Against a backdrop of new ways of engaging and configuring audiences across technologies, platforms, regions and modes, there is a revitalisation of audience studies, offering fresh theoretical and empirical territories that follow the frictions of social tensions and resistance in challenging modes of being an audience. As audiences engage with media, including artificial intelligence and related technologies, they are encountering and dealing with expanded resources for viewing, listening and interpreting their thoughts and actions, feelings and emotions. These various modes of audiencehood generate frictions, sources of both productive and negative energies to encounter and contest different conditions for a digital commons. This contribution is part of the Cultural Commons special issue on 'Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique', edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood.

Documentary 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 entertainment 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. This chapter investigates how documentary and reality series are visible on entertainment platforms, and why factuality is valuable to audiences. In particular, a transregional (Nordic audiences) and a time sensitive case (Covid-19 crisis) is used to bring to the foreground the highly contextual, unstable, and social nature of factual genres such as documentary and reality series.

This presentation is about the untold story of media infrastructures. We benefit from these infrastructures which by virtue of their invisibility, obscure social and environmental responsibility. ‘Data centres of convenience’ is a term derived from shipping logistics and flags of convenience (Campbell and Chellel 2022). The term underscores hidden systems, e.g. dividing ownership and management of the data and energy infrastructures, or tech companies domiciling in tax havens rather than the country where data centres are built, thus avoiding national taxation and labour and environmental standards (Traynor 2024). 

First, the talk makes visible dominant storytelling for data centres of convenience, told by top level actors and re-enforcing industrial logics and corporate power without responsibility for the impact of data centres on the earth’s atmosphere. Then, the talk draws on Gordon’s (2004) work on the power of telling social stories that imagine the world differently.  How can we power up alternative storytelling that contests dominant narratives, reflects on inequalities and redistributes responsibility for media infrastructures. Here, researchers can attend to the layering of storytelling of infrastructures and the agentic role of civic actors in alternative visions.

How do we imagine media infrastructures? The balance of research in media imaginaries weighs more towards how the media imagines us, prioritizing the visions of media industries, political actors and an imagined infrastructure-audience matrix. This talk focuses on the act of imagining streaming platforms as a creative and relational process. There are three acts explored in the talk. There is the act of imagining, referring to visual and creative processes for streaming platforms like Netflix or YouTube. There is the act of layering, referring to the multilayered experience of platform infrastructures as technical, lifestyle and environmental elements. And there is the act of streaming, referring to audience orientations in commodified media infrastructures. Together, the three acts of imagining, layering and streaming suggest counter positions of actors, cultural forms and meanings for envisioning infrastructures. By using visual methods, including drawing streaming platform maps and reflective interviews, the research explores how images enable audiences to show what is on their minds when imagining the current state of play for platform infrastructures now and in the near future.

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.

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.

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.