The Handbook of Media Audiences

Virginia Nightingale held the position of Associate Professor with the School of Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney until her retirement in 2010. Her publications include Media and Audiences: New Perspectives (with Karen Ross, 2003) and Critical Perspectives: Media and Audiences (with Karen Ross, 2003), and New Media Worlds: Challenges for Convergence (ed. with Tim Dwyer, 2007).

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the complexity and diversity of audience studies in the advent of digital media.
* Details the study of audiences and how it is changing in relation to digital media
* Recognizes and appreciates valuable traditional approaches and identifies how they can be applied to, and evolve with, the changing media world
* Offers diverse perspectives from which being an audience, theorizing audiences, researching audiences, and doing audience research are approached today
* Argues that the field works best by identifying particular 'audience problems' and applying the best theories and research methods available to solving them
* Includes contributions from some of the most outstanding international scholars in the field

As broadcasting gives way to the digital media age, the study of audiences faces unprecedented challenges. Digital media have dramatically increased the nature and the diversity in how people can position themselves in relation to media content, and the study of audiences is shifting and changing accordingly.

Notes on Contributors viii
 
Series Editor's Preface xiv
 
Acknowledgments xv
 
Introduction 1
Virginia Nightingale
 
Part I Being Audiences 17
 
1 Readers as Audiences 19
Wendy Griswold, Elizabeth Lenaghan, and Michelle Naffziger
 
2 Listening for Listeners: The Work of Arranging How Listening Will Occur in Cultures of Recorded Sound 41
Jackie Cook
 
3 Viewing 62
Shawn Shimpach
 
4 Search and Social Media 86
Virginia Nightingale
 
5 Spreadable Media: How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked Economy 109
Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins
 
6 Going Mobile 128
Gerard Goggin
 
Part II Theorizing Audiences 147
 
7 Audiences and Publics, Media and Public Spheres 149
Richard Butsch
 
8 The Implied Audience of Communications Policy Making:
Regulating Media in the Interests of Citizens and Consumers 169
Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt
 
9 New Configurations of the Audience? The Challenges of User-Generated Content for Audience Theory and Media Participation 190
Nico Carpentier
 
10 The Necessary Future of the Audience ... and How to Research It 213
Nick Couldry
 
11 Reception 230
Cornel Sandvoss
 
12 Affect Theory and Audience 251
Anna Gibbs
 
Part III Researching Audiences 267
 
13 Toward a Branded Audience: On the Dialectic between Marketing and Consumer Agency 269
Adam Arvidsson
 
14 Ratings and Audience Measurement 286
Philip M. Napoli
 
15 Quantitative Audience Research: Embracing the Poor Relation 302
David Deacon and Emily Keightley
 
16 Media Effects in Context 320
Brian O'Neill
 
17 Cultivation Analysis and Media Violence 340
Andy Ruddock
 
18 Creative and Visual Methods in Audience Research 360
Fatimah Awan and David Gauntlett
 
19 Locating Media Ethnography 380
Patrick D. Murphy
 
Part IV Doing Audience Research 403
 
20 Children's Media Cultures in Comparative Perspective 405
Sonia Livingstone and Kirsten Drotner
 
21 Fan Cultures and Fan Communities 425
Kristina Busse and Jonathan Gray
 
22 Beyond the Presumption of Identity? Ethnicities, Cultures, and Transnational Audiences 444
Mirca Madianou
 
23 Participatory Vision: Watching Movies with Yolngu 459
Jennifer Deger
 
24 The Audience Is the Show 472
Annette Hill
 
25 Seeking the Audience for News: Response, News Talk, and Everyday Practices 489
S. Elizabeth Bird
 
26 Sport and Its Audiences 509
David Rowe
 
Index 527