Taking Audience Research into the Age of New Media: Old Problems and New Challenges

Feminist reception studies in a post-audience age: returning to audiences and everyday life

“…The movements of itinerant audiences across an increasingly complex and seemingly infinite network of new media sites challenge us to consider how we trace these mobilities in rich and nuanced ways. As Andrea Press and Sonia Livingstone (2006) write, "filling in a survey to record an evening's viewing is tricky, but by no means as tricky as recording and interpreting an evening's surfing or chat" (186). Markham (2013) advocates "a more flexible notion of the field is one that allows us to stop thinking about it as an object, place, or whole-and start thinking more about movement, flow, and process" (2013,438).…”

Beck’s Song Reader: An Unbound Music Book

“…In doing so, textual analysis risks overdetermining the meaning of the text, assuming and enacting the fan response, and so silences the actual living fan (Morley 1980;Moores 1993). The end result of textual analysis is that the fan is bracketed out of the relationship between text, consumer and producer (Moores 1993;Press and Livingstone 2006). Where ethnography risks 'othering' the fan, textual analysis risks making them merely a subject created through textual functions: textual analysis risks losing the fan altogether.…”

“…The politics of representation and researcher reflexivity may be especially useful for fan studies for a number of reasons. Reflexivity highlights power, where the public representation of the fan (as somewhat crazy, overinvested, and highly gendered) places the researcher in a powerful position, in a context where research already assumes hierarchization between researcher and researched (Press and Livingstone 2006). Furthermore, the crisis of representation calls on the researcher to reflexively produce different forms of knowledge, for example through creative writing (see Richardson 2000), which may itself be part of the currency that fan research is studying (e.g.…”

On the material and the symbolic: Silverstone’s double articulation of research traditions in new media studies

“…In Press and Livingstone (2006), we observe similar difficulties within internet studies, arguing that the first generation of research prioritised the online world, illustrated by Sherry Turkle's (1995) inquiry into the playful construction of identity online in Life on the Screen, while neglecting the offline world in which the player was, necessarily, situated. Drawing less from psychology and more from the sociology of technology use, a parallel strand of research focused instead on life in front of the screen, being squarely centred on the space-time relations of those offline contexts in which the new object -computer, internet -was located, yet neglecting the internet as a medium (or media) beyond mapping the use of broad content categories (typically, as for television, education, entertainment, information, communication).…”