Abstract
This chapter approaches human communicators as produsers (a combination of ‘producer’ and ‘user’) and explores how present-day media audiences increasingly create and distribute their own content. It begins by examining various strands of audience research and considers how understandings of the term ‘audience’ have changed since the emergence of digital media. It then considers how recent notions of ‘participatory culture’ tend to depict produsers as active participants in media culture and as politically engaged subjects. It critically interrogates these suggestions by examining produsers as civic storytellers, citizen journalists, and fan activists. This chapter concludes by suggesting that the produser is a ‘paradoxical figure’ insofar as his or her power to participate is dependent on a capitalist media infrastructure that is often exploitative.
In the emergent participatory culture, ‘participation’ is thus an ambiguous concept.
—van Dijck (2009: 45)
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Notes
- 1.
Along with these examples are companies that use UGC as a marketing strategy. For example, GoPro ‘wearable cameras’ enable users to create images and videos that can then be shared online. According to Dillon (2015), approximately 6000 GoPro videos are posted to social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook every day.
- 2.
This is particularly apparent in the legal ‘terms of use’ of technology companies. For example, Samsung’s contains the following paragraph in a section titled ‘User Content’: ‘When you upload, transmit, create, post, display or otherwise provide any information, materials, documents, media files or other content on or through our Sites (“User Content”) you grant us an irrevocable, unlimited, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to copy, reproduce, adapt, modify, edit, distribute, translate, publish, publicly perform and publicly display the User Content (“User Content License”), to the full extent allowed by Applicable Law’. (Samsung Legal ‘Terms of Use’ https://www.samsung.com/us/common/legal/)
- 3.
For example, in the following passage a young man describes how movies helped him in his relations with women: ‘I watched for the proper way in which to conduct oneself at a night club, because I began to have ideas that way. … The technique of making love to a girl received considerable of my attention, and it was directly through the movies that I learned to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on the mouth, in a close huddle’ (Jowett et al. 1996: 278–279; in Sullivan 2013: 110).
- 4.
It is important to note that Hall was not the first to observe that individuals can interpret (or ‘decode’) media messages in different ways. For example, Herbert Blumer made a similar observation in the 1960s: ‘Their interests, their forms of receptiveness, indifference, or opposition, their sophistication or naiveté, and their established schemes of definition set the way in which they initially receive the presentations’ (1998[1969]: 187/8).
- 5.
We should add here, of course, that internet bots also generate much of the content we encounter online.
- 6.
In their transnational study covering Indonesia, Malaysia, and the USA, Hill and Chung Lee find important differences in local media infrastructures, internet penetration, mobile broadband subscriptions, Wi-Fi access, household incomes, and other factors. For example, Indonesia has slow internet connection speeds while neighbouring Singapore has extremely high internet speeds (p. 5).
- 7.
My apologies here to David Hesmondhalgh, who in 2010 wrote (hilariously), ‘If I read one more time about how Time magazine nominated ‘you’ as person of the year in 2006, and how this marked the beginning of a new era of user-generated, content, I think I’ll post a video on YouTube. It will be of me holding my head in my hands and screaming’ (2010: 268). Please don’t make a video David!
- 8.
Readers should note that some scholars take issue with various theorisations of ‘free labour’. For example, although his research focuses mainly on workers in the creative and cultural industries (as opposed to fans), Hesmondhalgh contests what he regards as the simple and problematic pairing of ‘free labour’ and ‘exploitation’. For one thing, he argues that we can hardly suggest that those ‘who sit at their computers modifying code or typing out responses to TV shows’ are ‘exploited in the same way as those who endure appalling conditions and pay in Indonesian sweatshops’ (2010: 271). More broadly, Hesmondhalgh convincingly argues that we need to distinguish different forms of unpaid labour. For example, he highlights that while internships are ‘a striking case of unjust, unpaid labour in the media industries’ (p. 279), this should hardly lead us to conclude that amateur football coaches should be paid for donating their free time. We might further add here that unpaid fan work can sometimes lead to a fruitful career. For instance, a number of early Doctor Who fans went on to become professional television writers and producers (e.g., Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall) and even the actor Peter Capaldi—who played the twelfth Doctor on the series—had previously contributed to Doctor Who fanzines.
- 9.
In this study, Hautea et al. (2021) draw on Papacharissi’s (2015) notion of ‘affective publics’. The term ‘affective’ refers to feelings and attitudes, and for Papacharissi, affective publics are networked publics mobilised around shared feelings such as fear, anxiety, anger, and hope. Rather like Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm (Chap. 3), she argues that the affective statements at the heart of such publics ‘mix fact with opinion and with emotion in a manner that simulates the way that we politically react’ (2015: 27). In their study of climate change-hashtagged TikTok videos, Hautea et al. draw on Papacharissi to argue that the affordances of ‘visibility’ (the ease with which information can be perceived and located), ‘editability’ (the ease with which content can be modified), and ‘association’ (the capacity to link disparate actors or content together) facilitate the formation of affective publics on TikTok.
- 10.
It is worth pointing out that citizen journalism is not entirely new. For example, one can suggest that footage taken by ordinary members of the public who observed the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 and the police beating of Rodney King in 1991 are early examples. Nevertheless, the term is generally associated with the emergence of networked media and mobile devices, especially smartphones.
- 11.
Another example of this interdependence is the BBC’s ‘UGC Hub’, which Ciobanu (2017) describes as ‘public-powered journalism’.
- 12.
It is worth adding here that a recent global survey of online violence against women journalists carried out by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) found that 73% of women journalists who responded had experienced online violence in the course of their work (Posetti et al. 2021).
- 13.
The term ‘stan’ is also popularly used to describe an obsessive, over-zealous fan.
- 14.
Like scholars of ‘relational dialectics theory’—a communication theory that we unfortunately do not have space to consider—Gray argues that we should not think of liking and disliking, or even loving and hating, as opposites. For example, in his own research he finds that some fans of Game of Thrones are uncomfortable with scenes of sexual violence yet still enjoy the television series overall. In earlier work, Gray used the term ‘antifan’; however, Dislike marks a shift away from thinking about audience members as occupying distinct positions in terms of like and dislike.
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O’Boyle, N. (2022). Produsers: New Media Audiences and the Paradoxes of Participatory Culture. In: Communication Theory for Humans. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02450-4_7
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