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Ok – you’re taking a course titled “Audience Studies”…
I figure a good place to start is figuring out what is an audience anyway? Then we can move on to figuring out why audiences matter, and then how we’re going to study them. In this chapter, we’ll quickly span thousands of years, highlight the significance of the last century or so, and then focus our attention on the contemporary media landscape. We will address different ways of thinking about audiences and chart the evolution of audiences from interpersonal to mass to mass-interpersonal, and from passive to active to interactive. Ultimately, we’ll set up future chapters and set the stage for understanding audiences as prime-movers in our contemporary participatory media culture. We will also lay the foundation for understanding (and studying) fans as the most active participants in that media culture.
Taylor Swift provides more than just an appropriate song lyric to get things started. In 2023-24, her Eras Tour is providing massive audiences with content for which they are prepared to pay massively. Her fans purchase untold amounts of merchandise, but also create their own content (such as the GIF, above), expressing their identity and also contributing to an archive of online interactive content and for some, a sense of community. Pent-up audience demand for the concert experience was met by further media product:
We see the push and pull of media industries and media audiences in this spectacular example of Taylor Swift (now a media industry on her own) feeding audience demand by creating more opportunities for new audiences to become fans or for current ones to celebrate their fandom. Cinemark’s chief marketing and content officer typified the audience response to the announcement of the new film as “frenzied traffic.” This mobilizes the classic frame of excessive, out-of-control fans, even as he said that the theatre chain was “ready for Swifties to be enchanted by this concert film.” Audiences derive meaning from media content, consuming, recirculating, and sometimes adding their own contributions, ultimately creating added value for themselves and others, while industries derive economic value from this audience behaviour.
This quick Taylor Swift example demonstrates how, to quote the title of a recent Henry Jenkins’ book, we are all not just witnesses to, but players in, “Participatory Culture in a Networked Era.”[1] Even if you’re not a fan, you’re subject to a media environment subject to the culture industry that is Taylor Swift — popular radio play her songs endlessly, streaming sites change their polices because of her, and even the announcement of her film’s release date caused other movies to reschedule theirs, knowing that the box office and the cultural conversation will be dominated by her. NFL football fans in 2023 found their world suddenly intersecting with her burgeoning romance with Kansas City Chiefs’ star player Travis Kielce. Clearly, certain kinds of content matt