engleski

Urbanising Audience Studies: A non-media-centric perspective on everyday living in mediated cities

There is a growing awareness that people are audiences in an increasing array of situations and spaces. Despite the significance of the ethnographic turn which emphasised the central importance of context and interdisciplinarity for an understanding of media consumption, many issues facing audience research in contemporary contexts consistently remain under-explored. One such area of investigation concerns everyday living in the so-called ‘media cities’, where people are invited to communicate with a variety of public display screens (outdoor news and advertisements) without the power to operate a control switch (as familiar from personal, home or workspace screen cultures). Drawing on my own recent research on interactions with public screens, in this paper I call for a long delayed conversation of audience studies with urban studies. My research shows that people pursue a variety of creative ways of turning public screens into private resources of dealing with situations in which they encounter them, and even domesticate screens as largely invisible signs of familiarity and safety. Such empirical situations rendered conventional audience studies assumptions unhelpfully ‘media- centric’. Rather than reading ‘texts’, respondents were involved in experiencing spatial ‘textures’, developing ‘situational uses’ of public screens (gazing at a nearby screen as an imaginary escape from a busy or intimidating site), and a sophisticated system of switching between different modes of attention conceptualised by urban theorists, such as pleasurable flâneuring (as described by Walter Benjamin), defensive indifference or blasé (following Georg Simmel) and tactically changing their walking (conceptualised by Michel de Certeau). I conclude that future audience research agenda requires what David Morley has recently termed a ‘de-centring’ of media from the focus of media research, so as to better understand how contemporary social life is being mediated.

media audiences ; cities ; interdisciplinarity ; urban media studies

nije evidentirano