Relating to Internet 'Audiences'
Authors: Green Lelia 
Published: October 2020

Audiences are a contested domain with Ang and others desperate to
analyse, anatomise, understand and describe them. They are particularly
important for the commercialisation of any medium since advertisers like
to know what they are getting for their money and, in the famous aphorism,
'the role of the commercial media is to deliver audiences to advertisers'.
Marshall's concept of 'audience-commodity' continues this intellectual
interrogation of the audience and its production by individual practices
of media consumption. Mass media audiences have consumed much research
attention over most of the past century with major consideration being
paid to the displacement of other activities arising from the consumption
of newly-introduced media, effects of the media and a succession of moral
panics. It has only been in recent years that 'the audience' has been
researched on (essentially) its own terms -- in the branch of media and
culture studies enquiry called, conveniently, 'audience studies'. Well-
known Australian examples of such studies often concern children and
adolescents and include: Hodge & Tripp, Noble, and Palmer (now Gillard).
Audience studies assumes that audience participants are sufficiently
insightful and sufficiently cognisant of their various pleasures, desires
and frustrations to be able to discuss their media consumption patterns
with interested researchers. The paradigm takes as read that people have
reasons for their behaviours, and sets out to uncover what these are
through (often) a variety of interview and observation techniques. It
accords audience membership an importance in people's lives. The nature of
the 'general' audience is illuminated by specific comments and examples
offered during the research process by specific audience members --
analysed and interpreted by the research team. What is clear from a
cursory glance at the literature is that audiences do not talk about
'broadcasting' per se, they talk about specific programs and have a
tendency to compare programs with others of the same type. Audiences
perceive broadcasting as divided into genred broadcasting streams. Unless
asked to do so, an audience member (and I've formally interviewed over two
hundred such people) is unlikely to compare Home and Away with the ABC
Evening News. Comparisons between Home and Away and Neighbours are
commonplace, however.
What genre is the Internet? A silly question, I know -- but one that is
begged by the repeated discussions of Internet culture, Internet
communications and information and Internet communities as 'the Internet'.
It's a long time since media studies and popular culture academics have
discussed 'broadcasting' generically because concern for the specifics of
genred broadcasting (both in television and radio) have rendered
generalised discussion ridiculously global and oversimplified. In
broadcasting we talk about television and radio as if they were (since
they are) significantly different. We recognise that the production values
for soap opera, drama, sport, news and current affairs and light
entertainment are dissimilar. It's only silly to ask 'what genre is the
Internet' because, when we think about it, the Internet is multiply
genred.
Audiences that consume broadcast programmes can be differentiated from
each other in terms of age, gender and socioeconomic status, and in terms
of viewing place, viewing style, motivation and preferred programme
genres. As Morley indicates in his 1986 treatise, Family Television:
Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, the domestic context is central to
the everyday consumption of TV. He argues that "the social dimensions of
'watching television' -- the social relationships within which viewing is
performed as an activity -- have to be brought more directly into focus if
we are properly to understand television audiences' choices of, and
responses to, their viewing" (15). That focus upon social relationships as
the domestic context within which television is consumed is the substance
of his book. Holmes suggests that much of the appeal of the Internet is a
spurious one, viz. by selling "a new kind of community to those who have
been disconnected from geographical communities" (35). He claims that
society has been divided into a multitude of separate domestic spheres
within which television is consumed, creating an isolation which the
Internet is marketed as solving. "The Internet offers to the dispossessed
the ability to remove some of the walls for brief periods of time in
return for a time-charged fee" (35).
A key to understanding the domestic consumption of television, however,
is an understanding of the specifics of genre, and the pleasures
associated with the consumption of the genre. Uses to which the broadcast
material is put in daily life in interpersonal settings are essentially
related to the broadcast material consumed. Discussion of soaps, and of
finance reporting, may both be used to develop interpersonal networks and
to display current knowledge, but these discussions are likely to occur in
different domestic/work contexts. Have we had enough of generalised
discussion of the global Internet? Can we move onto addressing whether it
is genred; and if so, in which ways?
Faced with the cacophony which is the Internet today -- let alone the
projected manifestation of the Internet tomorrow -- we are forced to
conclude that the Internet has the potential to mimic the features of all
the media and genres that have preceded it, and more. It can operate as a
mass medium, as a niche medium, and as one-to-one discrete communication --
Dayan's 'particularistic' media (103-13). Within all these categories it
can (or has the potential to) work in audio, visual, audiovisual, text and
data. On top of this complexity, it offers a variety of degrees of
interactivity from simple access to full content creation as part of the
communication exchange. You thought Media Studies was big? Watch out for
the disciplinary field of Internet Studies!
The concept of the active audience has been a staple of audience studies
theory for a generation. Here the activity recognised in the 'active'
audience is one of the audience actively engaging with programme content --
resisting, reformulating and recirculating the messages and meanings on
offer. This is a different level of interactivity compared with that
implicit in some aspects of the Internet (online community, for example).
Internet interactivity recognises that the text is produced as part of the
act of consumption. Have the audience activity characteristics of online
community members been sufficiently differentiated from -- say -- the
activity of accessing Encyclopaedia Britannica online? Are online
community members more of a 'www.participants' than an 'audience'; should
we see audiences as genred too?
Television audiences (as my anonymous reviewer has helpfully remarked)
are typically constituted via essentialising experiences' "generally
domestic/familial setting, generally in the context of other activities,
generally ritualised in terms of the serialisation of these experiences
etc." We know that this is the case from detailed investigations into the
consumption of television. Less is known about the experience of online
participation, although Wilbur discusses "the strangely solitary work that
many CMC [computer-mediated communications] researchers are engaged in,
sitting alone at their computers, but surrounded by a global multitude"
(6). He goes on to suggest seven definitions of 'virtual community' before
concluding that the "multi-bladed, critical Swiss army knives" might offer
an appropriate metaphor for the many uses of the Internet. 'Participation'
in this culture is similarly hard to define, and (given that it is so
individual and spatially private) expressive of individual difference.
"For those who doubt the possibility of online intimacy, I can only speak
of ... hours sitting at my keyboard with tears streaming down my face, or
convulsed with laughter" (Wilbur 18). I wait for the ethnographic research
before I venture further into definitions of 'www.participants'.
Online community, I would argue, is a specifically genred stream of
Internet activity. Further, it is particularly interesting to audience
researchers because it has no clear precursor in the audiences and
readerships of the traditional mass media. Holmes (32) has usefully
differentiated between 'Communities of broadcast' (using the generic term,
to offer an exception to the rule!) and 'Communities of interactivity',
but he does so to highlight difference -- not to argue great similarity.
The community of interest brought into being by the shared consumption and
social circulation of elements of broadcast programming differs from the
community of interactivity made visible through online community
membership -- and both differ from Anderson's notion of the imagined
community. Online communities are particularly problematic for audience
studies theorists because the audience is the content producer. There is
no content apart from the interactions and creativity of community
members, and the contributions of new/casual online participants. For
sites where 'hits' are enumerated, the simple act of access is also
content production, and creates value and interest for others.
Clearly the research is yet to be done in these areas. If we are to
theorise cogently and in depth about people's activities and
production/consumption patterns on the Internet, we need to identify
genres and investigate specific audience/community members. Interactions
with online community members suggest that age may offer a critical nexus
of audience/participant distinction (Palandri & Green). Community members
of 35+ have had to deliberately choose to learn the conventions of
Internet interaction. They have experienced specific motivations. In
affluent societies such as ours, on the other hand, for many people under
20, the required Internet skills and competencies have been normalised as
part of an everyday social repertoire, in the same way that almost all of
us have learned the conventions of television viewing. An understanding of
the specifics of difference, and of congruence, will make discussions of
Internet audiences/participants/content providers/community members that
much more useful.
Such research has an added frisson. I started this article with an
acknowledgement of Ang's book Desperately Seeking the Audience. The
research to be undertaken in the Internet genre of online community
includes the need to seek desperately for the audience; the individual
audience member; and (in many cases) the individual audience member's
multiple identities -- each of which offers specific and different value
to the researched community member. Identity is a key issue for Internet
researchers, and a signal difference between communities of broadcast and
communities of interactivity. As Holmes has usefully pointed out:
"broadcast facilitates mass recognition ... with little reciprocity while
the Internet facilitates reciprocity with little or no recognition" (31).
We need to acknowledge, recognise and explore these differences in the
next generation of audience studies research.

References

Anderson, B. Imagined Communities. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.
Ang, I. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge, 1991.
Dayan, D. "Particularistic Media and Diasporic Communications." Media,
Ritual and Identity. Eds T. Liebes and J. Curran. London: Routledge, 1998.
103-13.
Hodge, B., and D. Tripp. Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986.
Holmes, D. "Virtual Identity: Communities of Broadcast, Communities of
Interactivity." Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace.
Ed. D. Holmes. London: Sage, 1997. 26-45.
Morley, D. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure.
London: Routledge, 1986.
Noble, G. Children in Front of the Small Screen. London: Constable, 1975.
Palandri, M., and L. Green. "Image Management in a Bondage, Discipline,
Sadomasochist Subculture: A Cyber-Ethnographic Study." CyberPsychology and
Behavior. USA: Mary Ann Liebert, forthcoming.
<http://www.liebertpub.com/cpb/default.htm>.
Palmer, P. Girls and Television. Sydney: NSW Ministry of Education, 1986.
---. The Lively Audience: A Study of Children around the TV Set. Sydney:
Allen & Unwin, 1986.
Wilbur, S.P. "An Archaeology of Cyberspaces: Virtuality, Community,
Identity." Internet Culture. Ed. D. Porter. New York: Routledge, 1997. 5-
22.

Citation reference for this article
MLA style:

Lelia Green. "Relating to Internet 'Audiences'." M/C: A Journal of Media
and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access]
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/internet.php>.
Chicago style:

Lelia Green, "Relating to Internet 'Audiences'," M/C: A Journal of Media
and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/internet.php> ([your date of access]).
APA style:

Lelia Green. (2000) Relating to Internet 'Audiences'. M/C: A Journal of
Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/internet.php> ([your date of access]).