Abstract

We can characterize two trajectories relevant to audience engagement and experiences. The first trajectory, from the perspective of media industries, consumption studies and digital platform political economics, largely treats engagement as an objective, behavioural feature that can be measured, with the aim of enhanced success in targeting and reaching consumers. This perspective of media engagement prioritizes the here and now; it is the moment of engagement that is given value, whether this is in the form of attention or affective investment. These are powerful discourses surrounding media engagement that emanate from within media industries and commercial sectors; and this is a more traditional valuation of audiences and their attention, consumer trends and/or social media analytics which places emphasis on engagement as a commodity.

Audiences are hard at work finding and engaging in multiform factual content spread across a wide range of streaming platforms such as Netflix or YouTube. These platforms and the accompanying digital mess of generic labelling, algorithmic recommendations, and social media marketing, in many ways push audiences to the edge of their capacities. What are audiences to do when facts and authenticity have unstable generic identities? This research draws on empirical research for streaming content (eg Netflix, YouTube) to bring to the foreground the highly contextual, unstable, and social nature of factual genres such as documentary and reality. The research points to an acute attention to friction in factual evidence, in particular friction as signs of difference in what we can call an authenticity index. The unstable markers of factuality within mixed generic digital content don’t come with agreed upon labels. There is no fixed authenticity index; it fluctuates within the production environment of factual artefacts, the dominance of streaming platforms, the buoyancy of SVOD services, and the resonance of social media conversations. Examples of markers of authenticity include something simple like doing a workout together with a YouTube video, or survival reality series, where people live in the forest. Intensely physical reactions, such as tears of joy, by participants in documentary and reality series, can be matched by physical reactions by audiences themselves. This type of somatic evidence is given value and visibility by audiences in constructing and disputing markers of authenticity in factual streaming content. In the context of the precarity of documentary and reality genres, and the rise of AI and deep fake factual content, audiences join forces to figure out what is real and how to feel about the challenges factuality faces in digital environments. 

Abstract

Against a backdrop of new ways of configuring audiences across technologies, platforms, regions, and modes, there is a revitalisation of audience studies, offering fresh theoretical territory that follows the patterns of the emerging conditions of being an audience. These new lines of thinking are shaping the present and future of audience studies and expanding its intersection with other areas of study. In this chapter we position the collection against the backdrop of the changing media environment and audience imaginaries, modes and engagements, all of which provides the impetus for revision, review and reflection for audience research. The seven sections for the Companion are a response to audience studies as a newly energised area of research: theorizing audiences, imagining audiences, modes of audiences, engagement and experiences, identity and affect, environments, and methodologies and methods. Here we weave together the connections across the sections and reflect on two themes of layering and frictions arising from the work of authors in the collection. We see examples of the audience layering of empirical material and the diversification of conceptual resources used to interpret and understand what audiences do. And we see friction as a useful term to use for unpacking audience modes of engagement and experiences across layers of watching, reacting, making and participating with media in society and culture. As audiences are already alert to the sparks, conflicts, and differences in their relationships with and without digital media, researching what audiences do will be a dynamic, multi-layered field of research.

Abstract

The slow reality television show Back to the Field offers critical insights into affect and meaning making for Chinese audiences and their social environments. We use qualitative interviews with a selected sample of audiences who are the target market for the series, e.g., young urban millennials. This empirical material grounds our understanding of affect in audience research for non-Western contexts. We create dynamic connections between the cultural text of the reality genre and the text of our interviews in order to understand audience meaning making as a form of affect which is shaped in and through this slow reality show. Our Chinese audiences reflect on their affective relations with 'slow' representations in reality television and how this makes them feel in their social environment. We define the emergent concept of 'slow affect' as mood work which is dynamically connected to the situated and material conditions of audiences. In particular, we identify the affective energies of pressure and promise in audiences' critical reflections on the 'pressures' of urban living and stressful working conditions in their lives and the 'promise' of a slower rural lifestyle, as imagined in the series and slow lifestyle trends.

This article argues for a deeper understanding of the forms of streaming platform infrastructures as imagined and experienced by audiences. The empirical research is based on a qualitative audience study in Southeast Asia. Through the use of drawings of streaming platform maps, combining visual and interview methods, the article analyses visual forms depicting the infrastructures for global streaming platforms, e.g. Netflix, alongside transnational platforms and national cable channels, e.g. Astro. Out of this original research, a core finding is that audiences from the global south have multi-layered experiences of streaming platform infrastructures, technologies and lifestyles. A new concept of streaming platform imaginaries is developed in relation to the layering of platform infrastructures, thus contributing to a nuanced understanding of both real and imagined forms of streaming platforms.

The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences captures the ways in which audiences and audience researchers are adapting to emerging social, cultural, market, technical and environmental conditions.

Bringing together 40 original essays, this anthology explores how our constantly changing encounters with media are complex, contradictory and increasingly commercialized in the modern world. Each specially commissioned chapter by both early-career and experienced international scholars surveys new conceptualizations and constitutions of audiences, and assesses key issues, themes and developments within the field. As such, this companion cements itself as an indispensable guide for students and researchers who seek a comprehensive overview and source of inspiration for a diverse range of topics in media audiences.

The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences is an accessible, landmark tool which enhances our understanding of how media is utilized through advanced empirical research and methodological enquiry. It is a must-read for media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, humanities and social science scholars and students.

Written with media students in mind, this accessible book provides both students and researchers with a new perspective on how to research engagement, not as a metric but as a marker of power relations.

This book navigates the reader through a tighter analytical notion of engagement within an understanding of media, culture and democracy. Dahlgren and Hill offer a new definition of engagement as an energising internal force, and as such a powerful means to further human agency. From this definition, the book builds a generative theory of engagement as a nexus of relations we make and break with media on a daily basis, with examples from political activism, news and disinformation, and the global pandemic. Dahlgren and Hill identify five parameters of engagement in order to understand the relations we have with media across changing public and mediated spheres. This new perspective offers students and researchers pathways for investigating the meaning of media engagement as a resource for living.

It will be particularly useful for undergraduate courses on media audiences and publics, political communication and democracy, media and cultural theory, journalism, and for media, communication and sociology studies more broadly.

Research on Nordic Noir–inspired screen tourism addresses cross-sector collaboration of television, publishing, tourism and leisure and the material places of screen tourism. We add to this research by specifically addressing mobility (e.g., movement or transportation) and motility (e.g., differential resources for mobility) within media, mobility and screen studies. In this chapter, we explore how and why British Nordic Noir fans mobilise around their entertainment passions – how they meet, share and explore Nordic Noir at fan gatherings. By following in the footsteps of fans, we learn how they mobilise themselves into collectives, joining literary reading groups, commenting and sharing on social media, or by taking a Scandinavian tour. We focus our analysis on small details and practical arrangements, the ‘micro moves’ of discovery, engagement and contestation. In such a way, we hope to expand our idea of ‘entertainment mobilisation’ as a means of analysing both material and symbolic mobility within and around media and screen tourism. Our hope is to illuminate the Nordic constellations of fan movements, identities and power. 

Media industries recognise the extent to which the potential audiences for their products are now made up significantly of “roamers,” people finding diverse routes through the options available and combining them in different ways. The main research question in this article is: what sort of precise movements, combinations and connections become possible for roaming audiences in rapidly expanding commercial entertainment platforms? The article draws on emergent findings of a qualitative audience study in Malaysia and Indonesia, analysing patterns of movement across streaming services, e.g. Netflix, entertainment platforms, e.g. YouTube, and national cable and public television channels. Through empirical and theoretical research, we critically examine how the virtual and material are intertwined in audience mobility and motility. Through the use of visualisations of the media landscape by roamers, the trope of the “Netflix Park” signifies how motility is closely tied to media freedom and power. In our study, audiences adapt to life in a commodified culture; roamers combine global entertainment platforms and other piracy services, becoming enmeshed in the commercial foreclosure of new media spheres. 

Oppenheimer describes The Act of Killing as a ‘documentary about the imagination. We are documenting the ways we imagine ourselves, the ways we know ourselves’. This research analyses the documentary films The Act of Killing (Director Oppenheimer, co-directors Christine Cynn and anonymous 2012) and The Look of Silence (director Oppenheimer 2014), and the documentary imaginary. The research combines normally separate sites of analysis in production and audience studies in order to understand the power of documentary and the spectrum of social stories we inhabit. The article asks: how do the films document and imagine fear and impunity in memories of the genocide, and how do audiences engage with this documentary imaginary? Particular focus is paid towards the endings of the two documentary films and how audiences in this study reflect on the absence of justice for the victims of the genocide. Through the empirical research, we take a journey with the director and his film making process, understanding the lengthy and complex filming for the two documentaries in Indonesia. The films signal Oppenheimer’s political and ethical commitment towards victim recognition, the possibility and impossibility of forgiveness, and the challenge of reconciliation between victims and perpetrators. The filmmaker’s journey is intertwined with the enactments of the genocide by the perpetrators in their own surreal ways of imagining themselves, and the experience of victims seeking recognition. Audiences become intertwined in these journeys, finding along the way a critically productive space for documentary and the imaginary.