Session 3: Digital audiences

From Viewer to Participant
Lizzie Jackson, BBC

In July 2006 the BBC re-organised its Divisions to deliver the ‘Creative Future’, launching two Production groups, ‘BBC Vision’ and ‘BBC Audio and Music’, and placing ‘Marketing, communication and Audiences’ at the centre of the Corporation. This indicates a change of position from one which had been largely technologically determinist to a strategy which is more audience-led. This paper gives an overview of the opportunities audiences have to engage with BBC brands such as EastEnders and Dr Who, and to contribute ‘user-generated content’ to dynamic services. In 2007 BBC Children’s launches CBBC World, an immersive environment for children which shows a commitment to ‘virtuality’. It will be argued the BBC is beginning to be a ‘host’ organisation, a curator of public archives and provider of public space, as well as being a broadcaster and publisher. The Corporation must therefore foreground its role as mediator of content, facilitating audiences’ consumption and engagement with participatory media.

Digital Television and audience research: a sociological approach to capturing ‘user flows’.
Helen Wood, Du Montfort University

Audience reception is still a dominant concern at the core of media analysis, particularly as media technologies evolve and change. Sonia Livingstone (1999) has argued that the more fragmented audience engagements with the media become, the more important our understanding of changing audience practices for theories of social shaping. But capturing the ways in which audiences engage with television becomes even more challenging in an environment where the technology itself now demands differing modes of viewer engagement, responding to the digital environment. Digital TV packages offer ‘interactive’ choices coterminous with computer interfaces. John Caldwell (2003) has labelled the addition of new platforms to television as a ‘second shift aesthetics’. As the apparatus that mediates the interface between television and viewer changes, so might our methods for investigating the very nature of that relationship. This paper offers some suggestions for reconsidering our text/reader theoretical assumptions to deliver a methodology for television audience research within an evolving televisual landscape. By engaging with the phenomenological aspects of television in social contexts, this paper suggests that we may be able to capture the dynamic nature of viewer engagements as they morph and multiply with television’s evolving apparatus.