Active Audience

In today's world, with the development of technology, brands have turned to new communication means and methods apart from traditional communication tools like television, newspapers, magazines, cinemas , etc. in order to differentiate and escape from their competitors in an increasingly competitive environment. Storytelling and social media are the leading ones among these tools and methods. Thus, brands aim to create branding process and brand loyalty through the strategic communication they have established in social media with consumers. The concept of participatory culture has expanded thanks to digital communication technologies and social media. Fans who have an important place in the sto-rytelling of transmedia reshape a story, associate it with their own lives, and recreate it by producing it again through various media, especially social media. Thus, in this study, it is aimed to reveal how the transmedia storytelling which has been awarded with fan comments in the context of participant culture contributes to brand communication, image, reputation, and marketing.

This thesis is a study of how established institutions within the media and telecom industries act in times of change, using the first decade of the 2000s as its time frame. As an emerging field that has inspired high expectations but also much uncertainty, mobile media has been a leading subject of scholarly investigation. Located mainly within the management of technological innovation tradition, this thesis discusses how incumbent institutions, with their legacies from the traditional media and telecom industries, make sense of the mobile device as a media platform, as well as how they translate their perceptions into plans and actions. Furthermore, this thesis connects the development of mobile media to other, more far-reaching developments—technological, cultural and economic—within the media and telecom industries. Hence it considers how mobile-media perceptions and facilitations are related to the more general developments of media convergence, changing audience relations and challenging new-media business models. It concentrates on well-established institutions from the Norwegian media and telecom markets—the incumbent telecom operator Telenor, the public service broadcaster NRK, the tabloid newspaper VG, the commercial television channel TV 2 and the commercial radio channel P4 in particular.

"Esta comunicación examina las características de la convergencia de medios, un fenómeno poliédrico y dinámico. Se construye una caracterización tipológica del concepto,
delimitándolo y aclarándolo para extraer una definición que envuelva todas las dimensiones esenciales. Haremos énfasis en una dimensión concreta: las audiencias activas."

La presente labor de investigaciónintenta contribuir con una aproximación a la mirada de losmedios tradicionales y su fase productiva como medio-empresa y su relación medio-poder, al igual que se busca comprender dequé forma el ecosistema digital  y las redes de interconexión social contribuyen a la sobresaturación del espectro comunicativo,contribuyendo en gran medida a una desinformación propia,endógena, de todo proceso de comunicación masiva, por lo que se podría considerar a la desinformación como un estado natural del ecosistema, más que la usual mirada amoral y fuera de contexto de cualquier ética de la comunicación.

Jill Schostak and I wrote this book as part of our evolving interest in doing research radically.  By radically we mean engaging with people's voices to learn how to create the conditions for social justice and for democratising all the organisations of everyday life.  We draw on our own research but also on the ways in which the media is used to shaw people's voices and behaviours.  We explore all the ways in which the desires and demands of elites are inscribed upon minds and bodies as well as how writing may create the conditions for counter inscriptions.  Writing research is to engage politically.  Whether it is the Arab Spring re-inscribing hopes for freedom, the Occupy Movement or young people challenging orthodoxies at home or in classrooms through use of the media, it is the power of writing in its broadest sense that makes the difference.

Recent research on the media industries has been centrally concerned with the blurring of boundaries between production and reception in an era of digitalization and convergence. The article argues for a need for research to consider more closely the importance of notions of the ‘active audience’ within today’s media industries. Overall conceptual work has been done on ‘convergence culture’, and much scholarly debate currently centres around the pros and cons of convergence; whether it empowers ‘produsers’ or the industries themselves. Important as they are, these debates run the risk of stagnation if they are not informed by further empirical research on the concrete ways that media institutions put ‘activity’ to strategic use. The article reports from a survey on how notions of activity, sociability and technological novelty function as strategic ‘working notions’ for Norwegian media industry executives.

Comments in online news could be the contemporary enactment of the eighteenth-century cafés that founded public sphere. This article assesses to what extent do these forms of digital discussion fit in Habermas’ principles for democratic debate, using his discursive ethics as a demanding normative benchmark. The sample of more than 15,000 comments was selected from the online versions of five national newspapers of record from different political and journalistic contexts: The Guardian (United Kingdom), Le Monde (France), The New York Times (United States), El País (Spain), and La Repubblica (Italy). The ethical guidelines and legal frameworks set up by the newspapers as well as their moderation strategies were considered to understand the different settings of the conversations. Two models of audience participation emerge from the analysis, one where communities of debate are formed based on mostly respectful discussions between diverse points of view and another of homogenous commu...

An increasing number of broadcaster’s are trying to engage their audience through social media in order to increase their reach, alter their demographic profile and involve audience members to make their programme more relevant. This paper engages with debates about such media initiatives and their role in providing participatory spaces of democratic value inside and outside the African continent. The participatory programme BBC Africa Debate that launched in January 2012 is studied through participant observation of journalists as well as quantitative and qualitative social media analysis of BBC social media followers.
The first part of the paper provides a typology of audience participation from in-studio audience interaction, to radio listening and social media participation. This typology divides the participatory activities in to minimalist versus maximalist forms of participation (Carpentier 2007). Initial findings suggest that the participation taking place is mostly in line with minimalist forms of participation by the vast number of radio listeners who are not directly participating in the media production. In addition, those who are engaged in maximalist forms of participation through social media are not necessarily getting their voice heard by the wider radio audience because of lack of integration between social media and the radio content.
The second part of the paper evaluates BBC Africa Debate as a participatory space and contributes to debates about the democratic value of different forms of mediated participation. The paper concludes with arguing that despite some lack in terms of inclusivity and integration of debates between platforms, the programme serves an important purpose to reach new and younger audiences, make debates about Africa available to a wider global audience and provide a way for social media connected audiences to make the topics up for discussion their own.

When the lights go out in cinemas in most parts of the Western World the audience sits and stays silently in their seats until the end of the screening. Save for special sing-along screenings, for instance of musicals like " The Sound of Music, " audiences do not tend to exhibit vocally or bodily their response to films; if they do, their actions may be sanctioned by other audience members. In her ethnography " House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience, " Lakshmi Srinivas powerfully demonstrates that in India, cinema-going is foremost a social event undertaken and experienced in often large groups. The book has eight captivating chapters that offer the reader detailed observations of the organization of making and consuming Indian films as well as a discussion of the theoretical contribution of the study to a sociology of cinema-going in particular and a sociology of film in general. Throughout this outstanding book, Srinivas shows that in Bangalore (where she conducted most of her study), going to the cinema and experiencing film is fundamentally a social experience. The social aspects of the visit to the cinema take priority over the appreciation of the movie. And going alone to the cinema, in particular as a woman, is considered to be inappropriate (p. 133). The social experience of Indian cinema begins when people queue outside waiting to purchase tickets. Here, they unavoidably mix with other people who also wait to be let into the theater. The behavior in the waiting queue is managed by security guards and the police who not seldom use bamboo sticks to discipline unruly people (p. 103). Once people have been let into the theater physical barriers and ushers segment the audience by ticket class. Traditionally, the best seats in the house are on the balconies whilst the front rows tend to be occupied by those holding the cheapest ticket. This segmentation of the audience today does not necessarily reflect the socioeconomic status of audience members as in India ticket prices in contrast to wages have not increased much for the past few years, allowing also people who are less well-off to purchase balcony tickets. Moreover, after the intermission that interrupts the Symbolic Interaction, (2017), p. n/a, ISSN: 0195-6086 print/1533-8665 online.