This week’s lectorial focused on the topic of audiences, covering aspects such as key debates in theories of audience, the position of audiences as consumers, changing ideas in a post broadcast era, ratings, and fandom culture.
I particularly was interested in the discussion on the shift from audiences as a passive mass to the theory of active audience and participatory culture. I liked the idea in this week’s reading that in our current age of social media and proactive fan culture, we are “the people formerly known as the audience”. On the Tumblr community I have seen first hand evidence of social media changing the audience landscape, and directly communicating with and contributing to the creators and producers. From Kickstarter campaigns such as the Veronica Mars film, fan communities creating fanart and fanfiction, and Twitter allowing audiences to directly express their thoughts to actors and creators, the idea of a passive mass audience is quickly dissipating.
For now, there is still an idea that fan culture is not legitimate culture, and it is still looked down upon because there is the notion of fans as ‘textual poachers’ that find pleasure in aspects of the text that are not necessarily valued or intended by the producers. I, however, think that audiences are moving in a good direction. The idea of audiences having a say in what gets shown and produced, fans as active producers and manipulators of meaning, a rise in user generated content, and the idea of “collective intelligence” in fandom in my mind is a good shift towards the future of the media landscape.
