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Discourses about Audiences: Cross Cultural and Linguistic Comparisons
Last modified: 2011-06-20
Abstract
Discourses about Audiences: International Comparisons,
Abstract for IAMCR, Istanbul July 13-17, 2011
Deadline February 8, 2011
By Richard Butsch and Sonia Livingstone
In our books, The Citizen Audience and Audiences and Publics, we have explored cultural representations and structural positioning of audiences and the varied and subtle meanings of words used to characterize them. These explorations have been within the context of modern democracies in Western Europe and North America. In Western discourse, audiences have been variously considered crowds, publics, mass and consumers, active or passive, additive or selective, vulnerable and suggestible or critical and creative, educated or ignorant, high or low brow, and characterized differently on the basis of their presumed race, class, sex and age.
(We use “western” to indicate culture rather than geography. In that sense, the term contrasts to all societies not based upon Western traditions, including not only “eastern” societies but also societies south of the equator.)
These debates and these categories sometimes have been adopted and applied to audiences in non-Western cultures. The conjoined terms "audiences and publics," for example, have begun to be used by scholars across the globe. But there is no reason to assume that such Western categories and associations apply, or apply in the same way, in non-western societies. Our goal is to bring together research from across the globe, to investigate whether the terms associated with audiences in western Europe and North America actually fit the indigenous discourses on audiences in non-Western cultures. Each culture likely has a different and interesting history.
At a time when global and regional media (satellite, television/radio, recording, mobile phone, internet) saturate even remote populations and cultures, we have no comparative empirical studies to reveal what categories are indigenous to individual non-western cultures, and to record how they differ and change. The very connectivity, via internet and satellite, that is the theme of IAMCR for the 2011 conference in Istanbul, is the aspect of twenty-first century media that is especially accelerating these changes. This connectivity therefore increases the urgency of this project to examine both indigenous cultures of audiencing and the significance of the collisions between global and local.
We think that such a comparative study of discourse on media and audiences could bring new insights into global media as well as Western discourse and scholarship on media and audiences, and be of immense value to government policymakers and media practitioners as well.
The project will explore specifically non-Western languages and cultures, and as a whole, will compare their discourses on audiences. In this globalized world this will sometimes be a marginal distinction, given the bleeding of Western ideas through borders and cultural boundaries. Project contributors will go beyond non-Western incorporations of Western terms about audiences that accompanied their adoption of media technology and texts, to explore their discourses on indigenous practices and their audiences. With this foundation, we will investigate how indigenous discourses represent media audiences as these media spread through these societies. Contributors will study representations in non-Western cultures and languages, examining its historical development, in whole or part, of discourses as media are introduced into that culture through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special consideration to the lexicon used to characterize media audiences.
Richard Butsch, Professor of Sociology, American Studies, and Film and Media Studies
Rider University, USA Butsch@rider.edu
Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology
Department of Media and Communications,
London School of Economics, UK S.Livingstone@lse.ac.uk
Abstract for IAMCR, Istanbul July 13-17, 2011
Deadline February 8, 2011
By Richard Butsch and Sonia Livingstone
In our books, The Citizen Audience and Audiences and Publics, we have explored cultural representations and structural positioning of audiences and the varied and subtle meanings of words used to characterize them. These explorations have been within the context of modern democracies in Western Europe and North America. In Western discourse, audiences have been variously considered crowds, publics, mass and consumers, active or passive, additive or selective, vulnerable and suggestible or critical and creative, educated or ignorant, high or low brow, and characterized differently on the basis of their presumed race, class, sex and age.
(We use “western” to indicate culture rather than geography. In that sense, the term contrasts to all societies not based upon Western traditions, including not only “eastern” societies but also societies south of the equator.)
These debates and these categories sometimes have been adopted and applied to audiences in non-Western cultures. The conjoined terms "audiences and publics," for example, have begun to be used by scholars across the globe. But there is no reason to assume that such Western categories and associations apply, or apply in the same way, in non-western societies. Our goal is to bring together research from across the globe, to investigate whether the terms associated with audiences in western Europe and North America actually fit the indigenous discourses on audiences in non-Western cultures. Each culture likely has a different and interesting history.
At a time when global and regional media (satellite, television/radio, recording, mobile phone, internet) saturate even remote populations and cultures, we have no comparative empirical studies to reveal what categories are indigenous to individual non-western cultures, and to record how they differ and change. The very connectivity, via internet and satellite, that is the theme of IAMCR for the 2011 conference in Istanbul, is the aspect of twenty-first century media that is especially accelerating these changes. This connectivity therefore increases the urgency of this project to examine both indigenous cultures of audiencing and the significance of the collisions between global and local.
We think that such a comparative study of discourse on media and audiences could bring new insights into global media as well as Western discourse and scholarship on media and audiences, and be of immense value to government policymakers and media practitioners as well.
The project will explore specifically non-Western languages and cultures, and as a whole, will compare their discourses on audiences. In this globalized world this will sometimes be a marginal distinction, given the bleeding of Western ideas through borders and cultural boundaries. Project contributors will go beyond non-Western incorporations of Western terms about audiences that accompanied their adoption of media technology and texts, to explore their discourses on indigenous practices and their audiences. With this foundation, we will investigate how indigenous discourses represent media audiences as these media spread through these societies. Contributors will study representations in non-Western cultures and languages, examining its historical development, in whole or part, of discourses as media are introduced into that culture through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special consideration to the lexicon used to characterize media audiences.
Richard Butsch, Professor of Sociology, American Studies, and Film and Media Studies
Rider University, USA Butsch@rider.edu
Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology
Department of Media and Communications,
London School of Economics, UK S.Livingstone@lse.ac.uk