An Agenda in the Interest of Audiences: Facing the Challenges of Intrusive Media Technologies

Abstract

This article formulates a five-point agenda for audience research, drawing on implications arising out of a systematic foresight analysis exercise on the field of audience research, conducted between 2014 and 2017, by the research network Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research (CEDAR). We formulate this agenda in the context of the rapid datafication of society, amid emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things, and following a transformative decade, which overlapped with the pervasion of social media, proliferation of connected gadgets, and growing interest in and concern about big data. The agenda we formulate includes substantial and intellectual priorities concerning intrusive technologies, critical data literacies, labour, co-option, and resistance, and argues for the need for research on these matters, in the interest of audiences.

Audiences in an Age of Datafication: Critical Questions for Media Research

“…And yet it seems that in accounts of the datafication of society, attention to empirical audiences is easily displaced by a fascination with the data traces they leave, deliberately or inadvertently, in the digital record. Academic attention has turned to the analysis of the algorithmic manipulations of audience’s digital traces that increasingly allow everything people do to be tracked, as their data are bought and sold above their heads and below their radar (Qiu 2018; Ytre-Arne and Das 2018).…”

Digital Detox Camp: Values and Motivations for Engaging in Digital Disconnect

“…Media users increasingly express ambivalence about their own media consumption, often related to ubiquitous media technology such as the smartphone and social media (Syversen 2020). This has fostered public debates about the need to cut down on media use, and more research on the topic has been requested (Woodstock 2014, Ytre-Arne andDas 2019). In order to understand the growing trend of disconnection as a cultural and social phenomenon and more than a sum of individual choices and selfhelp practices, we conducted an analysis of the digital detox inspired camp for grownups Underleir, which has been arranged in Norway annually since 2014.…”

Netflix, transfandom and ‘trans TV’: Where data-driven fandom meets fan reflexivity

“…Theorising multi-discursive fandom allows for the possibility oftension between the characterization of an individualized hyper-connected media environment and the notion of audience experiences, or between intrusive media and newer literacies as a potential response.…This…sits within a necessary impetus to research audiences’ engagements and encounters with dataism and datafication in their lived everyday lives. (Ytre-Arne and Das, 2018: 4)Or, as Dan Hassler-Forest has written autoethnographically, of his own fan experience of Netflix’s Stranger Things :as much as I did enjoy it, there was also something uncanny…that I found even more unsettling than the [show’s monstrous] ‘Demogorgon’…It was the sense that there was something mechanical, something pre-programmed, even something truly inevitable about my first response to the show: almost literally as if it had been tailor-made just for me. (Hassler-Forest, 2016)This fan audience commentary gestures to tensions in Netflix’s ‘mathematization of taste’ (Alexander, 2016) where Netflix-commissioned textual products are themselves ‘in part algorithmic, designed for and structured within the broader abstraction aesthetic of Netflix, [with] particular traces of this corporate, computational authorship emerg[ing both] in the show itself’ (Finn, 2017: 103) and in fans’ reflexive awareness of being targeted by datafication.…”

“…tension between the characterization of an individualized hyper-connected media environment and the notion of audience experiences, or between intrusive media and newer literacies as a potential response.…This…sits within a necessary impetus to research audiences’ engagements and encounters with dataism and datafication in their lived everyday lives. (Ytre-Arne and Das, 2018: 4)…”

“…Netflix’s seemingly accurate capturing (and captivation) of fan taste is left feeling somehow uncannily simulated or derived. The form of multi-discursive fandom resonating with the work of Brita Ytre-Arne and Ranjana Das (2018) and Hassler-Forest (2016) is hence one where distinctively data-driven fandom meets embodied fan reflexivity – where fan and follower collide in an over-determined moment of industrial co-option, individualised personalisation, and lived fan (communal) experience. This ‘trans TV’ calls up not just ‘fans of…original content,…in many ways…the most truly distinctive product Netflix has to offer’ (Havens, 2018: 330) but self-divided examples of transfandom where television/genre fans reflexively negotiate their sense of fitting into, and resisting, fandom newly datafied as a ‘measurable type’.…”