Studying the Elusive Audience

Consumers, Readers, Users, and Viewers in a Changing World

Radhika Parameswaran

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My anecdotal recounting of Bridesmaids' idiosyncratic circulation within the interpersonal and mediated arteries of my social and professional life is by no means “representative” of some larger universe of film viewing practices or of audience responses to this film. Yet, in the midst of working on this book on audiences, the discursive shadows of Bridesmaids that followed me for several weeks reminded me of the ways in which media and popular culture act as conduits and conductors for that other stuff, which we call “culture,” and in the process of “charging” dispersed audiences their texts sometimes become the breeding ground for culture itself. Whether it is the news of turmoil in Syria and of the fragility of a European Union in crisis reaching numerous global publics or the global reception of Slumdog Millionaire on fan websites, old and new media forms and their audiences, users, browsers, producers, and consumers are constantly bringing one another into being, with corporations, governments, social movements, and individuals who are positioned within unequal hierarchies of power, acting as midwives of the public sphere. The richness of audience experiences in a world in which the media are increasingly bleeding into, traveling, contaminating, animating, and permeating everyday life has attracted some of the best debates in the academy over structure and agency, reality and fantasy, Althusser's “hegemony” and De Certeau's “tactics,” cultural imperialism and hybridity, uses and gratifications and oppositional decoding/resistance, Foucault's subjectivation and Marxist determinism, globalization and localization, and patriarchal pedagogies and gendered pleasure.

Joining and enlarging these invigorating debates among varied disciplinary thrusts and research traditions, Audience and Interpretation, Volume IV of the International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, aims to provide a state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and methodological developments in audience research, case studies of empirical work amidst different audiences, and reflections on productive future avenues that can advance the academy's endeavor to grasp the slippery and morphing concept of the audience. Many of this volume's chapters do not treat these topics separately; instead, the contributions here often weave together theory, reflections on method, analysis of findings, and discussions of research approaches in order to give us integrated visions of the audience. The chapters' geographic and cultural terrain encompasses a wide range of countries: Venezuela, India, China, Japan, France, Singapore, UK, USA, Australia, Korea, South Africa, and Brazil. Twenty-seven authors from different parts of the world have come together in these pages, to converge at the conceptual site of the “audience.” Readers of this book will be exposed to knowledge of different audience formations, a plurality of cultural and demographic spaces of reception, and diverse kinds of media genres, forms, and formats. The volume's content populates the field of audience studies with an unruly and heterogeneous sample of topics – children's media, online and television news, activist media, telenovelas, books and mega-bookstores, state-sponsored television dramas, social media, Bollywood films, plays, health communication, amusement parks, documentaries, reality television, and religious programming – a sample that generates new insights, revisits established concepts, and challenges the very notion of the “audience” itself.

The spectrum of methods utilized and presented across the chapters encompasses focus group research, interviews, participant observation, immersion in cultural and media environments, surveys, and auto- and family ethnography. While some authors present critical reviews and overviews of audience research in particular areas of the field, others take us through complex historical and transcontinental itineraries, which traverse the landscape of their work. Yet others deploy reflexivity as a research instrument, to enlighten readers about the intersections between fieldwork and family/personal life, between public knowledge and private/domestic spaces, and between the subject positions of researcher and audience member, or insider and outsider. While many authors present us with agendas for future research in their areas of expertise, in the case of chapters on non-Western nations, where the project of audience research has barely been inaugurated, authors devote a substantive portion of their work to outlining gaps in our knowledge of audiences in the midst of dynamic and flourishing media ecologies where the footprints of television, film, and newspaper apparatuses are inviting large sections of the populace to inhabit their upwardly mobile spaces of viewership and readership.

The Current Moment of Audience Studies

If we could imagine a series of brief audio press releases that greeted readers when they picked up this volume on audience studies and opened the cover (like the singing Hallmark cards), a few of these releases' audio headlines would announce the following: “Audience studies is not dead,” “The audience never died, it is breathing, jumping, running, and leaping,” “Audience studies staves off rigor mortis,” and “Audience studies survives near death experiences.” For scholars new to media studies, these announcements might need some historical perspective. When I was finishing up graduate work in the US and writing a dissertation project based in ethnographic audience research set in India in the early to mid-nineties, that was a time when a backlash against audience studies had been brewing steadily; and this skepticism eventually gained full momentum just as I had wrapped up my project. Summarizing the dismissive tone and content of some sweeping critiques of the nineties that cast the entire enterprise of audience studies as banal, regressive, pro-capitalist, and naïve, David Morley (2006) writes that far too many scholars have been eager to suggest that “work on the complexities and varieties of media consumption has led us up a blind alley – with John Fiske usually cast as the evil Pied Piper who led us astray” (p. 102). Morley, a pioneer in audience studies, points out that it was fair to “argue that some recent audience work has exaggerated, and wrongly romanticized the supposed power and freedoms of media consumers,” but it was also equally shortsighted to imagine that a return to simple-minded models of media power or to the politics of false consciousness could solve these problems (p. 102). Ann Gray (1999) notes that the backlash of the nineties also had its gendered dimensions, especially when critics lamented the shift that audience studies had precipitated, from masculinist “real-world” concerns to low-brow popular culture consumed within domestic spaces (read women's consumption of popular culture).

Taking up the ethnocentric tenor of arguments that advocated “moving on” from the seemingly “banal” project of audience studies, Vamsee Juluri writes eloquently about the problems I struggled to articulate 15 years ago, when discourses of disenchantment and closure greeted me at conferences:

My own thoughts at the time were: “Can Ien Ang's work on Dallas viewers in the Netherlands stand in for the rest of the world?” Expanding on Juluri's essay and on Timothy Gibson's (2000) constructive ideas to engage structures of power in ethnographic work, my own publication “Resuscitating Feminist Audience Studies” also argues that audience studies' new journeys in Asia, Africa, and Latin America's postcolonial and globalizing contexts could generate fresh questions and concerns that were capable of liberating the field from the tired binaries of “duped versus autonomous” or “active versus passive” subjects (Parameswaran, 2003). Again, as Morley cautions us:

Vexing each other with a stimulating palette of questions, the authors in this volume join a community of other scholars – who have published books, articles, book chapters, and essays – to help audience studies not only defend itself from any lingering effects of the backlash, but also thrive and grow in productive directions, which do not simply advocate throwing out the old to celebrate the new or avant garde. David Morley (2006) candidly observes that neophilia and facile new revisionism – with grand claims to change the field by exorcising the past – often masquerade as genuine intellectual progress: “the one thing I do not think we should do is to airily dismiss previous work as if we all, obviously, ‘know better’ than that now. That way lies hubris” (p. 112). I agree. This volume's contributions mark intellectual progress by constructively building on, stretching, revising, and assessing the legacy of previous research in the field. Looking back on the last decade, we can see that audience studies has matured across the spectrum of constituents it could reach – from publications that target scholars and students in interdisciplinary graduate seminars (Bird, 2003; Brooker & Jermyn, 2003; Hagen & Wasko, 2000) to shorter and more accessible texts for beginning student researchers in media and cultural studies (Briggs, 2010; Gillespie, 2005; Ross & Nightingale, 2003; Ruddock, 2007). The scope of recent work in audience studies spans the continuum of academic formats and genres, from robust conceptual speculations on research terminology and analytic approaches, the implications of particular institutional investments in the “audience,” and the impact of new media to empirical work among different kinds of media audiences and audiences in non-Western locations that are witnessing dramatic economic and cultural transformation due to globalization.

What are some key contributions of recent scholarship in audience studies? What new and regenerative routes for knowledge production are scholars mapping to help us understand audiences in a changing world? I sample and review here, in a highly selective manner, writings in audience studies that offer evidence of the field's continued potential to engage with some of the most important and exciting conceptual, cultural, technological, political, and historical concerns of this century. My discussion here cannot do full justice to the breadth and depth of the work cited, because my goal is to acknowledge key themes rather than cover extensively the entire literature in audience studies.

What recommendations have scholars made to strengthen the methodological and conceptual scaffolding of audience studies? One stream of theoretical scholarship on historical and ideological conceptions of the audience constructively merges the ideas and projects of fields and traditions that are often slotted into binaristic and irreconcilable paradigms, namely political economy and ethnography, mass communication and cultural studies, journalism and popular culture, and qualitative and quantitative research. Webster's analytic rubrics of the audience as “mass,” “outcome,” and “agent” elegantly unify conceptions of the audience across such diverse institutions as marketing and ratings enterprises and policy and academic fields and across qualitative and quantitative audience models that include film theory, media effects, literary criticism, reception and audience studies, and early propaganda research (Webster, 1998). Webster writes that the way forward should be to incorporate more creative borrowing of interdisciplinary concepts and analytic tools, relinquish the impoverished active/passive interpretive model, and pursue an enlightened empiricism that makes room for synthesizing a number of research methods. In an otherwise spirited debate where they outline disagreements with one another, Barker and Morley, seasoned veterans of audience studies, reinforce Webster's more inclusive model of empiricism when they concur that it is time to cultivate more synthetic methodological approaches to audience research that are less bifurcated, more pragmatic, and more attentive to the needs of the questions at hand (see Press, 2006). Goran Eriksson (2006) also pursues this productive line of inquiry, which seeks to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative research. As Eriksson notes, by “freeing itself from the empiricist conceptualization of generality as representativeness” (p. 42), ethnographic audience studies can continue to explore the potential for generality in relation to “the domain of the deep structures of reality” (p. 32).

Marrying the textual impulses of rhetorical criticism in communication studies with empirical social science research on audiences in media and cultural studies, Jennifer Stromer-Galley and Edward Schiappa (1998) pursue an innovative goal of advancing what they call the “argumentative burdens of audience conjectures” in close readings of popular culture texts where authors make claims concerning the “determinate meanings of the text or the effects of texts on audiences” (p. 27). Stromer-Galley and Schiappa carefully review examples of rhetorical/textual criticism in order to identify and parse out such “audience conjectures” and claims, and then they make specific recommendations for audience research that would help to support and enhance these scholars' gestures toward audience reception. In an intriguing move, they design and implement an audience study project that follows up and tests claims made in 1995 by Thomas Goodnight in an essay on the films' Jurassic Park and The Firm, and in the end they write that wording in scholarly writing matters and that audience research is valuable for assessing the “social and political significance of popular culture texts” (Stromer-Galley & Schiappa, 1998, p. 55). In an excellent illustration of Webster's call for more interdisciplinary dialogue to enrich audience research, Helen Wood (2007) points to the limits of most textual analyses of television talk shows that import literary methods to deconstruct the complex and multidimensional – oral/audio, visual, performative, and linguistic – architecture of electronic media. Wood applies an “interactive” analytic lens – an approach that is inspired and informed by linguist Volosinov's insistence on studying verbal interaction and the dynamism of “multi-accentuality” in dialogic linguistic interactions – to examine the “generative” manner in which viewers watch and engage with talk shows. In Wood's detailed and fine-grained exploration of women's utterances and verbal responses to talk shows' parasocial and intimate address, the peculiar form of broadcast media and the communicative acts they facilitate rise to the surface, thus demonstrating the possibilities of redrawing the boundaries between speech communication and mass communication in audience research.

Publishing their essays in the same year, Shimpach (2005) and Bratich (2005) guide their readers through the historical tracks of disciplines and institutional forces to offer us two different re-visions of the audience: one that interrogates the collective and industrialized forms of “labor” that produce audiences, and another that utilizes Hardt and Negri's concept of the “multitude” to problematize the ontologies of the audience in different academic discourses. For Shimpach, the tension between the very “real” practices of audience engagement with media technologies and the discursive construction and imagination of the audience in different institutional sites leads us toward a third way of taking seriously the affective, material, and performative practices of audience labor. Shimpach (2005) analyzes ethnographic audience research, Marxist-influenced writings on the commodity audience, and the history of audience reconnaissance and management techniques in the US motion picture industry, to argue that, “with labor knowingly foregrounded, differences in what is meant by audience in individual instances can be strategically subsumed under the rubric of a single over-riding conceptualization that at least implicitly, and as often explicitly, is premised upon the idea that the audience for the culture industries performs productive labor for itself and for those industries as a condition of being an audience” (p. 357). Jack Bratich (2005), who notes at the beginning of his essay that the “fugitive” and amorphous character of the audience ensures the longevity of audience research, adopts Hardt and Negri's social theory of subjectivity – specifically, the idea of “multititude,” or the “creative capacities of cooperative social forces” to denote constitutive power – in order to “problematize” the early discursive production of audiences within the three sites of propaganda (vulnerable and reactive audience), marketing (desiring audience), and moral panics (vulnerable yet threatening audience). His essay concludes with a useful outline of the implications of his ontological treatment of the audience for empirical audience research, particularly the integration of “information technologies, communication processes, and strategies of biopolitical control,” and for the active audience model (pp. 261–262). Bratich's historical and theoretical exploration of the multitude's metamorphosis – its various incarnations of audience power – offers ideas to strengthen diverse traditions of audience research.

In addition to fleshing out more collaborative models of research that cut across boundaries, critics have also debated the limits and potential of anchoring audience studies to new conceptual paradigms, which address the media's relationships with public education, the nation, and the unruly realities of global audiences' participation and consumption activities. Livingstone (2008) addresses the recent migration of audience or user engagement – such activities as decoding texts or participating in the formation of imaginary communities – from the vocabularies of ethnographic audience studies to the pedagogic project of media “literacy,” which has possibilities for democratizing outcomes, but is also packaged, quite often, in normative terms by neoliberal institutions. She writes that the terminology of “literacy” is gaining ascendancy in multiple zones of public discourse: “Everywhere it seems we hear of cyberliteracy, digital literacy, computer literacy, media literacy, Internet literacy, network literacy and so on, and this it seems, points to a new discourse whereby the academy can examine, critically or otherwise, with media and communication technologies” (p. 53). Measuring the literacy model's fit for different media technologies, media genres, and ideological projects of audience emancipation, Livingstone concludes that, if developed further, the text-reader metaphor of critical audience studies can still retain its usefulness; however, it is also important for media scholars to engage with audience studies' overlapping interfaces through the spreading literacy metaphor. Morley (2006) writes that the framework of “cultural citizenship,” which expands statist conceptions of political citizenship to the media's capacity to strengthen civic culture and foster individuals' and communities' feelings of belonging or alienation, could be a promising conceptual hinge for audience research, and some recent work in audience studies has pursued the study of cultural citizenship in relation to audience subjectivities (Banet-Weiser, 2007; Dolby, 2006; Harindranath, 2009; Muller & Hermes, 2010). Adrian Athique's (2008) essay sketches the notion of a “cultural field” as an alternative structure for imagining audience communities as sites of relational social practices rather than as discrete populations, and thus it proposes a timely revision of traditional models of fieldwork, which followed demographic classifications and privileged narrative cohesion by “analyzing trends in media use among a categorically defined community” (p. 30). A cultural field approach, according to Athique, would account for a complex matrix of situated practices that constituted one another:

For Athique (2008), the notion of cultural field would imply that a study of film viewing would cast its ethnographic net wide enough to include fans and non-fans, cultural insiders and outsiders, and a host of other possible relational groups, so as to conceive of the cultural field as “a radial zone of influence within which viewers engage with a cultural artifact for different purposes, and from different standpoints, generating different meanings and pleasures” (p. 38).

Scholars in audience studies have also debated the implications of the spread of computers and of the Internet, as well as the implications of their associated technological convergences, for the future of audience studies (Alasuutari, 1999; Caraway 2011; Costello & Moore, 2007; Morley, 2006; Livingstone, 2004; Napoli, 2011; Newman, 2010; Sloan, 2009). While the spread of new media usage has generated unique formal and informal terminologies for our everyday engagement practices and subject positions – of users and browsers; lurking, defriending, e-mailing, tweeting, and googling; netiquette and netizens; online and offline interactions; phishing and cyberbullying; and so on – Livingstone (2004) and Morley (2006) urge us to err on the side of caution before we rush to renew utopian or ahistorical ideas of powerful media effects. As Morley writes, a predominant strain of new media theory “returns us, ironically enough, to a place we started out from long ago – to a technologically determinist version of hypodermic media effects [. . .] it is as if technologies themselves had the magical capacity to make us all active – or in some visions, even to make us all democratic – a strange form of media effects indeed” (p. 117). Morley questions the institutionally funded “new orthodoxy” of theories purporting to capture the digital age, which argue that media studies has “got it all wrong for the last 20 years,” and he reminds us that the “rhetorics of the technological sublime,” which surround the new media, also accompanied such earlier technologies as the telegraph (p. 115). Livingstone's essay on “What Is the Audience Researcher to Do in the Age of the Internet” (Livingstone, 2004) executes precisely Morley's cautionary advice to consider the usefulness of the “old” – existing theories and methods – for the “new.” She starts with a number of insights from television audience research that can inform work on new media users, including the relevance of active audience theory for the “selective and self-directed” ways in which new media audiences are “producers as well as receivers of texts,” the constraining influences of capitalist media industries on audience responses, and the connections between media engagement and “analytic competencies, social practices, and material circumstances” (p. 81). Posing a series of excellent questions for future research on Internet audiences, Livingstone outlines the different and perhaps “magnified” methodological challenges that new media practices – surfing, game playing, instant messaging, privileging content over form, and consuming texts that are multimodal, hypertextual, and ephemeral – pose for issues of observation and access in empirical and ethnographic audience research. Taking on the vital issue of ethics in the context of qualitative audience research afforded by the Internet, Amanda Lotz and Sharon Ross (2004) describe the ethical considerations that must guide the research process, beginning with entering and monitoring chat groups and forums, procuring informed consent, ensuring a fair and dialogic exchange with the respondents, willingness to change research designs, accepting withdrawals and refusals from participants at any stage, and maintaining vigilance to protect subjects' anonymity.

While scholars have genuinely lamented the fact there is far more abstract writing about audiences than work that is based on empirical research, it is also true that the field has made progress in studying both international audiences and audiences that have been historically excluded from the field, either due to marginalization or because they were considered too normative and powerful. Cultural anthropology and sociology's discovery of the role of media in shaping and producing culture has helped audience studies gain a more international visage; feminist anthropologists and sociologists have carried out fieldwork in India (Mankekar, 1999; Derne, 2000; Dickey, 2007), Egypt (Abu-Lughod, 2005), and China (Friedman, 2006) to produce detailed ethnographies of audience responses to television drama and film in relation to discourses of class, colonialism, caste, gender, and nation. Cultural anthropologist Mark Peterson's (2010) singular work on journalism's reading publics in India demonstrates the depth of contextual data on news literacies that only careful ethnographic work can yield; his analyses of such phrases as “taking the newspaper,” “raddi,” and “common man,” which circulate among his informants, reveal the profound embeddedness of news in webs of social relations. Unlike in the early to mid-nineties, in the fairly barren landscape of global audience studies prevailing then, now we have a modest corpus of empirical research in the communications academy, which has explored, for example, the contours of media and popular culture audiences in such locations as Japan (Condry, 2006; Darling-Wolf, 2000, 2004; Muramatsu, 2002; Takahashi, 2010), Malaysia (Carstens, 2003), Australia (Aly, 2010; Holloway & Green, 2008), India (Juluri, 2003; McMillin, 2003; Parameswaran, 2002, 2003; Rao, 2007), Venezuela (Acosta-Alzuru, 2003, 2010), Brazil (La Pastina, 2004), South Africa (Bradfield, 2010; Strelitz, 2004), Singapore (Trager, 2008), Lebanon (Kraidy, 1999), China (Haiqing, 2006), and Denmark (Drotner, 2004). Several of the pioneering authors cited here are represented in this volume and, most importantly, their projects in global audience studies have propelled vigorous dialogue with other humanities and social science disciplines on phenomena related to globalization's spread – cultural imperialism, consumerism, neoliberalism, hybridity, postcolonial class formations, gender and nationalism, emerging markets, anti-globalization movements, and multiculturalism.

Some of the audience studies projects in different nations around the world, along with a growing body of work in the US, also foreground the cultural practices, media uses, and responses of communities whose profiles do not approximate to the historically dominant white, heterosexual, Christian, and middle-class subject position: examples of such work in the US include Mary Gray's (2009) ethnography of queer rural youth's consumption and production of online spaces; Vivian Barrera and Denise Bielby's (2001) qualitative exploration of Latino viewers' reactions to televonelas; and Lakshmi Srinivas' (2002) and Aswin Punathambekar's (2005) research on film reception among members of the Indian diaspora. Reflecting the shift in gender studies toward critiques of manhood and masculinity, audience research has also departed from its long-standing focus on women audiences and femininity, to address the ways in which men take pleasure in and utilize media in order to construct their identities (Derne, 2000; Hoover & Coats, 2011). Finally, rare recent work (Davis, 2005) on the strong media effects of communications on investor behavior and trading patterns in the London Stock Exchange (LSE), which was based on interviews with elite fund managers, exemplifies the value of “studying up” in audience research, namely tracking and observing the lives of privileged groups in society.

The field of audience studies has also made advances in incorporating reflexivity, a key and indispensable aspect of qualitative research that facilitates ethical, flexible, and rigorous research design and demystifies the research process for other communities of scholars, and especially for beginning researchers about to embark on their first major projects. Far from encouraging narcissistic navel-gazing, audience researchers' reflexivity has produced thoughtful and constructive accounts that dwell on fieldwork dilemmas, on the outcomes of using particular research methods, and on the challenges of navigating relations between and among research subjects. Elizabeth Bird (2003) embraces reflexivity in the introduction to her book, so as to offer instructive lessons on methods; she argues that “methods matter because the choices made, along with the very characteristics of the researcher, play into and ultimately shape the conclusions of any research” (p. 9). Bird's candid evaluation of the methodological choices and strategies – soliciting letters and conducting telephone interviews – that she employed in some of her previous work both helps readers understand the ways in which gendered norms shape “data collection” and dispels the myth that telephone interviews are always necessarily a poor substitute for personal interviews. She also provides details of how “researcher-absent methods” where participants tape their reactions to, and their interactions with, media without the ethnographer being present allow scholars to gather data under research conditions that approximate closely the everyday lives of media audiences.

Essays probing the intersections between personal biographies/identities and the trajectories and peculiarities of fieldwork undertaken in particular locations by media and cultural studies scholars – essays published in the multidisciplinary journal Qualitative Inquiry – flesh out the concrete ways in which researchers act as embodied instruments of knowledge production in qualitative research (Murphy, 2002; Parameswaran, 2001). The interrogation of researchers' subject positions in audience ethnographies has also expanded the horizons of debates over the politics of racial identity; for example, Vicki Mayer's (2005) deliberations on “narcissistic whiteness” and “defensive whiteness” challenges whiteness' invisible normativity and the tendency in scholarship to essentialize whiteness within ahistorical and functionalist “narratives of structural dominance or individual vulnerability” (p. 148). Reflexivity, as Lotz and Ross (2004) argue, is even more vital for research ethics when we mine or study audiences in the Internet age, where both scholars and subjects have to navigate the insecure and murky waters of privacy, anonymity, and intimacy in cyberspace. While audience studies must continue to deliver on its commitment to reflexive fieldwork and writing practices, these examples of sustained and serious attention to the research process get us closer to the use of “reflexivity to alleviate discrepant power relations” and to acknowledge power differentials in a manner that utilizes and advances feminist anthropology's commitment to ethical innovations in theoretical approaches and research methods (Abu-Lughod, 1988; Behar, 1993; Clifford, 1986; Gordon, 1988; Lotz, 2000, p. 453).

Distinguishing Characteristics and Organization of the Volume

This volume picks up and builds on the current momentum of work in audience studies outlined in the previous section. Collating and bringing together major scholars of national and international reputation and bright emerging researchers in the field, many of the chapters in this book synthesize and provide larger frameworks to interpret their authors' empirical studies and theoretical contributions and to specify productive questions, which can propel future debates and investigations. The volume's novel and distinguishing features extend to the first and leading part, which offers curricular, conceptual, and methodological strategies to strengthen the future of the field, and also to a part dealing with new media genres, which encompasses news, feminist online forums, institutional efforts to control and manage online audiences, and girls' uses of new media. The volume's integration of a wider range of subjects – such non-traditional topics as women audiences of health communication, consumers of multinational bookstores, and activist audiences are included here alongside more traditional audience studies content on viewers of popular culture – contributes still further to scholars' ongoing efforts to make the field more responsive to developments in the world and more inclusive of multiple audiences. Two chapters, one on China and another on India, which review recent media developments in these rising powers and emerging market nations in order to chart yawning gaps in what we know about audiences there, offer contributions that are not available in existing books. While edited collections often include a chapter or two where authors focus on reflexivity, this volume devotes a whole section to it, and the chapters here present different generic iterations of reflexive practices, from authors' deliberations on various stages of data analysis to the rare instance of work that showcases audience members' reflexive interpretations of research encounters. The chapters assembled in this book also represent different audience research traditions that have emerged from mass communication, cultural studies, media sociology, feminist anthropology, feminist media studies, and communication studies.

The volume is divided into five thematic parts, which address, respectively, future directions for the field, reflexivity, global media audiences, new media technologies, and citizenship. Some of the chapters could easily belong in two or more sections, and this ambiguity illustrates the hybrid analytic and methodological overlaps that characterize work in audience studies. My ensuing discussion of the different parts of the book and of the chapters will further highlight the volume's fresh perspectives on and new intersections with ongoing conversations about theory, fieldwork, methodology, data analysis, politics of research, and knowledge gaps in audience studies.

Part 1

The first part, “Expanding the Horizons of Audience Studies,” takes up the challenge of considering trajectories for the field to multiply and mature further, whether this results from a commitment to “growing” new generations of scholars or from tackling different approaches to theory, methodology, and fieldwork – approaches that can lead us beyond the dualistic constructs of active/passive and duped/autonomous audiences. Pedagogy for the graduate curriculum still presents a mysterious and uncharted terrain, especially when we compare it to the dozens and dozens of books and articles on undergraduate pedagogy. Gigi Durham's chapter “The Audience in the Graduate Curriculum: Training Future Scholars” in Part 1 may be the first of its kind: that is, the first to undertake an inventory and an account of the pedagogical challenges – from issues of access and human subjects review boards, to ethics and power in the field, to data collection, and to writing media ethnographies – that arise in courses designed to train students to study audiences. The process of teaching graduate students to manage audience studies projects occurs within formal classrooms and educational settings, in supervised research contexts, and in the less controlled and distant environments of fieldwork. Given the difficulties of studying human subjects, who can defy and rebel against the most well-planned research designs (unlike compliant and accommodating “textual” subjects), it is important for the academy to create public knowledge around the successes and failures of the graduate pedagogies that educate future scholars. Durham's essay takes on greater weight when we acknowledge the fact that some of the best and most innovative audience studies projects are birthed in the early stages of scholars' academic careers.

Patrick Murphy and Kim Trager-Bohley, whose chapters sit at contrasting ends of the spectrum, address methodological considerations that might shape the research designs of audience studies in the future. Murphy outlines the affirmative and pragmatic benefits of short-term fieldwork, or of abbreviated site visits, in an era when media researchers in the US academy are increasingly strapped by lack of time, funds, and institutional support. Trager-Bohley argues for the opposite, that is, for an expanded, flexible, and responsive vision of ethnography as a multi-sited endeavor whose open-ended pursuit of sites and subjects approximates Athique's (2008) notion of a more unbounded “cultural field.” In the last chapter in this section, CarrieLynn Reinhard and Brenda Dervin broaden the theoretical horizons of audience studies. Their chapter explains the conceptual paradigm of Dervin's “sense-making methodology” and offers illustrative examples of data from research projects to introduce readers to the strengths of this comprehensive approach. Sense-making methodology, as these authors show, allows scholars to study audiences at individual and collective levels, facilitates more expansive and immersive projects, and accommodates a matrix of contextual factors that affect audiences' situated interpretations of the media.

Part 2

The second part focuses on reflexivity in audience research; authors here are using different theoretical and political lenses and multiple narrative approaches to flesh out their particular stances on reflexivity. Foregrounding reflexivity through the creative architectural form of her essay, Carolina Acosta-Alzuru draws on the organizational metaphor of the “itinerary” in order to turn a potentially dry and pedestrian plotting of her work across time into a captivating “travelogue” that chronicles the changing landscape of the research strategies and methods she has employed to study telenovelas in Venezuela. Acosta-Alzuru writes candidly about the difficulties she navigated to arrive at more intimate and imaginative renderings of her research: “They [variations in my writing tone] offer evidence of my own struggles to detach myself from the more traditional (and ‘safe’) forms of academic writing that I was socialized to pursue, and instead allow personal reflection and critique to govern my writing and become the heartbeats of my prolonged academic immersion in the study of telenovelas.” Similarly blending his research on children's television and his parenting practices with an ethnographic portrait of his own family's viewing practices, Matt Briggs crafts a forceful and intriguing narrative, peppered alternatively with television's scripts and family transcripts, which articulates the concept of “force” as a means to deconstruct the intricate process of humans' meaning-making processes as well as to unpack audiences' deep emotional and ideological investments in media culture. Briggs rightly points out that audience research needs to be boosted through proposals for “methodological inventiveness,” which can in turn foster innovation in theory-building and help us achieve “thickness” in our research narratives. Acosta-Alzuru's and Briggs' chapters remind us of the importance of writing and of narrative form – a neglected topic in audience research – in conveying our representations of audience research. For them, reflexivity is as much an inner cognitive and affective process as it is a research strategy that enables them to externalize their audience research projects through the art of writing and through narrative choices.

Lynn Schofield Clark mines reflexivity within her larger project on US families' uses of new media in order to build a multilayered story of an “ethnographic dilemma”: this dilemma centers on a young girl, who engaged in excessive and sometimes inappropriate digital and mobile media use. Taking us backstage into the green room of qualitative research, where the messy and intimate processes of data collection unfold, Schofield Clark highlights the contingent and contextual forces that shape the writing and publishing formats of audience research. She argues that reflexivity helps us understand better the ways in which researchers' identities, the demands and discourses of multiple stakeholders (university students, research assistants, members of the public, and various academic research communities), and researchers' measures of what various reading publics expect influence the public audience studies research narratives we produce. While Schofied Clark digs into the inner recesses of fieldwork for one project, Fabienne Darling-Wolf takes an expansive view across time and space, to consider the challenges and opportunities that her identities present for her as a white European scholar who grew up in France, as an academic who lives ands works in the US, as a researcher who carries out fieldwork in Japan, and as she moves across multiple geographic and institutional contexts. Darling-Wolf anchors her empirical accounts of reflexivity – of trying to understand different national and ethnic audiences' responses to media in a connected global mediascape that also bears the imprints of history – to her advocacy of a “translocal” theoretical approach to audience studies that can engage with the criss-crossing networks of media flows.

Finally, Katherine Sender's unusual treatment of reflexivity in her chapter, in the context of audiences for reality shows, pushes the boundaries of scholarship on this topic by investing audiences, not just scholars and ethnographers, with the power to enact forms of reflexivity, that is, to exercise the critical capacity of achieving distance from the “self” and of projecting different “selves” that speak to one another. Such practices of reflexivity, which audiences perform and enact in research situations, are not simply “collateral damage” or incidental outcomes of audience research; in fact, as Sender shows, these productions of the viewer's self that arbitrate the circulation and reception of reality shows challenge the functionalism of users and gratifications theory and the regulatory/disciplinary emphasis of governmentality critiques.

Part 3

The seven chapters in the third and largest part of the volume – “Finding and Engaging Global Audiences” – carry out three crucial tasks: they provide case studies of empirical research in South Africa, Brazil, and India; they offer critical reviews of the literature on audience studies in China and India; and they propose prescriptive theoretical and methodological models of research to study audiences in East Asia and Australia. Shelley Bradfield's chapter on South African women television viewers and Vamsee Juluri's chapter on Indian film and television viewers contribute new knowledge of audience responses to the media in postcolonial and “emerging market” nations that are grappling with the challenges of bridging racial, religious, class, caste, and cultural differences in the midst of economic and cultural globalization and its aggressive incursions. Bradfield's analysis of a diverse group of South African women's interpretations of the television drama Home Affairs' fictional tales of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation illustrates the vicissitudes of the state-sponsored travels of multiculturalism into the intimate domestic and affective spaces of citizens' lives in this post-apartheid nation. She peels off and takes apart white, black, and a mixed ethnic and racial group of women audiences' different “globalized” and “localized” expressions of identification and disconnection with the drama's characters in order to demonstrate that multiculturalism's rhetoric of equality rings hollow in the face of the struggles that disenfranchised citizens continue to face. Juluri's chapter, which showcases his ethnographic research in India, also exemplifies the unique strengths of ethnographic audience research. His interviews and conversations with audiences allow him to bring to light the extraordinary complexities of assumptions about human nature and reality that mediate television viewers' seemingly “irrational” or “strange” responses to important issues related to family, nation, and religion in media culture. The author's elegant and robust integration, under the conceptual umbrella of the “real,” of findings from his multiple projects of audience studies undertaken over time and across media genres also affirms the enduring possibilities of ethnographic work to generate grounded and located theory, which resonates with the particular influence of historical and cultural forces on audiences' responses to popular culture. Echoing Juluri's longitudinal mode of contemplation, which links together the author's various research projects, another chapter in this section, authored by Antonio La Pastina, synthesizes this researcher's long-standing ethnographic media research in Macambira, Brazil, aiming to consider audiences' responses to various aspects of the social and capitalist content of telenovelas – including product placement, gender roles, social marketing, and generic conventions. Steering global media research away from its elitist metropolitan biases, La Pastina gently guides us through the material and mediated terrain of rural Brazilian viewers' lives, to argue – in contrast to the liberatory and populist tone of early audience research – that telenovelas have contributed further to the urban–rural divide and to power hierarchies of class and cultural capital in this upwardly mobile globalizing country.

In contrast to these three chapters, which are filled with data from fieldwork carried out amidst media audiences, Hongmei Li's and Sunitha Chitrapu's chapters, which take a critical inventory of China's and India's mediascapes respectively, make a persuasive case for amplifying the empirical base of audience research in these two nations. Li's chapter juxtaposes developments in China's exploding media environment with trends and changes in media and cultural studies research, so as to identify promising areas for future research on Chinese audiences. Chitrapu's overview of India's film industry re-orients the almost obsessive focus on Bollywood in film studies, to engage with Indian cinema's various linguistic sectors, which cater to this postcolonial nation's multiethnic and regional film viewing audiences. Bringing the material realities of political economy in conversation with the potential of culturalist ethnographic studies, Chitrapu charts the missed opportunities for audience research that scholars can harness to produce a richer, fuller, and more pluralistic portrait of film reception in India that interrupts the hegemonic hold of Bollywood in the academy.

Finally, a chapter on alternative regional audience formations in East Asia and another one on television and new audiences in Australia contribute new ways to think about theory and methodology in global audience research. Chua Beng Huat's chapter on transnational television – which augments the mission of recent scholarly endeavors to engage with global media counterflows that take us past US media and cultural imperialism (Iwabuchi, 2001; Thussu, 2006) – analyzes the implications, for audience studies, of the traffic in media flows between and among nations in East Asia. Stitching together existing work along with his own research, Beng Huat addresses a series of phenomena – dubbing as a form of semiotic alteration, audiences' paradoxical forms of identification with foreign content and artists, the politics of nationalism and transnational fandom, and the emerging fragile contours of a pan-East Asian identity – to fashion a conceptual model that will help other scholars conduct audience research that is sensitive to the regional inflections of global audience formations. Donell Holloway and Lelia Green, who dissect systematically the benefits of different methods that scholars frequently use in ethnographic research, begin their chapter by outlining the origins and concerns of audience studies in Australia. Dismantling the methodological edifice of their own work on families' viewing practices and interactions with media technologies, they argue that keen observations of mundane and familiar domestic spaces and close attention to audiences' struggles with negotiations over media use can add texture and nuance to qualitative work based on interviews.

Part 4

The still nebulous and uncharted waters of new media audiences are the focus of the fourth section of the book. How can we conceptualize new audiences in ways that do not simply import the ill-fitting baggage of old media technologies? Does it still make sense to erect boundaries between producers and audiences in the online media environment? What are the dilemmas that ethnographers should anticipate when they study online audience communities? Fernando Bermejo's chapter in Part 4 argues that new media audience practices are threatening to disrupt the fragile consensus on definitions of the audience that were forged earlier among various competing institutions. He charts the evolution of audience measurement techniques within various media industries and in the advertising world, to foreground the fresh complications that the new media pose for the managerial needs of corporate imperatives; and he evaluates the routes, methods, and techniques that researchers have devised to measure Internet audiences. Deborah Chung's chapter takes on a similar task, of appraising audience behaviors and communication models in the universe of online news media – a growing industry that has wrought major transformations in the fortunes of the rapidly declining print news industry in the US. She surveys trends and developments in the arena of online news – the use of interactive tools, the emergence of social media, and citizen blogging – to suggest fruitful directions for empirical research that can shed more light on the ways in which readers are flocking to the converging news habitats of cyberspace.

New media technologies have also attracted the attention of feminist media scholars, and authors Shayla Thiel-Stern and Radhika Gajjala explore the emancipatory potential of girls' and women's cyber-activities and cyber-communities from feminist perspectives. Thiel-Stern's chapter notes that new and mobile media have opened up opportunities for girls to express their agency and to bridge the gulf between “passive” and “active” subject positions by being both consumers and producers; but she also cautions us that lingering hegemonic patriarchal structures, the corporotization of the Internet, and continuing problems of access should restrain scholars from overestimating technology's alluring fantasies of resistance and freedom. Radhika Gajjala's chapter takes us on a biographical journey through the episodes of her ongoing feminist research program on Internet communities and online spaces in conjunction with the material imperatives of offline phenomena. Gajjala's descriptions of how she acquired her knowledge toolkit of theory and methods to study the new species of online audience communities fabricates the subject position of the cyber-ethnographer as a bricoleur, a flexible and open-minded scholar who makes use of various and serendipitous formal and informal knowledge resources to study the still unresolved research questions that crop up in the context of online media.

Part 5

The fifth and last part, “Empowering Audiences as Citizens,” scrutinizes audiences in their avatars as citizen subjects: chapters here approach formations of citizenship through the lenses of public health media, activism, news media, and performative and documentary genres of production. Linda Aldoory's chapter assesses the contributions of existing research on health messages and health campaigns that have targeted women from the point of view of their capacity to improve the quality of health communication and thus to empower female audiences. Aldoory argues that the biomedical paradigm, which assumes a linear progression from awareness to behavior, media campaigns' assumptions about audiences' middle-class lifestyles, and models of research that ignore issues of culture and power have hindered the development of public health media and of messages that can genuinely assist women to take charge of their lives. This chapter's focus on health communication in Part 5 adds a neglected topic to the archive of academic audience studies work that we have accumulated over the last 15 years.

Jennifer Rauch's chapter casts a new light on activist citizens, who have typically been studied as producers and disseminators of protest media rather than as subcultures or audiences of media and popular culture. Applying James Carey's model of ritual communication to activists' practices of media engagement and reception, Rauch proposes that shifting from the transmission mode of activists' communication to their ritualistic and symbolic patterns of media consumption will enable scholars to offer greater insight into the cultural formation and political mobilization of activist identities in the first place. Identifying and discussing activists' media preferences and their skepticism toward purely technological forms of dissent, Rauch recommends areas for future study on those ritual forms of communication and reception that inspire and invite audiences to become activists. Kim Christian Schrøder's ambitious chapter synthesizes an extensive body of knowledge on audiences as citizens, aiming to create a historical typology and taxonomy of audiences. Schrøder's theoretical and analytic distillation of three decades of reception research classifies the literature according to the following five categories: hegemonic citizenship, monitorial citizenship, popular citizenship, participatory citizenship, and ubiquitous citizenship. The author fleshes out the impulses, concerns, and research designs of each stage of citizenship, providing representative case studies that further help readers grasp more concretely the intellectual contours and contributions of each of these five stages.

Volumes on audience studies rarely include material on performative genres or on documentary productions. The final chapter in the volume and in this fifth part merges production and reception in order to address the issue of how alternative genres of communication and media – street theater, documentary film, and ordinary citizens' digital media productions – invite audiences to participate in acts of witnessing and to enter cultural and political spaces whose mediated rhetoric interpellates them as engaged and concerned citizens. Activists' street theater and grassroots organizations' documentary films aspire to earn instrumental forms of political recognition and acknowledgment from their audiences, and the testimonial accounts of digital media productions seek to incite sympathy from, and to build solidarity with, citizens. The authors acknowledge the distinctions between these genres, but they also argue that the autobiographical, narrative, and public testimonies circulating in public spaces though the vehicle of these genres may compel audiences to shift their subject positions from being isolated individuals to becoming connected and politically engaged citizens who participate in social movements.

* * *

In closing, I propose with great optimism that this volume's chapters offer evidence that the unfinished project of audience studies will continue to be an exciting and innovative area for future argumentation and debate and for future empirical research. Numerous chapters in this volume bring to light the intellectual cracks, gaps, and fissures in the field that generations of scholars ahead can deliberate over and choose to fill and repair. The field of audience studies is a vital and indispensable component of the ongoing larger projects of the still young disciplines of media, cultural, and communication studies, which seek to inform and educate citizens about the evolving ways in which media culture and technological forms intersect with the trajectories of human agency, the influences of historical patterns and global affairs, the contingencies of everyday life, and the endurance of institutional power structures. Indeed, as numerous other critics in audience studies have pointed out, the “audience,” both real and imaginary, constitutes the basic epistemological, material, and discursive foundation for the very existence and spread of mediated forms. The enterprise of scrutinizing the audience, as this volume demonstrates, can facilitate invigorating and constructive conversations between and among various streams of research and theoretical traditions that address production and political economy, texts and representations, psychology of media effects, qualitative and quantitative paradigms, and multiple and convergent media genres. At a time when media culture's fluid representations of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation are crossing geographic and political borders or erecting new boundaries to separate us into isolated and fragmented subcultures, creating knowledge of audience formations should take center stage in the academy's mission to produce responsible and engaged global citizens, workers, consumers, and scholars.

I invite readers of the volume to join me and the authors here in our project to keep the audience alive and kicking.

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FURTHER READING

Adrian, B. (2003). Framing the bride: Globalizing beauty and romance in Taiwan's bridal industry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hall, A. (2003). Reading realism: Audiences' evaluations of the reality of media texts. Journal of Communication, 53(4), 624–641.

Haridakis, P. M., & Whitmore, E. H. (2006). Understanding electronic media audiences: The pioneering research of Alan M. Rubin. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 50(4), 766–774.

Haynes, J. (2007). Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood films. Africa Today, 54(2), 130–150.

Höijer, B. (2004). The discourse of global compassion: The audience and media reporting of human suffering. Media, Culture and Society, 26(4), 513–531.

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