Audiences in an Age of Datafication: Critical Questions for Media Research

Abstract

This article critically examines how fears of audience gullibility, ignorance, and exploitation impede media studies' response to the pressing challenges posed by the growing power of social media platforms and their innovative datafication practices. I revisit the history of audience research to show how empirical findings contested the pejorative conception of the audience problematically yet persistently imagined by theorists of media power during the twentieth century. As media studies joins other disciplines in responding to the growing datafication of society, I propose that the circuit of culture model can help theorize media (including platform and algorithmic) power by opening up the hermeneutic and action space between production and consumption. In this way, critical scholarship might more effectively analyse such metaprocesses as mediatization and datafication precisely by recognizing rather than erasing audiences' relation to both the everyday lifeworld and the public world of citizen action, regulatory intervention, and the wider society.

Multi-Stakeholder Innovation in Smart City Discourse: Quadruple Helix Thinking in the Age of “Platforms”

“…Perhaps unsurprisingly, the growing theorization and body of empirical evidence that engages with "platforms, " particularly in media studies and geography, tends to focus on (often, rigid) accounts of power that seem to downplay or exclude users (or, citizens) and the significance of the surroundings in everyday life (Kitchin et al, 2018;Parker and Van Alstyne, 2018). Furthermore, the role of data, associated with particularly the term "datafication" 1 , has taken center stage in these debates, thereby highlighting the intertwined streams of thought about participation and innovation (Couldry and Mejias, 2019;Livingstone, 2019).…”

Reframing Current Debates on Young People's Online Privacy by Taking into Account the Cultural Construction of Youth

“…The generational categorization of digital natives marks an imaginary divide between youths and adults that represents utopian, as well as dystopian, visions about the digital future. Although young people are portrayed as technologically skilled, they are also seen as more susceptible to contemporary and future media manipulations such as fake news, data breaches, and filter bubbles [15,13,56,69].…”

“…Namely that youth lack 'adult' rationality and responsibility and are subsequently 'at risk' when they go online [1,10,11,12]. This assumption has given rise to widespread "technopanics" about young people's media use [2,13]. These technopanics produce tensions between youth and the adult institutions -such as the family and the education system -that structure their experiences because they fuel the rhetoric that adults have the right to intervene in the lives of the young in order to guide and protect them while simultaneously justifying youths' exclusion from networked public life [1,2,5,14,15,16].…”

“…Although it is true that social media hold a central place in young people's lives and that their participation in networked environments is not risk-free, researchers who pay attention to the voices and experiences of young people show that the technopanics portraying youth as irrational and irresponsible are a far cry from a more nuanced reality [5,13,17,18,19,20]. Rather than appropriating social media in a random or non-reflective manner, youths recognize and utilize these technologies as a valuable resource in their everyday life.…”

Hacia una caracterización de los modelos de programación y audiencia de las televisiones generalistas “locomotora” en el umbral del apagón analógico (2005-2010): análisis del caso español

“…La rentabilidad de los negocios neotelevisivos y de su oferta de programación audiovisual requiere del conocimiento estructural de la audiencia a través de las metodologías cuantitativas y cualitativas existentes en cada etapa histórica. En este sentido son interesantes las aportaciones de Huertas(1998, 2002, 2006),Jauset (2000),Gorton (2009), Webster, Phalen y Lichty (2014,Livingstone (2019),Roel y Grandío (2018a, 2018b oRoel (2019).Para proceder al estudio de los perfiles de audiencia de las televisiones en España y, en concreto, de los canales generalistas "locomotora", se ha accedido a los datos anuales de 2005 y 2010 publicados por TNS/Kantar Media, tal y como se ha explicado en el apartado introductorio. Todo ello nos ha permitido…”