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Beyond the Active Audience

Exploring New Media Audiences and the Limits of Cultural Production

Shayla Thiel-Stern

In a popular painting, The Treachery of Images, by René Magritte, a pipe is famously pictured floating above the phrase Ceci n'est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”) presenting a paradox and inviting its viewers to question further the notion of what is represented before them.

As I sit down at my computer, staring at a screen filled with windows of Facebook, blog comments, “friends” awaiting invitations to chat, a Twitter feed, and good old-fashioned email, I can practically envision a sentence floating beneath the monitor: “This is not an audience” (or, to paraphrase Magritte, Ceci n'est pas un public). Despite all of the audience comments and status updates before me, and despite the fact that the audience appears to be actively reading and engaged as well, this is not an audience.

Or rather it is not an audience in the sense in which we, as media scholars, have traditionally considered the audience. Certainly, the audience has always been active to a certain degree. For the sake of making a point about activity, one could refer to the very active – vociferous, sometimes downright noisy – theatre audiences of the late eighteenth century. It is also important to consider mass media research paradigms in which some audiences were conceived of as being not particularly active. Many felt that newspapers and broadcast media did not allow for true interactivity, and this could be true; despite the active meaning-making process that many critical scholars from the early 1980s onward attributed to the audience, some mass communication scholars today conduct studies that still seem to consider traditional mass media messages to flow directly from the medium to the receiver. However, even traditional media effects researchers must acknowledge the challenge that the interactive nature of new media poses for one-way paradigms of media – audience interactions. So, for all intents and purposes, the audience today is not an audience.

In fact this point must take us toward the realization that the new media audience is so much more than just an audience. This chapter seeks to track the negotiated meaning of “the audience,” from early Internet audience research to studies in the era of Web 2.0 and beyond, by focusing on two crucial ideas. First, the audience is now also a producer and gatekeeper. Second, the audience is now its own audience (and, perhaps even more crucially, that audience is aware that it has an audience). In the final part of the chapter – keeping in mind this complicated, negotiated construction of the new online audience – I will discuss two of my own qualitative audience-focused research studies to illustrate how this shifting audience presents both opportunities and challenges within the digital media environment.

The Audience as Producer

Although the field of audience studies has a long history in media studies, this chapter, which is by no means exhaustive, focuses on new media audience research in cultural studies – research that relates to youth culture. The chapter takes a selective path to illustrate certain conceptual points about audiences/users/consumers from previous research. However, it is helpful to begin here by using one of the earliest and best known communication models as a starting point for an argument. Shannon and Weaver's (1948) Source → Message → Channel → Receiver model (SMCR) very clearly illustrates how early scholars conceived of messages as flowing directly to audiences. The receiver was the end-point. End of story. Traditional media organizations today may still consider this model to exemplify their industry to a large degree, though they certainly have had to re-evaluate the audience in the age of interactive media. As their audiences have eroded and migrated to digital sources of news and information, which allow for increased personalization, immediacy, and interactivity, SMCR is far too simplistic a model.

Furthermore, this work by no means discounts the more “traditional” audience work that defines an audience either as a passive receptacle for mass media or as a creative, thinking, and constantly negotiating entity, which transforms traditional media texts. Instead it invites readers to reimagine or renegotiate their own understanding of an audience, as well as the eroding distinction between traditionally defined senders and receivers of information and the blurring or merging of roles between these formerly distinct groups. I mean to suggest that interactive media are fairly different animals from traditional media, and they require a different kind of audience – or perhaps something entirely different from an audience altogether. Our vocabulary might have to change.

The earliest new media audience studies felt more like anthropological experiments in an uncharted foreign terrain, and few communication scholars thought of them specifically as “audience studies.” Some of the earliest scholars were graduate students, and some of the key works were Masters theses; Rheingold, who wrote one of the earliest studies, was not even a traditional academic. Methods were primarily qualitative and specifically ethnographic, and they often fell in the realm of participant observation – methodology not so different from the more groundbreaking one used in traditional media audience studies on television and print audiences in the 1980s and 1990s. Early media scholars studying online audiences understood even then that their audience was something of a different animal, as it could immediately respond to any method of study. For one thing, the audience members often did not engage in the same “social” meaning-making with the texts before them, because they engaged in their online practices alone, sitting at a computer. For another, only a relatively small portion of the population actually had the knowledge and means to access these mediated online worlds. Often the research was written from a first-person perspective, as it questioned new sociological and cultural phenomena, to be found online within early text-based virtual communities known as MUDs – an acronym for “multi-user dungeon,” which referred to various Internet-based forums – and MOOs – an acronym for “MUD, object oriented” (Bruckman, 1992; Dery, 1994; Kendall, 1996; Reid, 1995; Rheingold, 1993; Turkle, 1995) as well as newsgroups and listservs (Baym, 1993, 1995; Gurak, 1997). In this work, the authors demonstrate very clearly the agency that the audience is granted in its ability to make sense of not only the content before it – as was generally the case in past mass communication audience studies using more traditional media such as books, television, film, radio, magazines, and newspapers – but also of the medium itself. These scholars used primarily a combination of participant observation, online interviews, and quotation, in their own research, of the audience's posted text. Their research often seemed to demonstrate the future possibilities and potential of the new media as much as to understand the audience that engaged with it.

In the early 1990s, in the pre-web Internet world, these studies were a marvel for anyone who saw “cyberspace” as a playground for identity play, anonymous protest, intellectual discussion, rhetorical advancement, and unfettered creativity in a space that provided a sense of equality through its disembodied anonymity. Several early audience studies on the Internet quoted the New Yorker cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer screen and telling another dog: “No one knows you're a dog on the Internet.” These early audience studies signaled to the larger community of media scholars that the new medium was a new space in which to find an audience, albeit a relatively small one. Still, the studies were not shy about extrapolating online sociological phenomena to the real world. Rheingold wrote:

These early studies also signaled a shift in the very idea of what constituted an audience. Clearly Internet users – even those studied in research that measured and compared the effects of online media content and those of traditional media content – were able, at least to a certain extent – through emails, chatrooms, and rudimentary discussion forums – to respond directly to the gatekeepers who produced content and to other audience members. Furthermore, as the audience members came to understand better how to use the tools of the web and how to construct their own web pages, the already blurry line separating audience member from producer shifted completely. In order to grasp better a particular facet of the new media audience, scholars began to analyze the web pages they produced. For example, Stern (1999) conducted an analysis of web pages produced by adolescent girls, and she did so in order to gain insight into how these pages served to broadcast to the world the girls' innermost thoughts. This was a novel study of an audience, one that, at the time, was not considered highly technical, both because of stereotypes associated with gender and because it was years before Xanga and other personal blogging applications became popular among teens and tweens. In 2000 Hine's groundbreaking book Virtual Ethnography granted a stronger sense of academic legitimacy to the idea of studying audiences/producers online. Although ethnography is often seen as a more immersive research approach to studying sociological phenomena, Hine suggested that online communities allowed for immersion and in fact were ripe for in-depth study that did not require the researcher to leave her office. As was the case in active audience studies, ethnography – even just in a virtual sense – became an accepted means of analyzing online audience members within their “native” environment.

Despite the generally accepted legitimacy of virtual ethnography, Internet audience studies in the early part of the millennium also signaled that there had been a change in that audience itself. As access to the Internet increased, and the web and digital media technologies became a more normalized part of the lives of millions of people worldwide, the studies no longer felt as though they were being conducted in a foreign land. People's behavior and emotional response online was often studied as an extension of their offline behavior, which suggested that the Internet audience did not present the separate facets of its life in a vacuum; and indeed studies from Clark (1998) on teen dating and from Sveningsson (2002) on friendships and romances online showed that online social bonds sometimes extended to varying degrees into the offline world.

Additionally, studies suggested that audiences integrated their new media use into their daily routines – at work, school, and home; new media were no longer sites of pure play, or a laboratory for identity negotiation, as was suggested in the early 1990s. In an effort to analyze this blurring line between the real world and the online world, scholars such as Lewis and Fabos (2000), Ribak (2001), and Livingstone (2003) studied their “audiences” while they were engaged in using new media within their homes. More recently, Gray (2009) used a combination of online and “traditional” ethnography to explore the “public” and “private” spaces in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teenagers in rural America negotiated “queer visibility” – from their hometown community centers, where they would have to appear in person, to Web forums, where they could communicate anonymously if they wished. Similarly, Clark (2003) combines Web and real-world ethnographic methods to study adolescents and spirituality. My own research on adolescent girls' use of instant messaging with regard to gender and identity, which will be discussed later in this chapter, uses a similar, multiple-method qualitative approach to explore one active audience's use of new media technology. Press and Livingstone (2006) regard this idea – recognizing that digital media are simply another part of the audiences' lives – as a welcome new direction in new media audience studies, with the help of which the research could go beyond “virtual ethnography” to “internet ethnography” and begin “to contextualise interpretation of online texts (reception of what's on the screen) in relation to consumption of a technological good in the domestic setting (in front of the screen)” (p. 17).

Research on audiences tends to evolve with the availability of digital media technologies. As more interactive tools emerged on both amateur and commercial web sites, scholarship borrowing from the methodological toolboxes of anthropology and traditional mass communication proliferated in order to address this “new” media audience. Starting in the mid-1990s, most news and consumer-oriented websites included their own forum sections, bulletin boards, and community sections; but scholarship on online fans of entertainment programming and on their participation in virtual communities (or “fan boards”) was the most robust. In these communities, passionate communication among users and creative uses of digital media are rampant, which makes them a particularly interesting (and perhaps, unusual) site for audience study. Often focusing on identity articulation and the production of cultural artifacts, audience studies of Internet fan communities analyze discursive construction and interactivity both among audience members and between the audience and the text. For example, Whiteman (2009) and Williamson (2005) study online communities of fans of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel in order to reveal their negotiation of sexuality and gender identity; and Jenkins (2006) examines a variety of fan communities in order to better comprehend the role of the convergence between old and new media in producing hybrid (and sometimes, resistant) artifacts based on the Harry Potter series, on Star Wars, and on the US reality TV show Survivor. Costello and Moore (2007) used a web-based survey to learn how fans of various TV shows used the Internet to demonstrate how audience members were empowered by their ability to interact with one another and to act as “outlaw” fans, resisting the preferred narratives of shows, just as Ang and Michaels did working in person with fans of Dallas. These are only a few published studies in a sea of work on fan communities; but they demonstrate precisely how researchers could interrogate a traditional audience (“traditional” in the sense that the audience members watch television and movies) that functions very much like the theoretical “active audience” envisaged by Hall (1973, 1981). Additionally, this work supports the notion of an active – and often resistant – producer/audience member, an essential consideration in the study of the interactive new media audience. Hermes (2009), however, problematizes the consideration of online fan communities as “typical” audiences: “Fandom is appreciated for its specialized knowledge and affective investment, related to moods, feelings, and attitudes. Everyday media use, by comparison, is the lower form, which requires no other investment than fleeting attention,” she writes. “Fan studies are attractive and problematic in equal measure.” Still, she acknowledges that audience research, which considers its subject as an “empowered consumer-producer” within “mediated networks” – as does Jenkins in his 2006 studies on convergence and peer production – signals a new type of audience study, in which the audience members are not only contributors but also producers. This, Hermes says, is an important next step within audience studies in the new media environment.

Although this is most explicit in Jenkins' work, other scholars have worked to make the distinction as well. For example, understanding the dynamics of bloggers and their audiences requires recognition that the audience is not only interactive but also productive. A blog, which could be defined as an easy-to-publish website that functions as a journal or personalized news site, provides tools to enable even the technically less inclined web audience members to publish their own musings and to attract audiences of their own. Largely characterized by its grassroots activism and do-it-yourself ethics, the blogging movement captured both media and scholarly attention in the middle part of the previous decade (2000 to 2010). In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, Gillmor referred to the “former audience” in his analysis of what was happening as a result of increasingly interactive media online:

However, in the primary research conducted on blogs, most studies seem to focus on bloggers as gatekeepers rather than on the blog audiences, who contribute largely to the content within blogs (McGill, Iggers, & Cline, 2007; Steyn, van Heerden, Pitt, & Boshoff, 2007; Tomaszeski, Proffitt, & McClung, 2009). Few audience studies have examined both the blog's founders/writers and its participants (apart from Carver, 2009 and a study of my own, which will be described later in this chapter), even though scholars have made clear that the audience – or the “former audience,” as Gillmor calls it – is what differentiates a blog from a traditional web page built with little or no capability for interactivity among users/audience members and the producers who created it. This becomes a more important issue for audience studies within the new media terrain of Web 2.0 and beyond, because the audience has added yet another layer to remind us that in fact it is still not an audience in the traditional sense.

The Audience Has an Audience (or The Audience is an Audience with An Audience)

With the immense popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and live micro-blogging services like Twitter, the meaning of “audience” must again be renegotiated and reimagined. Think of it as Audience 2.0 (Hermes, 2006). In this universe, new Internet applications and mobile devices make it incredibly easy for the audience to act as cultural producer on the fly (by writing and publishing whatever its members wish, to a very large audience of “friends”; by posting photographs; by commenting on others' writing and posting). Not only is the audience/producer line still as blurry as ever; now the audience itself has an immediate, built-in audience that reads and views everything it, the audience, wishes to share. Furthermore, the members of this built-in audience are more aware than ever before that they are being watched in the new, interactive social media environment. In fact, being watched by – or, in the parlance of Web 2.0, being connected to – others is simply part of the attraction to using social media technologies; in Twitter, part of the point is to be “followed” and to “follow” others as they post 140-character updates throughout the day. When a Facebook user posts a photo he has just taken from his phone to show the view from his hotel window on his vacation in Mexico, he certainly hopes to receive comments, or even just a small gesture of approval, as a Facebook friend hits the “like” button. When a Twitter user posts a link to an interesting article she read about her professional discipline in that morning's New York Times, she hopes to be “re-tweeted” by many of her followers, thus increasing her own visibility in her community and sharing an excellent article with people who otherwise might not see it.

It is easy to get caught up in technical innovation, but Facebook and Twitter and their effects on audiences are not exactly the point. After all, new applications and services that we have not even heard of yet will certainly grow and dominate media stories and conversations in the coming years (no doubt you, the reader, will be already giggling at these references to Twitter and Facebook and thinking how far interactive media have come since this chapter was published). However, as scholars of the media, we should still observe changes in the audience as they are happening; and we can use the same methodologies and philosophical reasoning in studying the audience as we have from the time of the earliest audience studies.

Many scholars have called for changes in the way we consider audience studies in this most recent phase of Internet communication development. In his article “Participation, Remediation, Bricolage,” Deuze (2006) writes that, since people live in ways that increasingly connect, both offline and online, scholars should consider studying the various components of digital culture rather than focusing on one aspect of it. In considering how the new media audience may be studied for the “work” it produces, Napoli (2010) asks whether traditional mass communication research typologies can be applied in the study of such an interactive emergent environment. He calls for a “broadening” of the term “mass” as it applies to media, acknowledging that audiences must be considered both senders and receivers of mass communication. Hermes (2009) wonders whether audience studies are even appropriate in an era where “we are smarter as knowledge communities than as individuals” and “the wisdom of crowds stands in contrast to the strange mix of sophistication and naïveté that we find when talking with individuals” (p. 124). Ultimately, she believes that audience studies in the Web 2.0 era are still important because recognizing media power and agency is still important, and the researcher's role can move from one of interpreter, storyteller, and theoretician to that of “coaches in media literacy” (p. 124).

Sundet and Ytreberg (2009) call for scholarship to withdraw from its conceptual work on “convergence culture” and to conduct empirical research in the tradition of active audience studies. Similarly, Press and Livingstone (2006) question whether a new paradigm of interrogation truly needs to be developed, suggesting instead that experience in studying traditional audiences could still provide a bedrock for the study of the new media audience; but they do acknowledge that online audiences present specific challenges:

Others go further – warning us that we should always look at our research questions in the sweep of cultural history, particularly because this will help us avoid getting too enamored of the wonders of the latest technologies (Spigel, 2001; Morley, 2006); in other words, we must realize that the telegraph provoked in its time many of the same dominant cultural discourses about progress and connectedness as the Internet does now (Standage, 1999). But these warnings can in effect end up discounting the Internet as a legitimate medium of study, and this would be a mistake. One does not have to be a technological determinist to note that millions of people are using the Internet in increasingly novel and interesting ways in this new millennium. Of course, we should recognize how culture has shaped technology (and vice versa) throughout history, but we should not discount the ways in which new media have generated new and revised forms of social relations.

In fact questions about the media audience in the interactive era are, arguably important, as the numbers of people with access to the Internet worldwide increase and social networking sites continue to outpace mainstream news sites in their number of visitors (according to comScore's statistics of worldwide unique visitors from June 2009, the top five sites included Google, Facebook, and Wikimedia Foundation sites like Wikipedia, while the only news-oriented site was CBS Interactive, the website for the US commercial television newscast, which was number eight; Schonfeld, 2009). The field of new media audience scholarship continues to grow and adds innovative work that does address the issues of the audience as producer and of the audience seeking its own audience. Researchers in this field use varied methodologies to get to the core of the interactive media audience; one is that of case studies – a methodology often used in organizational communication research, but less so in media studies research. For example, a case study by Russell (2007) examines how mobile digital media technologies were used by French youth to communicate what was happening in the 2005 riots outside of Paris; the same study also explores how various media outlets then appropriated these communications. Not only does the author employ an unusual methodology to study the audience; she also reveals a new facet – namely the audience acting as a producer tacitly aware of its own audience. This nuanced study uses Bourdieu's field theory (1993) in order to shed more light on questions of power, agency, and influence in the new media environment and to clarify the role of interactivity in shaping these questions. Carpentier (2009) uses the case study of a YouTube-tike online platform in Belgium to illustrate the importance of social relevance and social relations in an online participatory environment, while taking into account an audience that incorporates multiple layers of influence on production and reception. Carpentier ultimately argues that the traditional mass communication paradigm is not entirely discounted by new media audiences, which still seem to appreciate professionalism and the filter for social relevance that traditional gatekeepers provide.

Although case studies like these are useful in demonstrating different approaches to the audience as an audience with an audience, we should also heed Livingstone's (2004) warning against researchers becoming “melodramatic” in their bemoaning and romanticizing about the state of new media audience studies in an era when the media industry has become increasingly fractured:

In the next section I will discuss two studies of audiences in interactive environments that attempt to address some of the concerns expressed by Livingstone and others by using a multimethod approach to investigate the audience as it communicates both online and offline.

The Audience as Producer and the Audience That Seeks Its Own Audience

For those of us who have done qualitative primary research in the interactive media environment, “audience study” is a phrase that is rarely used – perhaps because of the complicated notions of “audience” that I outlined above.² However, the phrase can be reappropriated in many ways, in order to improve our understanding of how interactive media users are in fact an audience – albeit an active, hyper-aware audience. In my own research in this realm I have used multiple methods and theoretical frameworks to analyze this new audience's role as producer and consumer and as a doubly articulated audience. The researcher's work consists no longer in just interviewing and observing the audience as it reacts, or after it has reacted, to some particular media in a designated environment. The researcher must recognize instead that the digital environment is not the only environment in which the audience member is positioned. In the research I have carried out on adolescent girls by using instant messaging (IM), the girls positioned themselves in particular ways in various online conversations with their peers, and in yet other ways in interview situations, away from the computer screen. Since my conceptual framework rested on Hall's (1996) idea that identity was always shifting and on Butler's (1990) notion that gender identity is performed through a series of repetitive acts that are imagined to constitute gender, it was imperative that I be able to view both of these aspects in my research participants, because different dimensions of their self-presentation signaled different aspects of their identity. Furthermore, identity itself was complicated by the fact that the girls' discursive construction varied from IM conversation to conversation, usually depending on whom they conversed with; and their tone and reactions in interviews with me differed from online to offline space. Furthermore, because I wished to incorporate the ideals of feminist ethnography – a field that attempts to place research subjects on as much of an equal footing with the researcher as possible – I was not comfortable asking the girls essentially to hand over every aspect of their lives to me, with little payment in return. (My university's Institutional Review Board agreed with this stance, incidentally.) Because of these complications, I settled upon a multipronged research approach. The adolescent girls would send me their IM conversations over a three- to six-month period, choosing on their own which and how many conversations to send to me. I would interview them in advance, in person whenever possible and over the phone when an in-person interview was not possible. As the research was underway, I would also contact them by email or IM for any clarification I needed, or simply to check in with them. This gave me conversations with a variety of peers chosen by the girls themselves to represent them – conversations that I could analyze as discourse (Gee, 1999), and it also gave me interview data culled both from an interactive mediated setting and from a traditional media or non-media setting.

Although the girls themselves did not differentiate aspects of their lives as “real life” or “online life” – which contradicts somewhat the data found in early audience studies online – I felt it was important to be able to see how the girls articulated gender and identity in a variety of settings. In virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000), the researcher may assume to a certain extent that those studied in an online community or setting might extrapolate their behavior to the “real world,” or they might believe that an intense, immersive study of subjects interacting in an online realm is a work of sociological research in its own right and that the Internet itself is a cultural artifact that deserves legitimacy. In general I agree with this stance. However, in media research in the era of Web 2.0 and beyond, it is imperative to observe and interact with those who are researched both as they use the Internet and (whenever possible) in face-to-face situations, if the researcher plans to make claims about theoretical concepts like identity. Perhaps this approach to online audiences marks me as a traditional social scientist, but the triangulation that can be obtained from the combination of oral/written and in-person/online conversations and interviews – in other words, from attempting to see the audience as producer and as active consumer – allows for a more complete picture of what is happening online. This combination allows for a bricolage, a way to construct fuller meanings by combining a diverse range of objects in one's study in order to come to those meanings (Lévi-Strauss, 1966; Derrida, 1978; Deuze, 2006). Through bricolage, it is possible not only to see this new audience in its many forms and functions, but also to build upon the past research that theorizes the “traditional” audience as active.

Keeping in mind bricolage as a mode of triangulation, I used this approach in a very different piece of research, on a journalistic blog that covered news and events in a mid-sized Minnesota community called Northfield. In addition to functioning as a conventional blog, where one gatekeeper published his thoughts and musings about Northfield and included links and news of interest, the blog also incorporated some interesting and somewhat experimental reporting techniques, including the use of crowd-sourcing, or asking the blog's online audience to give input during the reporting process. In thinking about how I could construct as complete a case study as possible on the blog, I realized that it was as important to study the founder and the main blogger as it was to study the audience, which appeared to be quite loyal and vocal in its comments on the blog. I set up the study so that I could conduct a number of in-person interviews with the blog's founder – a local man who also had a talk show on the Northfield community radio station – as well as with its “official” contributors: a traditional news professional who was being paid through grant funding to work as a traditional reporter for one year; a copy-editor; and the founder's co-hosts on the radio show. This part of the study was something of an investigation into gatekeeping, or an attempt to understand both the intentional and the unintentional choices that producers made in crafting the blog.

However, in the blogosphere, the blog's readers break down these traditional “gates” (Gillmor, 2004), and it becomes important to think about this audience as an important producer and mediator of the blog's content through its comments and contributions. Because of this, not only did I study the stories and video clips posted by these gatekeepers, but I also analyzed the comments and responses posted by the blog's audience. In many ways these audience members appeared to be part of a cohesive community; they were able to converse with one another and to add insight to the conversations that started from blog postings (much of this claim is based on the fact that the blog focused on local news events and information, and the audience members primarily used their real names). Often the audience members would post additional information for the reporter, telling her that she should contact certain people to help with her stories or suggesting that she look at the archives of a local newspaper for more background on similar issues that the city faced years before.

Observing this reporter–source/gatekeeper–audience member dynamic was exciting for me as a researcher, but I felt limited in the claims I could make about the audience. Although a few audience members listed their full names – and even linked to their own web pages, Twitter feeds and personal blogs in their profiles – most of them used only first names, and there was no way to guarantee that these were their real names. However, I was presented with a unique opportunity to study this audience: in an effort to connect with the audience better, the blog's producers held a townhall-style meeting at a coffee house in Northfield, and around twenty of the most “vocal” audience members showed up and participated in person. By attending this meeting and talking to many of the attendees (most of whom were regular participants and posters in the blog discussions), I was able to gather insight into feelings and attitudes that were not articulated in the online interactions on the blog.

Furthermore, I was able to clarify an important misconception that I had cultivated through my analysis of online texts. In the situations where the blog's audience members were able to contribute to the reporting process, I (and the reporter who received the audience input) both sensed a general feeling of satisfaction, and even accomplishment, from the interactions as they presented themselves online. You could see this in the comments that would be posted after the story had been published as well (for example, congratulatory remarks like “Great job on the story!”). In person, however, when the attendees were asked about whether they valued the opportunity for this input – specifically in response to whether they would pay for a blog that allowed them to partake in crowd-sourcing in this way – almost all of them responded that they did not care about that part of the blog. Instead they said that they preferred the more traditional reporting models it used. Granted, as a researcher, one must question group behavior in this setting (for example, the reporter was present, and perhaps they wanted to make her feel good), but this personal, live interaction proved to be a crucial component in my analysis. (Interestingly, this finding supports the conclusion of Carpentier's (2009) study on Belgian online video audiences, which was mentioned in the previous section.) Had I not heard the audiences' actual, real-life voices in addition to their voices online, I might have made some incorrect assumptions in my research.

Moreover, this situation might also better illuminate a point made earlier in this chapter: that the audience is more aware than ever that it has an audience. On the blog, the commenters making suggestions and contributions to the reporting might have been doing so because it was an opportunity for them to publish to a far-reaching audience in a very public way, which usually is not afforded to non-journalists. Furthermore, after contributing to the stories, their posts to the blog would not be erased, even after the story was published. In this sense their contributions would also live online, perhaps for many years to come. When working “on the record” in this way, it is possible that an audience behaves differently. Questioning this behavior and the work produced by it is exactly the task of the new media audience researcher today. We realize that the audience is active, productive, aware of its own audience, and we should get to the crux of what this means with regard to media production and representation.

This revelation has forced me to re-evaluate the research I conducted on adolescent girls and on IM, which was done many years before the blog study, and also before social networking sites like Facebook had taken over the new media landscape (Facebook and MySpace offer their own versions of chat or instant messaging on their sites, though many adolescents still use other IM clients as well). One of the major findings in this work was that this particular mode of communication was an interactive diary – a space free from parents and teachers, where identity could be articulated and gender could be negotiated through interactive conversations that might then be saved or printed for (private) posterity. However, these conversations sometimes were pasted within other conversations and passed along to other peers – sometimes recopied and pasted and passed along to the entire student population at the participants' schools and beyond. In my analysis I could not help but think about the girls as being somewhat naïve about the blurring of private and public space, as they hashed out their personal lives in conversations that they thought were private. However, in considering this particular audience, I did not give enough credence to the fact that – as members of a generation so cognizant of being constantly watched, surveyed, and under surveillance—privacy had become less meaningful to them than it might have been to me, and perhaps to my generation (Generation X) and previous generations. In my current research about adolescent girls and their use of Facebook – which includes the comments, the photos, the status reports they post to make them seen by their “Facebook friends” – it looks as if being watched, or the potential of being watched, by one's peers is in many ways the entire point. Considering the prevalence of social media in their lives and the presence of reality television programming on every network, it did not surprise me to hear the girls I studied express little expectation of privacy and confidentiality.

Toward the end of my IM study I conducted follow-up interviews in my analysis, with the hope of being able to catch these kinds of nuances; but, by the time the analysis was finished and the conclusions drawn, the girls were older by two years. Their preferred online technologies had changed in that time; many had moved exclusively to social networking sites to communicate with peers. Furthermore, in the life of an adolescent in a study of identity, this often means that the audience has changed so drastically that its members do not even recognize themselves in their own work; and that was indeed the case here. “I don't even use IM anymore now that I'm a junior (in high school),” one girl told me. “I think a lot of that stuff is just funny now, but I really was into it back then.”

Part of the challenge lies in the fact that new media will always be new, dynamic, and changing, and, as Livingstone (2004) noted, the academic publishing community might have a tendency to embrace too quickly whatever new media is newer and, along with that new media, the audience that follows it. In 2010 IM is decidedly “old,” and the earlier studies on MUDs, MOOs, listservs, and newsgroups are considered ancient history. While insight into the changing interactive media audience could certainly be gained by revisiting this work and by using it to illuminate the cultural context of a world that has reached the point where social networking sites are part of people's daily lives, this type of audience work would now be relegated to historical journals.

The ever-changing landscape of new media takes us back to the point of departure of the chapter: to Magritte's inscription about the pipe, and to my own parallel statement about the audience. Within Web 2.0, audience studies researchers must now consider an environment where Hall's (1973) explanation for the processes of encoding and decoding within media texts is skewed. Through interactive and social media, encoding and decoding take place simultaneously rather than in two separate steps. Both producers and audience members are regularly executing such meaning-making tasks. This return to the original understanding of the audience as an “active” entity has been cited frequently by scholars over the past decade, in essays about the study of interactive media audiences. Certainly, in their work over the past 15 to 20 years, many – especially those who authored the studies explored in this chapter – have grasped the implications of a growingly active and productive online audience. After all, the fact that the audience may no longer be an audience at all, or that it may be a new “super-audience” instead (that is, an audience with an audience with an audience . . .), speaks to the potential need for an entirely new label for this genre of research. Moving forward, we must question not only the interactive media audience's dual role – as producer and audience – but also what it means that this audience is constantly aware of its new role and of its creative potential.

Ce n'est pas un public – indeed.

NOTES

1 Livingstone practices this nicely in a different piece of research on adolescents and social networking sites (Livingstone, 2008), where she interviews 16 teenagers in their homes while they demonstrate what they are talking about by showing her their MySpace, Facebook, and Piczo pages.

2 When I asked a colleague whether I could refer to one of her studies on blog audiences for a chapter I was working on about new media audience studies, her reaction was: “I didn't conduct a survey for that article. That's what you mean, right?”

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