Television & New Media · 2012 · 45 citations · 25 references
Social SciencesCommunicationMedia StudiesMedia TheoryProduction StudiesAudience ReceptionMedia AudiencesMedia ProductionNew MediaProduction ContextAudience Co-productionAudience ProductionAudience-producer RelationsMeaning ProductionProsumer Audiences
The emergence of “prosumers” and “produsers” suggests that production and reception are more conflated now than ever before. The article questions whether the mediation of hybrid roles is new and whether producers and audiences were ever separate, critiquing theories that overstate their distinction. The authors reject the idea of a structured break between production and reception, drawing on Goffman and Meyrowitz to propose that production is a social situation sustained by participants and oriented toward an absent audience. The article concludes that this model has implications for studying production and producers.
The emergence of “prosumers” and “produsers” suggests that production and reception are more conflated now than ever before. But is their mediation through the performance of hybrid roles new? And were the two ever separate? This article criticizes social theories of the media and “production studies” for overstating the distinction between producers and audiences and the instrumental means whereby the former engage the latter. It rejects this postulate of a “structured break” between production and reception by discussing the producers’ tacit knowledge of the audience, their reflexivity and socialization, and their use of “audience images.” The article then draws on Goffman (1959) and Meyrowitz (1985) to propose a new model for understanding production: as a social situation sustained by participants but explicitly oriented to an absent third party: the audience. It concludes by discussing the implications of the model for the study of production and producers.
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