TY - JOUR
T1 - The co-option of audiences in the attention economy
T2 - introduction
AU - Jorge, Ana
AU - Amaral, Inês
AU - Mathieu, David
N1 - Funding Information:
The motivation for this special issue was born of the two-day conference ‘Audiences 2030: Imagining a future for audiences’, in late September 2017, in Lisbon, sponsored by the Consortium on Emerging Directions of Audience Research (CEDAR) which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, in association with Universidade Católica Portuguesa, as well as the Audience and Reception Studies section of ECREA and YECREA. The event was the public culmination of the three-year work of CEDAR, directed by Ranjana Das (University of Surrey) and Brita Ytre-Arne (University of Bergen). The network identified as one of the major trends in audience and audience research that audience participation is being co-opted by large, global players, partly as a consequence of the technological capabilities developed by digital media (Das & Ytre-Arne, 2017). Recent debates on datafication and exploitation have looked at digital workers as well as at audiences in different degrees of creativity and productivity, displayed by fans in their remediation of media content, by produsers (Bruns, 2006) in their ordinary practice of consumption or in the labor that amateurs invest in content creation. These debates have decried how platforms are able to feed the algorithms and turn audience’s work and engagement into commodities for attracting attention, metrics to be sold to advertisers and business models to run social media (Hearn & Schoenhoff, 2016). The capitalization or exploitation of audience (free) labor in the benefit of industries has been vividly argued by scholars from political economy of communication and in particular of the web 2.0 (Andrejevic, 2009; Fuchs & Sevignani, 2013; Van Dijck, 2013; Nieborg & Poell, 2018). In contrast, cultural studies have tended to conceptualize users’ productivity as prosumption (Bruns, 2006) or participation (Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013), discussing the possible gains of agency among audiences. However, Vesnić-Alujević & Murru (2016) claimed the urgency to reconcile the two strands of theory. In reviewing work on the topic and offering a stance for the future of audience research, Stehling et al. (2018) argue such an integrated view is crucial to understand the negotiation of power and agency between platforms and digital players, on the one hand, and audiences, on the other. Such a perspective is also crucial to make sense of the ambiguous and relatively inconsequential (for most users) critical opinions regarding media and cultural objects, and their search for, or appreciation of, recognition by industries about their creativity, e.g. among fans. Distinguishing user-generated content (UGC) as data (liking, tagging, etc.) or labor (work, content creation), the authors (2018, p. 80) argue that audience co-option can be obtained more or less voluntarily, more or less consciously, ranging from endorsement via “illegible and lengthy privacy policies and terms of use and services” to the reception of payment or other benefits in return for favorable recommendations of products and services.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - The motivation for this special issue was born of the two-day conference ‘Audiences 2030: Imagining a future for audiences’, in late September 2017, in Lisbon, sponsored by the Consortium on Emerging Di-rections of Audience Research (CEDAR) which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, in association with Universidade Católica Portuguesa, as well as the Audience and Reception Studies section of ECREA and YECREA. The event was the public culmination of the three-year work of CEDAR, directed by Ranjana Das (University of Surrey) and Brita Ytre-Arne (University of Bergen). The network identified as one of the major trends in audience and audience research that audience participation is being co-opted by large, global players, partly as a consequence of the technological capabilities devel-oped by digital media (Das & Ytre-Arne, 2017).
AB - The motivation for this special issue was born of the two-day conference ‘Audiences 2030: Imagining a future for audiences’, in late September 2017, in Lisbon, sponsored by the Consortium on Emerging Di-rections of Audience Research (CEDAR) which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, in association with Universidade Católica Portuguesa, as well as the Audience and Reception Studies section of ECREA and YECREA. The event was the public culmination of the three-year work of CEDAR, directed by Ranjana Das (University of Surrey) and Brita Ytre-Arne (University of Bergen). The network identified as one of the major trends in audience and audience research that audience participation is being co-opted by large, global players, partly as a consequence of the technological capabilities devel-oped by digital media (Das & Ytre-Arne, 2017).
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087957399&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.15847/OBSOBS0001381
DO - 10.15847/OBSOBS0001381
M3 - Editorial
AN - SCOPUS:85087957399
SN - 1646-5954
VL - 12
SP - 1
EP - 4
JO - Observatorio (OBS)
JF - Observatorio (OBS)
ER -