Roaming Audiences: The Mobile Socialities of Drama Audiences

• In Event: Mobile Socialities

Abstract

Audience research faces a challenge in understanding our fluid experiences with media today. Audiences are often described as fragmented, or nomadic, moving around media in mobile contexts. Silverstone (1999) refers to nomadic audiences and asks ‘what sort of movements become possible?’ (1999: 8). Similarly, Athique (2016) researches transnational audiences, noting how audiences wander anywhere and everywhere, but in doing so become placeless. Rather than see audiences as nomadic, this research argues that people roam around storytelling within cross media content. Roaming audiences is a metaphor that captures the dynamic practices of audiences as they experience storytelling that takes place across dispersed sites of production, distribution and reception.

The empirical research uses a geo-cultural approach to audiences, drawing on a qualitative study of transnational drama production and reception in Europe, America and Mexico, in particular crime drama The Bridge and cult drama Utopia. The research question asks what sort of movements are possible for audiences in mobile socialities? The findings indicate a push-pull dynamics (Hill 2016). Media industries push audiences into television drama, creating engagement through sites of narrative, characters and settings, and through channel brand, and social media (Johnson 2011). At the same time, audiences are pulled into content, shaping their engagement as they roam around storytelling as viewers, users and producers. Audiences also push back, negatively engaging with content or disengaging completely. Illegal audiences access content through get arounds for geo blocking (Lobato and Thomas 2011) or piracy sites. This illegal means of accessing, sharing and engaging with mobile media highlights a sense of first release media citizenship, a right to roam. There is an affective relationship where people have an emergent sense of rights to roam across geographical and commercial boundaries. The research argues for a push and pull dynamics of roaming audiences, as people’s movements are shaped through media institutions and legal structures, and as it is experienced by audiences and their lived experiences. This is a performance of power (Coleman 2011) that is played out in mobile media spaces and across geographical and economic boundaries.

Author

• Annette Hill, Lund U