtual is to the real as the perfect is to the imperfect. Here, it is the real that is figured as partial, flawed, and lacking, while the virtual promises a rectification and final resolution to come . . . sadly, reality rarely suffices” (p. 268). For example, computer games based on PlayStation2 are advertised as being more engaging than the reality they are based on. This somewhat utopian conception of the virtual is still based on the need to compare the virtual with the real. A third conception posits the idea that the virtual is its own “hyper-reality” (Baudrilland, 1994) divorced from any need to correspond or connect to a “lived-world” reality — the idea that the virtual creates it own form of reality (Doel & Clarke, 1999). One problem with this conception is that, in attempting to define a possible world of its own, it cannot ultimately divorce itself from lived worlds.

Through participation in on-line chat rooms or collaborative computer games, students experience a sense of virtual community. Many adolescents are turning away from the “represented” worlds of much of broadcast media, which “created a world awash in events but largely devoid of shared experiences” (Travis, 1998), to participate in shared communal experiences of interactive media. In these virtual worlds, they can also experiment with different roles and stances by using alternative forms of language without concern for the constraints of gender, class, race, age, or disability markers that inhibit their participation in lived-world, face-to-face interaction.

Participants in virtual worlds may or may not be accountable for any “real-world” consequences for their actions in virtual worlds. They may adopt different identities because they perceive no need, in a virtual world, to considering the consequences of their actions. As Bill Teel, who runs a chat monitoring service noted “In teen chat rooms, all the girls are cheerleaders and all the boys have muscles…for the majority of kids, this kind of fibbing is healthy, allowing kids to pretend to be whatever they think is cool” (Santo, 2000, p. 9). Based on her extensive study of MUD participants, Sherry Turkle (1996) found that “you are who you pretend to be” by experimenting with different identities/roles. She quotes one participant:

You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You can be the opposite sex. You can be more talkative. You can be less talkative. Whatever. You can just be just be who you want really, whoever you have the capacity to be. You don’t have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. It’s easier to change the way people perceive you, because all they’ve got is what you show them. They don’t look at your body and make assumptions. They don’t hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see is your words” (p. 158).

Developing social connections

In participating in sharing responses to texts, audiences experience social connections to other actual or virtual audiences, connections that convey to them they are part of a larger social network. For example, some research on females’ responses to teen magazine advice columns and quizzes argued that female readers were being socialized to adopt traditional feminine values and function as consumers of beauty-industry products (see Module 4). However, ethnographic research by Currie (1999) found that not only were the advice columns and quizzes the most frequently read sections of the magazines, but also serve to foster sharing of problems with peers, creating a sense of community with those peers. Currie (2003) notes that the sharing of magazines between peers was a popular pastime. Currie quotes one of her participants, 17-year-old Alexandra:

“My friend loves doing the little surveys, like the ‘Friends’ survey and stuff. She always gets me to fill them out with her, or she’ll ask me questions and we go through — actually, lately, we’ve been going through them like crazy because it’s grad. So we’ve been all going through those magazines you’ve listed, basically just for style of grad dresses, and stuff like that.” (p. 252).

Audiences as communities

In developing social connections through participation with the media, audiences construct communities — either imagined or real (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998) — whose beliefs and values serve to define their own identities. Audiences of an evangelical television program or a conservative talk show identify with the imagined community of other participants who may share certain beliefs and values constituting participation with these programs or shows. Or, they may be participants in actual, real communities, for example, as members of a fan club chat group.

In one student study, Rick Lybeck (1996) examined his own family members’ responses to a televised baseball game. He recorded and took notes on his father’s and brothers’ responses to a series of baseball games. He analyzed this data in terms of what aspects of the game the participants focused on, their physical behaviors in responding together as a group, and any ritual-like patterns of response.

Lybeck found that his participants, all of whom were or had been baseball players, responded to the game by vicariously experiencing the actions of the players. They used their viewing to fulfill the purposes of a “companionship dimension” (Wenner & Gantz, 1998, p. 237) to share time with other family members. In some cases, the actual physical act of responding — of standing up and swinging as if they were a hitter or giving “high-fives” to each other as if they were on the field was part of a shared drama of mutual engagement in the game. Through mimicking the ball players on the field, they were vicariously playing out their own enjoyment of the game as a form of male-bonding. The participants also frequently adopted the “sports-talk” lingo of the television commentators to formulate their own descriptions of the game. Lybeck notes that this male sports talk serves to define their social identities as avid fans:

The main feature of the ESPN update was Barry Bonds having hit his 300th and 301st home runs earlier that afternoon. The significance of this was that Bonds joined an elite group of three other players who have in their careers hit 300 or more home runs and stolen 300 or more bases. A trivia question was put: who are the other guys. There were three generations of ball players present, two father-and-son combinations, quizzing each other on father-and-son baseball trivia; it truly was a question made for them. The TV medium as focused on in this informal ethnography was something that was integrated into a male bonding setting, but not necessarily central to the bonding. TV enabled the males to extend their baseball enjoyment and to affirm their identities as baseball players following in the footsteps of baseball fathers (Lybeck, 1996, p. 12).

Lybeck’s analysis points to the need to understand television sports-viewing activity as central to constructing male relationships.

Audiences as fans

Audiences also assume the roles of being active fans. Being an avid fan often involves exerting some influence on people involved with the production (Harrington & Bielby, 1995; Jenkins, 1992). In a study of soap opera fans and fan clubs, Harrington & Bielby (1995) found that producers and actors/actresses often lurked on fan clubs bulletin boards or participate in fan club meetings for the purposes of garnering evaluative comments about their program. Because the fans were aware of their participation, they assumed that their responses might have some influence on the program’s production.

Fan participation is also driven by the need to publicly demonstrate their commitment to being more than simply casual viewers through displaying pictures of soap opera actors/actresses in one’s home or attending fan club meetings (Harrington & Bielby, 1995). In doing so, they must also often cope with their peers’ stereotypes of themselves as fans who are incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality, stereotypes which, in some cases, created a sense of ambivalence about their own viewing habits.

Varied levels of uses of the media/computers

Audience participation with media may vary considerably in terms of their level of active/attention engagement depending on their purposes for participation. In some cases, they may not be directly attending to an experience, for example, in which the television or radio is simply passive background noise. In other cases, they may be directly attending to a media text when they have a defined purpose or reason for participation. For example, a sports fan who is a member of a fantasy sports club may carefully attend to games, sports talk shows, or information on the Internet in order to acquire relevant information necessary for his participation in the fantasy sports club.

This suggests the need to examine audiences’ modes or levels of engagement — the extent to which they are actively or passively engaged with or participating with the media texts. In playing computer/video games, they may experience high levels of interactive engagement, while in watching television while multi-tasking, they may be not be attending to the television content. These different modes or levels of engagement may be a function of interest, text-design, social participation with other audiences, or larger purposes for responding. Studying these different modes or levels provides researchers with some understanding of various factors shaping variations in these modes or levels.

Audiences may also vary in terms of their moving through and attending to media related to changing/surfing channels or radio stations, or clicking on different hypertext options on the Web. Audiences may have a particular goal or purpose driving their choices, or, they may simply exploring what is available.

Social and cultural uses of the media

Audiences are also use the media to fulfill certain social and cultural needs. For example, they may view television or films in groups as part of the need to build social relationships. They may also view certain programs in order to acquire information necessary for participation in conversations with others. They may also engaged in ritual participation with media as part of being a member of a culture, however virtual. For example, they may view television news as part of a nightly ritual celebration of virtual link to “community” constructed by the television news program. For example, in a study of avid readers’ reasons for reading the newspaper tabloid, The National Inquirer, female readers often read the tabloid in order to obtain information about celebrities which they could then share with their friends as a form of gossip (Bird, 1992). Women who could cite the latest celebrity "insider story" from sources such as The National Inquirer and dramatize its relevance for their peer group assumed status within the peer group (Bird, 1992).

Even the relatively “passive” process of television viewing can become part of an active social interaction around responding to and critiquing television.

Dan Chandler’s Module: The Active Viewer (extensive bibliography)

Understanding the various purposes for participation in virtual worlds may explain the appeal of the worlds. One purpose may be to engage in a pleasurable, ritual-like experience that connects participants with larger, mythic, collective dramas (Real, 1996). For example, soccer fans viewing World Cup soccer television broadcasts as a social group engage in ritual-like social practices a “fanship dimension and the desire to ‘thrill in victory’” (Wenner & Gantz, 1998, p. 237), a “learning dimension” (p. 237) — acquiring information about the teams and players, a “release dimension” — the “opportunity to ‘let loose’” or “get psyched up” (p. 237), a “companionship dimension” (p. 237) — sharing time with friends and family, and a “filler dimension” — the use of sports viewing to “kill time” (p. 237). The appeal of virtual worlds may therefore lie in participants’ need to transcend the everyday through collective rituals.

Viewers’ responses may also be driven by the need for a reassuring, ritual-like activity. Viewers may enjoy watching a weekly mystery program because of the reassurance of a predictable sense of closure provided by the final resolution of solving the crime. Based on her research on elderly viewers’ responses to mystery programs, Karen Riggs (1998) argues that “the reassuring mystery presents a means to validate the self at a stage of life when one’s identity is threatened in many ways by society as a whole” (p. 17).

Michael Real (1996) argues that these ritual participations in the media culture serve to connect viewers to larger, mythic dramas as well as other fans engaged in the same collective rituals. Rituals involve viewers in a collective experience that serves to unify their allegiance to a group. They engage viewers in the repetition of certain familiar narrative patterns. They structure time and space in ways that provide a sense of order and defined roles. Real cites the example of the soccer fans active engagement in viewing World Cup television broadcasts of soccer games. Real draws a comparison between the rituals of the Balinese cockfight as described by Clifford Geertz (1973) and sports fans’ participation with media sports:

First, both the cockfight and sports provide double meanings and metaphor that reach out to other aspects of social life. Second, both are elaborately organized with written rules and umpires. . . . Third, betting plays a major role in each. . . . Fourth, violence heightens the dramaof each. Fifth, the presence of status hierarchies surpasses money in importance in the event, with corporate and political elites assuming central roles. . . . Sixth, each of the two, the cockfight and the media sporting event, “makes nothing happen”; neither produces goods or directly affects the welfare of the people (p. 60).

By perceiving viewers’ responses as part of a larger ritual activity, students may understand how viewing is driven by larger cultural purposes. For example, analysis of television sports viewing found five basic dimensions associated with purposes for viewing (Wenner & Gantz, 1998). Five basic dimensions emerged from analysis of the viewers’ responses. A primary motive was a “fanship dimension and the desire to ‘thrill in victory’” (p. 237). A “learning dimension” (p. 237) had to do with acquiring information about the teams and players. A “release dimension” refers to the “opportunity to ‘let loose’” or “get psyched up” (p. 237). A “companionship dimension” (p. 237) has to do with the use of sports to share time with friends and family. And, a “filler dimension” relates to the use of sports viewing to “kill time” (p. 237). While these objects or purposes overlap, they suggest that understanding different objects and purposes requires an understanding of the activity in which viewers are engaged.

Defining class, gender, and racial identities

Audiences also use their participation with media to defining class, gender, and racial identities. By adopting certain stances associated with the practices and discourses portrayed in certain texts, audiences align themselves with certain class, gender, and racial identities. In his analysis of the television production professional wrestling, Jenkins (1997) posits that the staging of a melodramatic encounter between the “good guy” who ultimately seeks revenge on and overcomes the trickery of the underhanded, villainous “bad guy” is a genre tool that is highly appealing to a working-class male audience. Vicarious participation in this drama allows males to “confront their own feelings of vulnerability, their own frustrations at a world which promises them patriarchal authority but which is experienced through relations of economic subordination…WWF wrestling offers a utopian alternative to this situation, allowing a movement from victimization toward mastery” (p. 560).

In her study of female adolescents’ responses to the popular television program, Beverly Hills, 90210, McGinley (1997) found that the females rarely challenged the program’s predominate narrative of employing a range of practices associated with being attractive to males. Through their talk about the characters’ appearance and actions, they defined their own beliefs about gender identity in ways that were consistent with the program’s traditional, consumerist values. As McGinley noted, “talk about fictional characters and situations both produces and makes possible certain ways of being in the world and relating to others, certain identities, and the same talk conceals and closes off other possibilities” (p. 52). They perceived themselves as experts on these topics, and gained pleasure and status from sharing their expertise. She found that “never did they question the media definition of “pretty,” or their own unproblematic equating of appearance and identity” (p. 77). They “accepted the show’s invitation to foreground appearance, then enthusiastically cycled that way of attending to female identity back toward their own lives” (p. 78).

The females in the study defined a virtual community through their relationships with the characters: “As viewers constructed a community with the characters, as they drew connections and disjunctions between the characters’ personalities and their own, new meanings accrued to those traits that gave viewers importance new ways to attend to their own lives” (p. 103). The females achieved status through responding in ways that demonstrated their expertise about the social practices of dating as portrayed in the program. As McGinley notes, “They constructed a pleasurable community with which they could be experts, and positioned themselves as authors of the female identity they constructed” (p. 215).

One new media ethnography project that is starting up (as of summer 2003), involves an analysis of audience response to, online discussions of, and the integration of Oxygen within viewers’everyday lives with the new Oxygen media organization material, particularly their television broadcasts.

The Oxygen Media Research Project will examine the ways in which audiences respond to the somewhat feminist-oriented content available on Oxygen (Penley, Parks, & Everett, 2003).

Audiences may also define their beliefs and attitudes associated with class identities through their responses to media texts. Cheryl Reinertsen (1993) completed a project in which she analyzed a group of her adolescent daughter’s female friends’ weekly viewing of two television programs, “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Melrose Place.” These programs revolve around male/female relationships: fidelity, marriage, sex, relationships in the workplace, conflict resolution, etc. Cheryl observed the group discussions of the programs and interviewed various group members about their perceptions of the group meetings. Based on her observations and interview transcripts, she extracted a number of patterns in the group’s responses to these programs. She found that members applied their own beliefs and attitudes to judge the characters’ actions. They “liked Donna because she is nice and she doesn’t do anything wrong; Andrea because she doesn’t care only about her clothes and appearance; Billy because he is true and the most caring, ideal, and sensitive; Jo because she is her own person and she stands up for herself; Matt because he is a peacemaker and serves other people” (p. 8). They “disliked Amanda because she is anorexic, out for herself, and ruthless and arrogant and Kimberly because she’s a weakling” (p. 9).

For Cheryl these judgments consistently reflected what she characterized as middle class assumptions about family, work, and sexual behavior. They believed that the characters are often irresponsible in not being concerned with their education or future career. For example, in one episode of “90210,” a female college student becomes engaged to an older man. The group shared their displeasure with her decision to become engaged: “‘She likes him just because he’s rich.’ ‘She should stay in college.’ ‘She’s too young.’ and ‘Wait until her parents find out. They will really be mad’” (p. 14). For Cheryl, these comments reflected a cultural model in which “college age students should not be engaged because they are too young. If they do get engaged, they will drop out. Education is important, love can wait” (p. 22).

Cheryl recognized the power of the group in shaping individual members’ responses. Through sharing responses valued by their peers, group members affirmed their allegiance to the group's shared beliefs related to the middle class values of her own home and community.

Aspects of racial identities also influence response. In a study of African-American females responses to the film versions of The Color Purple, Jacqueline Bobo (2003) found that, despite Spielberg’s uses of black stereotypes and criticisms of the film by reviewers, particularly male reviewers, the females empathized strongly with what they perceived to be the positive aspects of the film related to portrayals of strong female identities consistent with the daily lives of black females and their own history of viewing largely white actresses. Bobo cites the example of one participant:

“When I went to the movie, I thought, here I am. I grew up looking at Elvis Presley kissing all these white girls. I grew up listening to ‘Tammy, Tammy, Tammy.’ And it wasn’t that I had anything projected before me on the screen to really give me something that I could grow up to be like. Or even wanted to be. Because I knew I wasn’t Goldilocks, you know, and I had heard those stories all my life. So when I go to the movie, the first thing I said was ‘God, this is good acting.’

And I liked that. I felt a lot of pride in my Black brothers and sisters…By the end of the movie I was totally emotionally drained…The emotional things were all in the book, but the movie just took every one of my emotions…Toward the end, when she looks up and sees her sister Nettie…I had gotten some emotionally high at that point…when she saw her sister, when she started to call her name and to recognize who she was, the hairs on my neck started to stick up. I had never had a movie do that to me before.” (p. 311-312).

Bobo notes that her participants’ positive reactions to the film reflects the process of “interpellation” — the “way in which the subject is hailed by the text; it is the method by which ideological discourses constituted subjects and draw them into the text” (p. 312). Given black females’ experiences and their own ideological discourses, the film evoked positive responses and led them to bracket out what may have been critical responses to some of the stereotyping in the film.

Media ethnographers are also interested in the relationship between media and audience response in different cultures throughout the world (Ginsbury, Abu-Lughod, & Larkin, 2002: Kraidy & Murphy, 2003). For example, when television first became available to Australian Aborigines, they were not accustomed to the content of the programs, the focus of a major cultural tension between their own and the White, commercial cultural content of television.

Elizabeth Bird (2003) argues that media ethnography serves a valuable purpose in providing a complex perspective on audiences’ media participation and challenge some of the simplistic claims made about the overpowering effects of media on people—“demonstrations of audience activity can make us feel less helpless and more powerful…” (p. 189):

It is a mistake to conclude that all people, all the time, are in the vice-like grip of all media. The pervasive talk of “media saturation” overlooks the more complex reality, which is that people’s attention is variable and selective…it is indeed very difficult for most of use to live without some media, but other media we can happily take or leave. Similarly, ethnographic research paints a more subtle and optimistic picture, showing people who engage enthusiastically with some messages, while letting much wash over them—and spending much of their time loving, caring, and sparring with each other. (p. 190)

Module 8: Word document

Active Audience Response in a Media Culture

Methods for Conducting Media Ethnographies

Methods for Conducting Media Ethnography Studies

References