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
http://nofilmschool.com/2015/07/tangerine-sundance-iphone-5s-sean-baker-radium-cheung-interview (Accessed November 2015)
[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.
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