At the heart of the concept of the “active audience” lies the idea of the viewer’s active engagement with media texts and autonomy in reception: rather than passive receivers of dominant/imposed messages (Hall 1980), the audience, reception studies argue, is constituted of critically engaged, thinking and imagining subjects who actively negotiate and co-construct meanings, and are capable of producing individual, subjective and often unpredictable responses to media content. The emergence of interactive Reality Television formats such as Big Brother, however, invites us to consider how traditional definitions of the “active audience” relate to the interactive (participating) viewer. Empirical research indicates that while defining features of the “active audience” could be traced in the Big Brother audience too, interactivity gives rise to new ways of being “active”, which are both more physical (texting/voting) and more media technology-related (creatively appropriating different media channels in approaching media content). If the “active audience” in other television genres has been seen as autonomous because of its ability to negotiate proposed meanings, interactivity in Reality TV programs, has been positively received for the power it grants to the viewer to intervene in the narrative and influence its outcome. By inspecting the new possibilities for audience interaction with media content, opened up by the Big Brother program, and new types of audience engagement, empirical analysis tests two alternative options: (1) does interaction mark a more advanced stage in the evolution of the “active audience”, a progressive movement from autonomy to empowerment, or (2) does it simply designate a different type of engagement of viewers with media texts, involving its own characteristic threat of subjection and domination?
The concept of the “active audience” is the product of a new generation of audience research which emerged as a reaction against a series of assumptions on the relationship between media and audience, produced under what Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) dubbed the Behavioral Paradigm in audience research, or the “effects” research tradition. The “effects model”, born out of concerns with the pernicious effects exerted by a powerful media upon a vulnerable public, points to a broader tendency of media-centrism in theory, also exemplified by the “media imperialism thesis” and the “development model” (Gillespie 2005). They both recognize a threatening potential in media content which has the power to manipulate audiences’ perceptions (of self and community) or to re-shape/ erode/ depersonalize indigenous cultures through the imposition of new cultural models. What makes this claims problematic, proponents of reception studies argue, is that: (1) they portray the audience as a “unified aggregate” (Radway 2008: 360) of passive and uncritical viewers- “helpless victims of media producers” (Costello and Moore 2007: 124). They originate from studies which are often speculative rather than investigative in their nature, and as such (2) fail to account for the complex process by which meanings are produced and transmitted (Gauntlett 1998: 126), (3) accepting, instead, the media message to be “a fixed, enduring entity that remains unchanged by the transmission process” (Radway 2008: 360). The “effects model” in Gauntlett’s view, performs a “double deception”: in presuming, firstly, that media provide viewers with a single clear-cut message, and secondly, that the audiences unproblematically accept imposed meanings (Gautlett 1998: 126).
In response to the “effects theory” and the passive role it attributed to the viewer, reception studies chose to explore the role of the audience in media consumption: “what audiences do with media” rather than what media content does to them (Gillespie, 2005: 138). Research on both Reality TV and other television formats demonstrates the complexity of viewers’ responses to media content and shows that the intricate mechanisms operating within media consumption cannot be exhausted with a model conceptualizing the viewer as a fixed position in the text, and the act of watching as being “pulled along a predetermined path” (Eco 1979: 8) towards an imposed “dominant message” (Hall 1980). By empirically analysing the audience’s experience of viewing- their motivation for using the media (Herzog 1944; Warner and Henry 1984) and contexts for media use (Morley 1992; Liebes and Katz 1993; Tincknell and Raghuram 2004, Press 1993), their role and function in media consumption, as well as the nature of their engagement with media “texts” (Gillespie 2005; Wood, Skeggs and Thumim 2008; Jones 2003; Wood 2007)- it demonstrated that, rather than being passive and unreflective recipients of media messages, television viewers are actively engaged in the communication process as co-constructors of meaning (Livingstone 1993: 123); the responses they produce are highly unpredictable and idiosyncratic, varied and subjective. Viewers’ active engagement with media texts could counter possible media effects. Empirical evidence testifies for an “active audience” which has (1) an active agency in the communicative process, (2) the ability to assume critical distance to media content (Morley 1992, Wood 2007) and to keep itself aware of its constructed-ness while remaining emotionally involved with it and enjoying it (Livingstone 1998, Wood, Skeggs and Thumim 2008, Liebes and Katz 1993). Moreover, TV viewing is often “instrumental” rather than uncritical and passive: the viewers of Reality programs, soap opera and talk show claim to learn from television content and to apply it as a tool for negotiating their own social reality (Livingstone 1998; Gillespie 2005; Miller 1995). Skeggs and Wood further reveal that viewers have the capacity to “see through” proposed narratives and, instead, to focus on and elicit what they personally find meaningful, important and useful in media content (2008: 570).
While the findings of empirical examinations on the Big Brother audience largely echo those of research on the audience in other genres, empirical research demonstrates that Big Brother’s interactive character gives birth to, both, new ways of being “active” and new types of audiences. Interactivity, Holmes argues, makes the question of the “active audience” newly interesting (2004: 225). Because of the new relationship between “text” and participating subject established by Big Brother, this new type of program, in Tincknell and Raghuram’s view, both “challenges and re-configures earlier conceptualizations of the active audience” (2004: 252).
Due to the specificity of the program, not a single text but a “media event” (Tincknell and Raghuram 2004) evolving on several media platforms, negotiating meaning in BB, for example, differs from “meaning making” in more traditional formats such as soap opera and talk show. One of the ways in which it is manifested is in the viewers’ development of “strategies of viewing” (Hill 2005: 336). Both Janet Jones and Annette Hill’s research indicate that enjoyment and motivation for watching BB derives from the viewers’ awareness of the constructed-ness of the show and their resulting engagement in “fake spotting” (Jones 2003: 411)- a search for “moments of authenticity” within a staged environment inhabited by performing characters. Viewers selectively adopt different media channels via which they can regulate their proximity to the BB “reality”: necessary for their realization of effective control over possible inauthenticity. Being the “active audience” in BB thus means more than being critically engaged: it involves the viewers active self-positioning in relation to the text, comparative viewing (via different sources), selective use or combination of diverse techniques in approaching media content. Moreover, interactivity re-shapes traditional meanings of the notions of “proximity” and “positioning” involved in the negotiating process: while normally understood in terms of social positioning and available cultural resources (Morley 1992), “proximity” is now a matter of creatively operating with media channels for the purpose of realizing “pore-close encounters” (Jones 2003). Overall, Jones’ empirical observations are particularly important for comprehending the text-audience relationship: they reveal a correspondence between motivations for watching and types of engagement which challenges theoretical models binding types of content (entertainment) with quality of engagement (passive/unreflective).
The autonomy of the viewers of this inter-textual format is expressed in their ability to shape their own experience of the program through the appropriation of different media platforms. But an increased autonomy in interpretation is also allowed through the possibility to challenge authoritative meanings (the producers’ verbal interpretation and visual portrayal of the events in the house) offered through the voiceover and the program’s edited TV version. Andrejevik provides empirical evidence that audiences do engage in comparative viewing and take advantage of the opportunity to trace the producers’ touch in the reality picture offered on TV. Many of them comment on the presence of notable discrepancies and deformations in the edited Big Brother reality: some participants, they feel, are “caricaturized” either more or less favourably than they appear in the live program. Watching the live stream, they conclude is “the ONLY way to have the BB experience” (Andrejevik 2004: 132): the reality in the house is the exclusive product of their own interpretative activity. This, Jones argues, is what distinguishes the interactive BB audience from the “active audience” in other media genres: its “active ownership” of the BB reality (2003: 414). While the “active viewer” in other genres has traditionally been perceived as a “creative subject”, a co-constructor of meaning (Livignstone 1993: 123), arguably, it is the interactive text that first attributes the viewer control and ownership over the narrative.
The BB viewer displays more of the defining features of the “active audience”. Just like the audience in soap opera and talk show which takes an active role in the construction of meaning (Livingstone 1990; Liebes and Katz 1993; Wood 2007), the BB audience, Jones demonstrates, also have an active agency in meaning making. It is creatively “co-writing”, rather than passively “reading” the text: making sense of the BB narrative is like “filling up an empty canvas” ( 2003: 414): knowing nothing of the characters at the opening of the show, it is up to the viewers to find out the true personality of the participants and to watch over their level of authenticity throughout the development of the show. Furthermore, the viewers of Reality TV similarly perceive of watching the program as a learning experience. Observing the BB participants deal with the reality in the house is considered by the viewers important for the “acquisition of social skills” and for “using the experience of viewing to help them make sense of their own lives” (Jones 2003: 408). Perceiving BB as an “anthropology TV” (Andrejevik, 2004: 124) rather than a mindless entertaining program, the viewers attempt to critically assimilate the happenings in the house and to elicit important knowledge on human nature and social interaction, creatively appropriating media content as a tool for dealing with their own reality.
Yet, it has been enticing to conceptualize “interactivity” as being more than “active”, rather than a new way of being “active”. While, the “active audience” is traditionally defined through its critical engagement with the “text” and its ability to produce a response (either challenging or overthrowing authoritative meanings), all actions performed in relation to the “text”, being (inter)active in Big Brother is essentially an act of intervention in television content (Tincknell and Raghuram 2004). The viewer’s opportunity to influence the narrative’s outcome by casting a vote and voicing his individual choice has been interpreted as profoundly reshaping traditional text/reader and producer/consumer relationships. In this way, the interactive audience appears to go a step further in the project of independence from “dominant/implied/authoritative meanings” which lies at the heart of discourses on the “active viewer”: while discussions on the nature of the “active” viewer center on autonomy, discourses on the “interactive” viewer center on empowerment. The transition from an “active” to an “interactive” audience has been seen to mark a passage from engagement with to intervention in, from the ability to respond to the power to change.
However, Tincknell and Raghuram remain suspicious to the potential of Big Brother to effectively transform existing “power relations” between text and audience. They question whether the interactive formula adopted in the program was intended to transform or to disguise these relations. Interactivity in their view, creates only an illusion of power: even though the audience is given the opportunity to intervene in the “text” by casting their vote, their intervention is a “prescribed activity” and the programs’ proposed “model of agency is goal-driven and highly specific” (Tincknell and Raghuram 2004 :265). The “power” granted to the viewers is reduced to a choice among a set of limited options. Furthermore, the extent to which the producers’ exercise an impact on this choice should be taken into account: the viewer might be free to vote but it is still the producers who “sketch” and “edit” the characters that the viewers would vote for or against. True, the viewer might prefer to observe the authentic live stream instead, but this opportunity remains only a potential which is far from being realizable: a sense of complete transparency (of the text) and interpretative autonomy (of the viewer) is created by the opportunity to observe 24/7 granted to an audience who will clearly not be able to engage on a 24/7 basis.
For Andrejevik, the illusion of empowerment which Big Brother creates functions to disguise new relations of domination established through the interactive text. While Jones’ research presents the surveilling viewer as an empowered viewer (able to adopt a chosen proximity to reality which enables him to produce an individual “reading”), Andrejevik reminds that the surveilling viewer is also himself being surveilled. The viewers’ preferences and choices, voiced throughout various media channels are monitored by producers and adopted for shaping the program: “In expressing their preferences via the voting process (for which they had to pay), the viewers subjected themselves to another form of monitoring- one that allowed them to participate in shaping the content of the show” (Andrejevik 2004: 130).This problematizes the notion of the “active response”: while traditionally taken to signal the autonomy and detachment from dominant readings of an elusive and unpredictable audience, in the era of interactivity, it is through their active response that the viewer is “subjected to commodified entertainment”, made predictable and incorporated into the text’s closed system (Andrejevic 2004: 130).
For Holmes this is conceptualized as a problem of the viewer’s positioning in relation to the text. Interactivity as a text-viewer relationship enacted by an “active audience” is problematised by the fact that its “active response” (a feature which once served as an argument for the autonomy of the viewer from dominant meanings) is here a function set up by and implemented in the “text” (Holmes 2004: 226). This makes it clear that conceptualizing the “interactive audience” through a theoretical apparatus traditionally adopted for conceptualizing the “active audience” is problematic: it is “based on the model of a separate text and viewer in which any active response occurred at an “extrinsic level”” (Holmes 2004: 225). In a format which incorporates the viewer within its structure, the participating audience is equally a “subject position” in the text, as is the “implied reader”. In this sense, it is arguable whether the notion of the “active response” is still useful when all it points to is a new relation of subjection and domination between text and audience.
This essay attempted to outline views on the interactive audience as an “active audience”, produced in empirical studies on the audience of Big Brother. They demonstrate that while there are significant lines of continuity that could be traced between the two types of audiences, interactivity now also re-shapes or, rather, extends the meanings of notions originating with studies on the “active audience”. This makes direct borrowings of featured from earlier conceptual models problematic. Heterogeneous audiences (once interpreted as socially and culturally divergent are now also recognized as “extended and dislocated” (Tincknell and Raghuram 2004: 260) along different media platforms), divergent contexts for viewing (once socio-cultural now relate to specific media channels), different types of audience engagement (once referring to the critically involved now to the participating viewer). While preserving their relevance also all assume a new and different meaning.
Furthermore, empirical examinations on the Big Brother audience demonstrate that while there are new possibilities for experience and expression opened up by interactive TV formats, there are also new strategies for domination disguised under a contrived “illusion of empowerment”. Difficulties in relating the (inter)active viewer of Big Brother to traditional definitions of the “active audience” stem from the fact that while the audience in reception studies has so far been seen as being active despite the text (and any imposed meaning that it may possibly contain), the possibilities for being active in Big Brother emerge because of the text (and the new possibilities for intervention and response provided by its inter-textual specificity). Yet, Holmes is critical of a media communication model which contains the “active viewer” as an element of the text and the active response as a prescribed activity integrated into the text structure. Adrejevik demonstrates that an “active response” designed to be appropriated by a media industry can hardly sustain the idea of the “active audience” as autonomous and independent, ungoverned and unregulated. Tincknell and Raghuram conclude that it is the intertextuality of Big Brother as a “media event”, rather than the opportunity to vote and intervene in the text that created a condition for the “active audience” (Tincknell and Raghuram 2004): this appears to be another way of saying that the Big Brother audience is “active” in that it can creatively negotiate meanings and control its experiences of the text, but its “empowerment” through intervention in the text disguises just another type of subjection. Paradoxically, it is the features which it shares with the “active audience” rather than what, arguably, makes it more than “active”-interaction, which preserve and guarantee the true autonomy of the Big Brother audience.
Overall, Andrejevik’s conceptualization, which focuses on the subordination of viewers’ engagement to the aims of the Reality TV producers, betrays links with earlier theoretical models criticized for missing the gist of the communication process by attempting to “locate” the viewer as a position within a system of perceived domination. Communication and interchange between audience and producers need not necessarily be conceptualized as subordination. Yet, a speculative claim invites a response producing yet another speculative statement- the only divergence between the two being in terms of phrasing. Empirical research in the future will perhaps remain confronted with the task to balance examinations on the audience as a “position”, with what research on the “active audience” had focused on so far, a consideration and detailed examination of the nature of its experience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Abercrombie, N. and Longhurst, B. (1998), Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination, London: Sage Publications.
Andrejevik, M. (2004), Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.
Andrejevik, M. (2002), “The Kinder, Gentler Gaze of Big Brother: Reality TV in the era of digital capitalism”, in New Media and Society, Vol. 4 (2): 251-270.
Costello, V. and Moore, B., “Cultural Outlaws: An Examination of Audience Activity and Online Television Fandom”, in Television and New Media, Vol. 8 (2): 124-143.
Eco, U. (1979), Introduction: The role of the reader. The role of the reader: Explorations in the semiotics of texts, Indiana University Press.
Gillespie, M. (Ed.). (2005), Media Audiences. Maidenhead: Open University/McGraw Hill.
Hall, S. (1974/1980), “Encoding/Decoding”, in S. Hall et al. (Eds.), Culture, Media and Language, London: Hutchinson.
Herzog, H. (1944), “What do we really know about daytime serial listeners?”, in P. F. Lazarsfeld and F. Stanton (Eds.), Radio Research, 1942-1943 (pp. 3-33), New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
Hill, A. (2005) Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television, London: Routledge.
Holmes, S. (2004), “But this time you choose” Approaching the “interactive” audience in reality TV.”, in International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (2): 213-231.
Jones, J-M (2003) “Show your Real Face: A Fan Study of the UK BB transmissions. Investigating the boundaries between notions of consumers and producers of factual television”, in New Media and Society, 5 (3), 400-421.
Liebes, T. and Katz, E. (1993), Cultural differences in the re-telling of an episode, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Livingstone, S. (1990), “Interpreting television narrative: How viewers see a story”, in Journal of Communication, 40 (1), 72-82.
Livingstone, S. (1988), “Why people watch soap opera: An analysis of the explanations of British viewers”, in European Journal of Communication, 3, 55-80.
McQuail, D. (Ed.). (2002), McQuail’s Reader in Mass Communication Theory, California: Sage Publications.
Morley, D., (1992), Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies, London: Routledge.
Palmer, G (2004), “The New You': Class and Transformation in Lifestyle Television” in Holmes, S and Jermyn, D., Understanding Reality Television, London: Routledge.
Press, A. (1990), “Class, Gender and the Female Viewer: Women's Responses to Dynasty”, in M. E. Brown (Ed.) Television and Women's Culture: The Politics of the Popular, London: Sage.
Skeggs, B., and Wood, H. (2008), “ The labour of Transformation and Circuits of Value “Around” Reality Television”, in Continuum, Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 22 (4), 557-572.
Radway, R. (2008), “Reception Study: Ethnography and the Problems of Dispersed Audiences and Nomadic Subjects”, in Cultural Studies, 2 (3), 359-376.
Tincknell, E. and Raghuram, P (2004), “Big Brother: Reconfiguring the “active audience” of cultural studies?”, in S. Holmes and D. Jermyn (Eds.)Understanding Reality Television, London: Routledge.
Wood, H. (2007) “The Mediated Conversation Floor: An interactive approach to reception analysis”, in Media, Culture and Society, 29 (1), 75-103.
Wood, H., and Skeggs, B. (2004). “Notes on Ethical Scenarios of Self on British Reality TV”, Feminist Media Studies, 4 (2), 205-208.
Wood, H., Skeggs, B., and Thumim, N. (2008),”It’s just sad”: Affect, Judgment and Emotional Labour in “Reality” Television Viewing”, in Gillis, S., and Hollows, J. (Eds.)., Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture, London: Routledge.
No comments:
Post a Comment