Audiences: a decade of transformations – reflections from the CEDAR network on emerging directions in audience analysis

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the 10 years between 2004 and 2014 as a transformative, if uncertain, decade for audience analysis, faced with rapidly fragmenting media environments. Next, reflecting on the research done by a 14 country network I direct – Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research (CEDAR), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, United Kingdom – I examine the features of this decade of transformation, paying attention to the intellectual markers that punctuate this decade and make it stand out in the history of audience studies. I focus on four pivotal axes of transformations which emerge out of the analysis conducted by the CEDAR network and argue that these four represent significant ways in which audience analysis has lived through an uncertain but exciting decade. These axes are audiences’ changing coping strategies with hyper-connected and intrusive media, audience interruptions of media content flows, the co-option of audience labour, and the micro–macro politics of audience action. I conclude by locating this transformative decade 2004–2014 against a longer backdrop of uncertain moments and periods of flux in the field, arguing, that not unlike those points in time, now too, audience analysis has reached a newer, more unknown, but very significant phase.