Core Post 2: Deconstructing the "Audience"

Ellen Seiter's piece, "Qualitative Audience Research" details the myriad methodologies of "Audience Studies". Overall, Seiter denotes that the shift from the message emitted by media content to the interpretive reception of media content represents a shift in media scholarship, one that for some reason or another, is revolutionary in making sense of how we make sense of media in our everyday lives. Seiter streamlines various ethnographic studies, usually focused on the individual consumption of televised content in the domestic sphere. While the sample sizes may be minimum in scope and dealing with individual responses, in many of these studies, the overall aim is to assess how prevailing class, race, or gender issues pervade audience interpretation and reception. The audience still lacks agency, their likes and dislikes predetermined by their political or social identities. For example, in her summary of the Jhally and Lewis study that interviewed white and black families from both the middle and working class, Seiter explains that the findings of the study, which aimed to correlate reception of a well-to-do black family to racial attitudes, demonstrated that the reception of The Cosby Show typically reinforced pre-existing worldviews. For the white family, The Cosby Show demonstrated that affirmative action isn't needed and that black mobility is easily attainable in the United States (466). Rather than considering the Cosby family as an exception to the rule, white viewers invoke The Cosby Show and its promise of black wealth and empowerment as the norm, a norm which the black community cannot seemingly attain. Rather than rollback these racist notions, The Cosby Show serves to codify them.

With ethnography at the heart of audience studies, the audience becomes an abstract "other", even if scholarly conceptions of the audience rely on small groups of individuals through focus groups, interviews, or surveys. The audience is still being acted upon, now by the researcher, even if it can be seen as being an active decoder of apparatus messages. Any audience engagement is attributed or boiled down to ideology. However, due to the age of Seiter's article and the emergence of non-television visual platforms and streaming services, previous audience methodology fails to really keep up with modern advances and, arguably, the greater ubiquity of visual media in everyday life. In this respect, I greatly enjoyed Mark Andrejevic's piece "Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans", which takes as fact that audiences participate in the meaning making of television explicitly because they are grouped abstractly as an "audience" being acted upon, and as such, they feel unheard.

Online platforms serve as a self-created focus group for the audience member, who is an economic consumer of a visual product. Being a consumer, the audience member is, in my view, put in a very interesting position: they must consume before deriving value or satisfaction. The audience member takes a risk for every television episode or film that he or she views. The time spent on the viewing cannot be refunded. In the media industry, the customer isn't always right, but rather must be manipulated and persuaded to consume the product at hand due to the very distance inherent in the production-consumption process of visual media. How many times have you heard die-hard loyalists, who have watched a show, for say, six years, bemoan a less-than-gratifying series finale that seemingly had no thought of the audience that valued the show for several years? And then saw articles that list the many ways that series finale could have been better and truer to both the story of the show and the audience that watched it? Online forums seek to, to some degree, reverse the power differential. The power, to some extent, is within the consumer as the distance between consumer and producer lessen. Think of all the shows making a comeback due to a wave of 90s TV nostalgia or due to petitions to bring a show back so it can have the ending it deserved. Online platforms highlight the very real, important place that televised content has in the home and for the individual consumer. Whether it is to influence the writing and plot of a show or legitimate the time spent on, perhaps, trash television, online platforms demonstrate that audiences seek to act on the media rather than passively accept a notion of media acting on them. Audiences seek to feel connected to the show as they devote the time to become immersed in its world in the privacy and intimacy of their own home (31).

In terms of audience participation, I think of the rise of web series or YouTube-esque content where comment sections are more readily accessible than the online forums of Andrejevic's article. The "like" or "dislike" button immediately tallies and shows the world the mass appeal and reception of the work. Furthermore, the audience is in control on most of these platforms as ads are usually the greatest source of income for YouTubers. If audiences don't watch, ad deals won't be forthcoming. You can quickly "X-out" of a video that isn't stimulating you. You have much greater control over your time and the media content that you consume to fill it. Plus, these streaming services are, to a great degree, free. These "shows" or "videos" are often designed with viewers in mind. YouTubers heavily rely on audience suggestions and desires in order to galvanize viewership but also maintain it and craft an intimate viewing community (I'm thinking of Buzzfeed Unsolved or, one of my favorite, Hot Ones). Once it is revealed that audience suggestions were meaningfully considered, audience members express their gratitude for the content maker's understanding that their voice matters. It will be interesting to see how more traditional content providers evolve in light of these platforms.