The Audience And Its Landscape

This book offers a major reconceptualization of the term audience, one which involves a landscape, including the landscape of a given audiencesituated and territorializing features of any way of seeing and defining the world. It acknowledges, in the face of conventional discourse analysis, the contextual features of discourse, to produce complex and textured understanding of the concept of audience. The book will speak to students of rhetoric, mass communication, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology alike. This book offers a major reconceptualization of the term audience, including the landscape of a given audiencethe situated and territorializing features of any way of seeing and defining the world. Given de Certeaus hypothesis that listening, watching, and reading all occur in places and result in produce transformed paths or spaces, the contributors to this landmark volume have provided innovative essays analyzing the transformations that take place in the geography between sender and receiver. The book acknowledges, in the face of conventional discourse analysis, the contextual features of discourse, to produce a complex and textured understanding of the concept of audience. The Audience and Its Landscape, presents the work of a vital cross-section of international scholars including Swedens Karl Erik Rosengren, the UKs Jay G. Blumler and Roger Silverstone, Australias Tony Bennett, Israels Elihu Katz, Canadas Martin Allor, and the United Statess Janice Radway, Byron Reeves, and John Fisk, to name a few. This book is truly groundbreaking in its depth and scope, and will speak to students of rhetoric, mass communication, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology alike.

Ever since the exposure of the Kitten Killer of Hangshou captured the imagination of online communities world-wide, vigilantism and digilantism has come to the fore as an emerging and poignant issue. In their book Introducing Vigilant Audiences Daniel Trottier and colleagues (and contributors) have produced an excellent and throughtful ‘must read’ for all who are studying vigilantism, or just interested in it. Prof. David Wall, University of Leeds This is a collection of cutting edge and thoughtful case studies of global digital vigilantism that advances this emerging and increasingly important field in useful and intriguing ways. Prof. Michael Pfeifer, City University of New York This ground-breaking collection of essays examines the scope and consequences of digital vigilantism – a phenomenon emerging on a global scale, which sees digital audiences using social platforms to shape social and political life. Longstanding forms of moral scrutiny and justice seeking are disseminated through our contemporary media landscape, and researchers are increasingly recognising the significance of societal impacts effected by digital media. The authors engage with a range of cross-disciplinary perspectives in order to explore the actions of a vigilant digital audience – denunciation, shaming, doxing – and to consider the role of the press and other public figures in supporting or contesting these activities. In turn, the volume illuminates several tensions underlying these justice seeking activities – from their capacity to reproduce categorical forms of discrimination, to the diverse motivations of the wider audiences who participate in vigilant denunciations. This timely volume presents thoughtful case studies drawn both from high-profile Anglo-American contexts, and from developments in regions that have received less coverage in English-language scholarship. It is distinctive in its focus on the contested boundary between policing and entertainment, and on the various contexts in which the desire to seek retribution converges with the desire to consume entertainment. Introducing Vigilant Audiences will be of great value to researchers and students of sociology, politics, criminology, critical security studies, and media and communication. It will be of further interest to those who wish to understand recent cases of citizen-led justice seeking in their global context.

Key writings exploring questions of reception, interpretation and interactivity. The fan audience, the active audience, gender and audience, nation and ethnicity, internet audiences.

Pertti Alasuutari provides a state-of-the-art summary of the field of audience research. With contributions from Ann Gray, Joke Hermes, John Tulloch and David Morley, a case is presented for a new agenda to account for the role of the media in everyday life.

The revitalisation of audience studies is not only about new approaches and methods; it entails a crossing of disciplines and a bridging of long-established boundaries in the field. The aim of this volume is to capture the boundary-crossing processes that have begun to emerge across the discipline in the form of innovative, interdisciplinary interventions in the audience research agenda. Contributions to this volume seek to further this process though innovative, audience-oriented perspectives that firmly anchor media engagement within the diversity of contexts and purposes to which people incorporate media in their daily lives, in ways often unanticipated by industries and professionals.

Whether we are watching TV, surfing the Internet, listening to our iPods, or reading a novel, we all engage with media as an audience. Despite the widespread use of this term in our popular culture, the meaning of the "audience" is complex, and it has undergone significant historical shifts as new forms of mediated communication have developed from print, telegraphy, and radio to film, television, and the Internet. John L. Sullivan's second edition of Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power explores the concept of media audiences from four broad perspectives: as "victims" of mass media, as market constructions & commodities, as users of media, and as producers & subcultures of mass media. The goal is for students to be able to think critically about the role and status of media audiences in contemporary society, reflecting on their relative power in relation to institutional media producers.

This book examines the reception of rhetoric and the rhetoric of reception. By considering salient rhetorical traits of rhetorical utterances and texts seen in context, and relating this to different kinds of reception and/or audience use and negotiation, the authors explore the connections between rhetoric and reception. In our time, new media and new forms of communication make it harder to distinguish between speaker and audience. The active involvement of users and audiences is more important than ever before. This project is based on the premise that rhetorical research should reconsider the understanding, conceptualization and examination of the rhetorical audience. From mostly understanding audiences as theoretical constructions that are examined textually and speculatively, the contributors give more attention to empirical explorations of actual audiences and users. The book will provide readers with new knowledge on the workings of rhetoric as well as illustrative and guiding examples of new methods of rhetorical studies.