Working Notions of Active Audiences: Further Research on the Active Participant in Convergent Media Industries
Vilde Schanke Sundet and Espen Ytreberg
Convergence 2009; 15; 383
DOI: 10.1177/1354856509342339
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Abstract
Recent research on the media industries has been centrally concerned with the blurring of boundaries between production and reception in an era of digitalization and convergence. The article argues for a need for research to consider more closely the importance of notions of the ‘active audience’ within today’s media industries. Overall conceptual work has been done on ‘convergence culture’, and much scholarly debate currently centres around the pros and cons of convergence; whether it empowers ‘produsers’ or the industries themselves. Important as they are, these debates run the risk of stagnation if they are not informed by further empirical research on the concrete ways that media institutions put ‘activity’ to strategic use. The article reports from a survey on how notions of activity, sociability and technological novelty function as strategic ‘working notions’ for Norwegian media industry executives.
The Usefulness of an Institutional Approach to ‘Activity’
The media industries are all about justifying the making of priorities, and nothing suggests convergent media industries are any different. The usefulness of a perspective on the institutional uses of ‘activity’ lies partly in the way it helps us to see just what was not made a priority. Here as so often in the media industries, actors’ naturalized accounts tend to obscure how some very real choices are being made. For instance, the emphasis on emotional engagement seems to invite thinking about output in terms that will privilege the emotions over the rational. The emphasis on socializing will promote a certain coupling of socializing and consumerism. And the emphasis on experimentation tends to privilege youth and gadget lovers.
Vilde Schanke Sundet and Espen Ytreberg
Convergence 2009; 15; 383
DOI: 10.1177/1354856509342339
Abstract
Recent research on the media industries has been centrally concerned with the blurring of boundaries between production and reception in an era of digitalization and convergence. The article argues for a need for research to consider more closely the importance of notions of the ‘active audience’ within today’s media industries. Overall conceptual work has been done on ‘convergence culture’, and much scholarly debate currently centres around the pros and cons of convergence; whether it empowers ‘produsers’ or the industries themselves. Important as they are, these debates run the risk of stagnation if they are not informed by further empirical research on the concrete ways that media institutions put ‘activity’ to strategic use. The article reports from a survey on how notions of activity, sociability and technological novelty function as strategic ‘working notions’ for Norwegian media industry executives.
The Usefulness of an Institutional Approach to ‘Activity’
The media industries are all about justifying the making of priorities, and nothing suggests convergent media industries are any different. The usefulness of a perspective on the institutional uses of ‘activity’ lies partly in the way it helps us to see just what was not made a priority. Here as so often in the media industries, actors’ naturalized accounts tend to obscure how some very real choices are being made. For instance, the emphasis on emotional engagement seems to invite thinking about output in terms that will privilege the emotions over the rational. The emphasis on socializing will promote a certain coupling of socializing and consumerism. And the emphasis on experimentation tends to privilege youth and gadget lovers.
These are of course all debatable priorities. One might even do well to question the fundamental assumption of audience active-ness, once it has so obviously lost its innocence at the hands of executives and major media institutions. One might hypothesize that an ever-increasing offer to be active in all sorts of ways that serve purposes others than those of the participants themselves may make passivity a more attractive option for them.
The usefulness of the type of research presented here also springs from the way it allows us to understand a certain current media industry mechanism whereby the established media industries expand into digital media.
The usefulness of the type of research presented here also springs from the way it allows us to understand a certain current media industry mechanism whereby the established media industries expand into digital media.
It might be true that current technological developments tend to put established media industries in a situation of playing catch-up, and executives themselves frequently describe their current market situation as increasingly difficult. Still it seems necessary to acknowledge and understand the industries’ capacities for containing such developments, finding ways of channelling and shaping them for strategic purposes. A key overall trend in Norway’s media industry – one that seems to have numerous international parallels – is that of established mass media institutions expanding into digital media, dominating them in terms of institutionalization and production (cf. Siapera, 2004).
These ‘old media’ institutions now often have a strong presence among the most popular national web pages and web news services. At the same time, these media institutions seem to have taken on a view of the audience that derives from the digital media.
Digital media audiences have always been described by a metaphorics of active agency; they are ‘users’, ‘navigators’ and ‘surfers’ possessing intentionality and subjectivity.
As established media institutions expand from their original base in the mass media into the digital realm, they seem to have adopted this discourse of active-ness and turned it into a tool for expansion.
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