zondag 13 december 2015

 Disney rap
Controlling the Creative Output


One of the often heard critiques of modern times is that the information we receive is highly influenced and dominated by ‘the media’: they not only decide which messages we receive, but also which sides of the stories we see and how identities of the personalities that are broadcast by these corporations are represented. The critical point we would like to raise in this essay, is that the media industries – by which we mean the corporations that own the media – tend to control the creative output and images that we as both deliberate and accidental consumers perceive. It is interesting to imagine what would happen if a certain risqué cultural element would be usurped by a corporation that from then on would decide the presentation of the former risqué element. For instance, we could imagine a record label that produces the Parental Advisory: Explicit Content-sticker approved music of a gangster-rapper. Then, the record label gets bought by Walt Disney, one of the big five media conglomerates and becomes a subdivision that has to produce music in accordance with the Walt Disney seal of approval. As a consequence, one expects that identity and cultural expression will become compromised. Or as cultural scholars Havens, Lotz and Tunic put it, media are ‘both a site of artistic and social expression as well as a business concerned with the maximization of markets and profits.’[1] Fenton puts it even more eloquently:

Having power in or control over media is argued to impact upon the capacity to determine or influence the contents of the media products and meaning carried by them. This has grown out of a strictly Marxist perspective which states that the class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control, at the same time, over the means of mental production.[2]

Even though material production subsequently controls and maybe even erodes mental production or capacity, the important thing to point out here is that, on account of Hesmondalgh, the political economy is not monolithic; subgenres exist within.[3] The question remains if these subgenres all cater to one overruling norm issued by behemoth corporations or that they do actually have some form of independency. An interesting example is the career of actor and musician Will Smith. Smith started out as a rapper, mainly in collaboration with DJ Jazzy Jeff, then gained worldwide fame with the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (NBC, 1990-1996). The peculiar thing about Smith is that, within the hip-hop discourse, he has been and remains practically the only hip-hop artist (of that magnitude) that has a reputation that is not based on what most hip-hop reputations are based on: violence, profanity, sex, drugs, living life on the edge, living in the projects et cetera. On his first solo record, Big Willie Style (1997), not one curse word is uttered; instead the album contains radio-friendly hits such as ‘Gettin’ Jiggy wit It’, ‘Miami’, ‘Men in Black’ and a couple of love songs that hinge on R&B. Very safe, one might say. When we look at Smith’s filmography, there is not one film that even seems to go slightly beyond stereotypical American pop culture entertainment. The films that may contain some risqué elements like Bad Boys (1995) or Independence Day (1996) have a dominant comedic tone or they feature Smith as a world savior. He only seems to show morally dubious behavior as the adulterous Muhammad Ali in Ali (2001), but that behavior is excused by virtue of the fact that Ali is often cited as the greatest boxer of all time. In a culture where most stars seem to want to get rid of a certain Disney quality or Disney past (Miley Cyrus for instance), Smith has always seem to be okay with his family-friendly image.
     One might even say that Smith, with his rap music that doesn’t conform to today’s standards or to any hip-hop norms from any age in particular, is an outsider within a certain rigid cultural structure, and is therefore an interesting case study. In Fenton’s words: ‘to focus largely or exclusively on the structure and content of media messages and attempt to read off the impact of these messages cannot possibly interrogate the consequences of mediated culture.’[4] Within every structure, there are dissonants. The hip-hop hegemony of rugged lyrics, explicit content gets, in a way, violated by Smith, something the rapper Eminem reprimanded him for, in a lyrically explicit way, thereby consciously or unconsciously punctuating the function of mass media within a ‘larger sociological perspective of culture, social structure and social groups.’[5] Dialectics come into fruition when Eminem raps in ‘The Real Slim Shady’: ‘Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell records, well I do, so (expletive) him and (expletive) you too.’[6] The different way in which Smith and the corporations that he is a part of organize their cultural production, has a traceable consequence (in this case in the form of a dialectics that implicitly questions the essence or norms of hip-hop) for the discourse and representation in the public domain and what listeners (choose to) consume: the so-called ‘hardcore’ hip-hop of a rapper like Eminem or the ‘Disneyfied’ hip-hop of Smith.[7] Sterne underscores this when he writes that:

For scholars interested in music as a media industries issue, our first analytical step must be a simple subtraction. When we go looking for unity inside a music industry, we should instead assume a polymorphous set of relations among radically different industries and concerns, especially when we analyze economic activity around or through music.[8]

So, in conclusion, one could say, hardened cultural structures soften or erode (or harden again, since 2005 was the last release of a Will Smith album) and culture-creating practices are fluid; within the hip-hop spectrum two almost opposite poles can exist; or they go in dialogue with each other via their respective cultural artifacts, thereby establishing at least an illusion of a critical political economy, uncovering what cultural scholars Krämer and Bredekamp call ‘silent processes of knowledge’, which we have tried to exemplify in this article.[9]



Proposition
The Disneyfication of certain segments of cultural production launches new modes of cultural production and is therefore desirable.

A. vd B., V. M., J. P. 

Bibliography

Timothy Havens, Aamanda D. Lotz & Serra Tinic (2009), ‘Critical Media Industry Studies: A Research Approach’, in: Communication, Culture & Critique 2, pp. 234-253.

Sybille Krämer & Horst Bredekamp (2013), ‘Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques – Moving Beyond Text’, in: Theory, Culture & Society 30 (6), pp. 20-29.

Natalie Fenton (2007), ‘Bridging the Mythical Divide: Political Economy and Cultural Studies Approaches to the Analysis of the Media', in: Eoin Devereux (ed.), Media Studies: Key Issues and Debates. London: SAGE, pp. 7-31.

Jonathan Sterne (2014), ‘There Is No Music Industry’, in: Media Industries Journal 1 (1), pp. 50-55.

Discography

‘The Real Slim Shady’. Eminem (Marshall Mathers). The Marshall Mathers LP. Santa Monica, New York: Aftermath, Interscope, Shady, Goliath. 2000.

Will Smith. Big Willie Style. New York: Columbia. 1997.










[1] Havens, Lotz & Tunic 2009: 249.
[2] Fenton 2007: 11-12.
[3] Fenton 2007: 13.
[4] Fenton 2007: 25-26.
[5] Fenton 2007: 25-27.
[6] Mathers 2000: ‘The Real Slim Shady’.
[7] Fenton 2007: 11.
[8] Sterne 2014: 53.
[9] Krämer & Bredekamp 2013: 23.

maandag 7 december 2015

Gluckauf!

The process of digitization made it easier for cultural artifacts such as film to cross national borders. As Daya Kishan Thussu states in the paper Cultural Practices and Media Production: The Case of Bollywood:


As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, the world of global media and communication offers exciting challenges and possibilities of rethinking intercultural exchanges at a transnational level. Time–space compression in the 24/7 digitized media economy, with its localization and multiple and multivocal flows, has created a dynamic transnational communication space.[1]


In this blogpost, however, we want to argue that intercultural exchange doesn't necessarily have to take place on an international level, but can also be observed on an intra-national level within a certain ethnic group. In this essay we will zoom in on the movie Gluckauf (in English titled Son of Mine) to show how interculturality and locality plays a role between a country’s borders.We think that this movie, in which the sense of locality is underlined by the use of the regional language, is an excellent case study for a discussion about the centrality or de-centrality of certain regions in the Netherlands. This is especially interesting since different media emphasize the differences between the province in regard to the rest of the country.

Gluckauf; most Dutch people don’t know what this word means. The word, in the official acknowledged regional language Limburgs, originated from the mining industry and was used as a salutation to workers who went down the mines to wish them a good return. Not only the word itself, but also the cultural-historical context is specific for the province of South Limburg. Since the closing of the mines, underemployment raised, and is, according to the director of the film still one of the causes of todays social problems such as criminality in the area. This movie, based on van Heugten's own experiences, uses the criminal, social traumatized context for a story about father and son.[2]
One first important remark is that the movie has Dutch subtitles. The regional language differs enough from official Dutch that it needs subtitles to be available for a national audience. Nevertheless, during the last edition of the Dutch Film festival; the Nederlands Film Festival (NFF) this film garnered the most awards. It won four gouden kalveren, for the categories Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography.[3] For his first big feature film, director Remy van Heugten turned back to his roots; the province of South Limburg.[4] Even though the majority of the cast and crew aren't from this region, the whole movie is recorded in the region and regional dialect.
Not only language implicates a certain locality to the film, but also the certain shared history and culture, something that is underlined by the director himself in different interviews. By saying that the characters might as well have been based on old friends or fathers of old friends, he shows that the movie is very much in line with his own history and background that strongly ties in with the culture of South Limburg.[5]




In national as well as in regional news media we see that the local aspect of the movie is highlighted. Not only the director himself in interviews draws a comparison between South Limburg and the Netherlands, also headlines of national news papers show the foreignness of the film. The Volkskrant, national newspaper, headlines: 'Gouden Kalf: beste speelfilm spreekt dialect. Het Limburgse mijnstreekdrama Gluckauf was vrijdagavond de grote winnaar bij de uitreiking van de Gouden Kalveren […]'.[6]
As Chua Beng Huat states in East Asian Pop Culture, audiences can take up different viewing positions, altering moments of distancing and identification.


where and when the on-screen characters are ‘like me/us’ or ‘unlike me/us’, are generated during real-time viewing. This identification/distancing process is complicated by the audience’s awareness of the foreignness of imported programs, which can raise hurdles to identification while facilitating distancing.[7]


We would like to state that however Gluckauf is a Dutch movie, people that are not from the province of South Limburg are aware of the foreignness first and foremost by the dialect that is used. The fact that the rest of the Dutch audience needs Dutch subtitles, show basically that the language is foreign enough to create a distance. Also the way in which the film is branded by different media, as Limburgs instead of Dutch, shows that the media relate to the movie more based on foreignness than on relatedness.
Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, in their article Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe, describe dynamics of center and periphery in the light of (post)colonization and argue that, in most media outings, we mainly see characters from a white, Western background. Still, the film Gluckauf shows a story of what happens in the periphery and not only because the province is located outside of the center of the Netherlands. Even though ethnic diversity doesn't play a role in the movie, we can argue that the Limburg in the film functions as a periphery in the Netherlands with its modern outlaws as characters, caught in a run-down working class area. We might argue that in this sense the film by van Heugten can be carefully compared with the Banlieu films in which the stories of the disadvantaged are foregrounded.[8]
In an item of 1Limburg, composer of Gluckauf Jorrit Kleinen acknowledges that Limburg is often seen as the underdog of the Netherlands, mostly because of its location and because Dutch people from other regions joke about the accent, but that this also had the consequence of people from Limburg adopting a fighter’s mentality. The reporter jokes about the rise of 'Lollywood', and states that a lot of talented filmmakers come from this region. Also van Heugten wants to return to South Limburg for his next film.[9]
Even though it is located outside of the center in the Netherlands, interestingly enough there are a lot of initiatives and organizations that try to put Limburg as an alternative center. Such as film fund LimburgCrossing Borders or film community Cine Sud that is located in Limburg but includes the Eu-region Meuse-Rhine (South Limburg and parts of Belgium and Germany). With mainly Dutch projects on their website, it is clear who takes the lead in this international initiative.



In this thought experiment we were interested in the way in which borders become clear on an intra-national in stead of an international level. The Film Gluckauf in our opinion not only shows a story of the social periphery of the Netherlands. By looking at the ways in which the film is perceived by different media, the differences between the province and the rest of the country become clear. By making locality specific films in area’s that are literally further away from the center, stories and histories that otherwise aren’t often heard can spread. Not only geography but also language plays a big role in the conception of distance to specific area’s within a country. While the province of South Limburg in the movie and conception of the movie can be regarded as positioned in the periphery of the Netherlands, it is maybe even more interesting to see that this region tries to put itself in an alternative center by crossing the national borders to the surrounding countries.


Statement: The way in which organizations as film community Cine Sud operate, convincingly put’s the province of Limburg in an alternative center.


A. vd B. V.M. & J.P.




[1] Thussu, D. K. (2012) ‘Cultural Practices and Media Production: The Case of Bollywood’, in: Isabelle Rigoni & Eugénie Saitta (eds.) Mediating Cultural Diversity in a Globalised Public Space. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 120.
[2] Sine Screen Magazine (2015) ‘WPFF Opening Night: Director Remy van Heugten’, in: Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTXD8WmVVng (06-12-2015).
[3] Remy van Heugten (2015) ‘Golden Calves and RE-RELEASE’, in: Remy van Heugten. http://www.remyvanheugten.nl (06-12-2015).
[4] Remy van Heugten (2015) ‘(Heerlen, The Netherlands, 1976) Film Director - Creative Producer’, in: Remy van Heugten. http://www.remyvanheugten.nl/html/about.html (06-12-2015).
[5] Sine Screen Magazine (2015).
[6] Beekman, B. (2015) ‘Gouden Kalf: beste speelfilm spreekt dialect’, in: Volkskrant. 02-10-2015.
[7] Huat, C. B. (2011) ‘East Asian Pop Culture’, in: Felicia Chan, Angelina Karpovich & Xin Zhang (eds.) Genre in Asian Film and Television: New Approaches. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 232.
[8]  Berghahn, D. & Sternberg, C. (2010), ‘Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe’, in: Daniela Berghahn & Claudia Sternberg (eds.) European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 29.
[9] 1Limburg (2015) ‘Remy van Heugten blij met nominaties Gouden Kalveren Gluckauf (2 sept 2015)’, in: Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMxMi_QL0k8 (06-12-2015).


Sources:

  • 1Limburg (2015) ‘Remy van Heugten blij met nominaties Gouden Kalveren Gluckauf (2 sept 2015)’, in: Youtube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMxMi_QL0k8 (06-12-2015).
  • Beekman, B. (2015) ‘Gouden Kalf: beste speelfilm spreekt dialect’, in: Volkskrant. 02-10-2015.
  • Berghahn, D. & Sternberg, C. (2010), ‘Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe’, in: Daniela Berghahn & Claudia Sternberg (eds.) European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan:12-49.
  • Het Parool (2015) ‘Gluckauf grote winnaar filmfestival met vier Gouden Kalveren’, in: Het Parool.http://www.parool.nl/parool/nl/21/FILM/article/detail/4155147/2015/10/02/Gluckauf-grote-winnaar-filmfestival-met-vier-Gouden-Kalveren.dhtml (06-12-2015).
  • Huat, C. B. (2011) ‘East Asian Pop Culture’, in: Felicia Chan, Angelina Karpovich & Xin Zhang (eds.) Genre in Asian Film and Television: New Approaches. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 222-245.
  • Remy van Heugten (2015) ‘Golden Calves and RE-RELEASE’, in: Remy van Heugten. http://www.remyvanheugten.nl (06-12-2015).
  • Remy van Heugten (2015) ‘(Heerlen, The Netherlands, 1976) Film Director - Creative Producer’, in: Remy van Heugten. http://www.remyvanheugten.nl/html/about.html (06-12-2015).
  • Sine Screen Magazine (2015) ‘WPFF Opening Night: Director Remy van Heugten’, in: Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTXD8WmVVng (06-12-2015).
  • Thussu, D. K. (2012) ‘Cultural Practices and Media Production: The Case of Bollywood’, in: Isabelle Rigoni & Eugénie Saitta (eds.)Mediating Cultural Diversity in a Globalised Public Space. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 119-134.

maandag 30 november 2015

#Hashtags, Tweets and Posts in the format of TV programs


In the past years, the TV format industry has become a global trade worth billions of euros per year; formatted brands exist in all TV genres and reach almost every country in the world.[1] It’s not easy to put a clear definition on the concept of a ‘format’; whereas some define a format simply as ‘any show that anyone is willing to pay for’, others, like the Format Recognition and Protection Association (FRAPA), see it as a more complex concept and define it in this way: ‘In the making of a television program, in the ordering of the television elements such as that a distinctive narrative progression is created’.[2] In the article of Chalaby it is said that a format must have a distinctive narrative dimension. An example of such a distinctive dimension is the use of trigger moments, produced by unexpected twists or nomination nights.[3] Another example of a successful format element that is being used in many programs is voting, like in the program Super Star, in which the outcomes of the competition have been heavily linked to voting technology.[4]
Besides these examples, there are many more strategies that are being used in formatting in order to create a successful television program. In this essay, we want to focus on one particular element in television formats, namely the use of social media in live television programs. With social media, we mean ‘the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration’.[5] Examples of social media are Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.


 
Nowadays, networks and producers begin to further embed social media initiatives into their content and programming strategies.[6] Think for example of the popular tv show The Voice of Holland, in which the Red Room app gives the audience the opportunity to get more information about the candidates or listen to the The Voice of Holland music. Or Dancing With the Stars, where a Facebook page is included in the format, which gives the audience the opportunity to share their thoughts and vote online for their favourite candidate. Furthermore, a rising amount of programs use #hashtags - like #TVOH - so the audience can refer to the program when writing about it on social media. 
But why exactly do producers use social media in their television program formats? How might social media affect and change television programs, and the audience who watch it? Harrington et al.[7] state that ‘social media like Twitter does not necessarily replace existing media channels, but often complements them, providing its users with alternative opportunities to contribute more actively to the wider media sphere.’ Furthermore, recent market research suggests that viewers now use social media with considerable enthusiasm to engage with television programs, particularly where there are explicit on-screen prompts, such as dedicated hashtags.[8]
Used in the format of television programs, Harrington et al. argue that ‘Twitter and services alike, become a kind of virtual loungeroom, connecting the active audiences of specific TV shows at an unprecedented scale. For audiences with access to social media on a second screen, the experience of watching television thus becomes an even more communal one’.[9] This is for example the case in The Voice of Holland, in which tweets and posts of audiences online are screened and read out loud by the show hosts in the Red Room, which includes the audience on a whole new level. The voices of the audience are actually incorporated in the program and social media does not only function as a backchannel for the show, but becomes a part of the show itself. Furthermore, by looking at the comments made on social media, the program gets an ‘instant audience feedback’[10], originally intended for other viewers but also highly useful for program makers, in order to see what the audience thinks of the program and how it may be improved to meet the wishes of the audience better. In this way, social media can be a place of reflection for program makers.
    The increased use of social media alongside television - as a simple backchannel, or in more sophisticated, transmedia contexts - may add a new dimension to the experience of being ‘an audience’ for television.[11] In the current scientific debate, two roles for the audience are distinguished: the audience as an active viewer and the audience as an interactive viewer. The (inter)active audience is an audience that actively looks for the programs that fit their preferences and interact with the program, for example by voting on candidates via their telephone. With the integration of social media in television programs, however, the role of the audience can even go a step further, namely, in the direction of a ‘creating audience’. In her article, Plasman argues that the integration of new media in television programs can possibly create three new roles for the viewer, which all contain a ‘creating function’: the semi-creating viewer, the co-creating viewer and the creating viewer.[12] The semi-creating viewer is subject to a sort of ‘fake creation’: the viewer gets invited to actively shape the content of the program, but in fact the producers still have much influence, for example by only viewing positive social media tweets and posts in the program. The co-creating viewer gets a more objective and bigger influence role; the social media users are at the basis of all the program elements and the viewer proposes options for the makers to work with in the broadcast. An example of this is a pilot of a BNN show called Not So Lonely Planet, in which the social media user decides where show host Dennis Storm is about to travel and what his travel schedule will look like.[13] Third, the viewer can become the main creator of the program; the makers of the programs have less influence than the social media using audience; the viewer has nearly all the power over the content.[14] Anno 2015, the audience probably can be placed in the role of a semi or co-creating viewer.
    As we have seen, the integration of social media in the format of live television programs caused some noteworthy changes. First of all, the audience has become more involved and their role may change from an interactive one, to a creating one. If the audience will ever be full creators, however, is in our opinion rather doubtful. Is it likely that the producers will fully let go of their power over the content? In the example of Not So Lonely Planet, what if the viewer would send Dennis Storm to highly expensive places? Or boring places everyone knows already? How would that effect the program financially and what would it mean for the audience ratings? Probably, producers will always to some extent keep hold of the reins itself, but the fact that the audience gets more and more power is undeniable.
For program makers, the use of social media in their programming means that, by looking at the tweets and posts of the viewers, they can have a better picture of what the audience thinks of their programs and what their wishes are. Furthermore, it may more closely attach the audience to the program when they feel like they are being heard, which can influence the audience ratings for the better. According to Harrington et al.[15] the use of social media in live television programs ‘raise the potential of making television a more interactive, dialogical experience. However, the extent to which such interactivity might be incorporated into live television formats, has yet to be explored in full. Indeed, entirely new television formats may arise to leverage such interactivity more effectively.[16]

Proposition
In the future, how probable do you think it is that the audience will eventually become a ‘creating viewer’, like Plasman writes about in her article? 

AvdB, VM, JP.


[1] Chalaby, 2011: 293.
[2] Chalaby, 2011: 294.
[3] Chalaby, 2011: 294.
[4] Meizel, 2010: 207.
[6] Harrington et al., 2013: 408.
[7] Harrington et al., 2013: 405.
[8] Harrington et al., 2013: 405.
[9] Harrington et al., 2013: 405.
[10] Harrington et al., 2013: 406.
[11] Harrington et al., 2013: 405.
[12] Plasman, 2011: 46.
[13] Plasman, 2011: 40.
[14] Plasman, 2011: 45.
[15] Harrington et al., 2013: 407.
[16] Harrington et al., 2013: 407.

References

Chalaby, J. (2011) ‘The making of an entertainment revolution: How the TV format trade became a global industry’, in: European Journal of Communication, 26 (4): 293-308.

Harrington, S., Highfield, T. & Bruns, A. (2013) ‘More than a backchannel: Twitter and television’, in: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 10 (1): 405-409.

Meizel, K. (2010) ‘The United Nations of Pop: Global Franchise and Geopolitics’, in: Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 192-219.

Plasman, Y. (2011) ‘Creërende kijkers: Een onderzoek naar de veranderende rol van de kijker door de integratie van sociale media in televisieprogramma’s’. Faculty of Humanities: University of Utrecht.

maandag 16 november 2015

Split localities
On the problematization and the possibilities of the audience
This week’s blogpost explores different modes of audience perception and audience participation, two activities that, due to globalization and digitalization, have become increasingly diffuse on account of growing audiences worldwide and the many platforms that come with it. Rather than focusing on one particular case study, we oscillate between different cultural examples and touch upon different questions such as ‘What is an audience?’ and ‘How much power does an audience have today?’, thereby illustrating our arguments with quotes from several texts on these topics by cultural scholars Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Shayla Thiel-Stern and Jack Z. Bratich (see bibliography).
Transnational communication research as a concept entails research that focuses on the local reception of global texts.[1] We might deem the Harry Potter series (both the books and the films) a global text in that it is of such a worldwide renown that practically every locality in the world recognizes it and can verbally contribute to it, from a grassroots level to an academic level. However, the way in which this series is received, differs from country to country, conceivably even from town to town. On a spatial level, the Harry Potter story itself doesn’t employ various or extremely different global communities, countries, cities et cetera (the bulk takes place in the UK: Hogwarts, London, the Dursley’s home). The reception of these texts in different localities and the focus on the diverse connections between these different spaces can bring to light ‘hitherto neglected local-to-local links’. In other words, if the reception of a text in London is more or less the same as in Manchester, the question why that is the case becomes interesting. This is what is called a translocal approach.[2]
But how, we might ask ourselves, does one make such distinctions in a world that has shifted from a local, sedentary sphere to a more mobile, digital (and thus more universal?) sphere? Does the internet flatten the diversity of audiences or does the locality of one’s specific social sphere still plays a significant role in being part of an audience? The notion of an audience isn’t a unilateral one either. Conceptualizing an audience is deemed a product of ‘problematization’, a notion which is defined by Foucault as: ‘not the representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that does not exist. It is the totality of discursive and non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object for thought’.[3] Different types of audiences then are described by Bratich as masses, publics, consumers, recipients, spectators, social identities, active decoders and fans.[4] We can see the difficulty of describing an audience in a concise or universal way, something that has become even more difficult with the prevalence of social media, whereby the audience itself has acquired an audience (someone who uses Facebook is both a performer and a spectator at the same time). The audience/producer line blurs. While in a former, more analogue sphere the audience would watch something in the dark, the audience today is very much aware of the fact that they are, in the interactive social media environment, continuously being watched as well.[5]
A classic analogue audience
So, with the notion that a singular concept of an audience is difficult (and the semantic boundaries of such a concept can be interminably stretched) in the back of our heads, it becomes interesting to analyze whether or not an audience that has transgressed certain spatial boundaries, by virtue of the democratization of the digital sphere, still encounters difficulties that can’t be transgressed through this digital sphere. According to Gillmor, the increasing interactive online media possibilities have led to a grassroots uprising of such magnitude that he dares to state that ‘for the first time in modern history, the user is truly in charge, as a consumer and as a producer’.[6] We wonder if this is truly the case. Nowadays people find it easy to say that to make music you only need a computer, or if you want to make a movie, you can do it on your iPhone. There may be some truth to that, but there is also an optimistic undertone in that assertion that, we feel, violates the truth. They (and by ‘they’ we mean the general masses and consumers) can make a film on their iPhones, but it is unlikely that it will have the technical expertise that is prevalent on a professional level, nor can they indulge in the same amount of possibilities. They can’t easily access the spaces that are open to the professional. They can’t shoot in a bank, in a police station, in a hospital, and they can’t rent a train to drive it of the tracks into a ravine. They might try of course, but the chances are improbable, for they lack the money, the tools, the wherewithal, the support of official commissions, granted permits et cetera. You can shoot a film on your iPhone, but then you have to settle for places that are accessible to everyone who wants to shoot a film guerilla style: cabs, streets, one or two houses for example, as Sean Baker did with Tangerine (2015), which was shot on an iPhone 5s.[7]
Shooting Tangerine on the iPhone 5s
We think that for a large part the audience remains in the hands of what Bratich denotes as ‘uncertainty, experimentation and unpredictability’, because the space of the internet may be completely open to them, but they can’t at will transcend the borders of the physical space.[8] Hence the consecration of the ‘interregnum’, a transitional space in between two epochs. In between the still very tangible remnants of an analogue age and a full-blown digital age wherein the audience perhaps can access the same possibilities the professional performers have now, they have to lie in wait. The audience has to make do with what Bratich calls ‘mutations’: new hybridizations that hold a ‘terrible ambiguity’ towards their possibilities.’[9] That ambiguity, as mentioned before, lies in the fact that the audience stands with one leg in an analogue sphere, and with the other in a not yet full-blown digital one.
In conclusion, one might state that the concept of the audience may widen, but the possibilities of the audience do not evolve in a parallel way. We want to stress however, that  although we chose for a more pessimistic or realistic nuance in the idea that the audience today virtually has the same instruments at hand as the professional performer, there are undoubtedly spheres in which the specific lack of a certain accessibility precisely inspires new types of creativity, but that is perhaps something to be discussed on another platform.
Proposition: The possibilities of the audience are still very much limited, despite the endless stretching of the concept.
A. vd B., V. M., J. P.  
Bibliography
Fabienne Darling-Wolf (2013), ‘Nomadic Scholarship: Translocal Approaches to Audience Studies’, in: Radhika Parameswaran (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Volume IV: Audience and Interpretation. Malden & Chichester: Whiley-Blackwell.
Shayla Thiel-Stern (2013), ‘Beyond the active audience: Exploring new media audiences and the limits of cultural production’, in: Radhika Parameswaran (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Volume IV: Audience and Interpretation. Malden & Chichester: Whiley-Blackwell, pp. 389-405.
Jack Z. Bratich (2013), ‘From Audiences to Media Subjectivities: Mutants in the Interregnum’, in: Kelly Gates (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Volume VI: Media Studies Futures. Malden & Chichester: Whiley-Blackwell.
Joe Marine (2015) ‘How the Filmmakers Behind Sundance Hit 'Tangerine' Shot on an iPhone & Got Cinematic Results’, nofilmschool.com



[1] Darling-Wolf 2013: 2.
[2] Darling-Wolf 2013: 2.
[3] Bratich 2013: 2.
[4] Bratich 2013: 6-19.
[5] Thiel-Stern 2013: 7.
[6] Thiel-Stern 2013: 7.
[8] Thiel-Stern 2013: 1.
[9] Bratich 2013: 1.