Audiences and change

So far in this chapter, we’ve seen that as audiences our identities and our position within the communication landscape are determined by forces that are often beyond our control or even our comprehension. These forces are constantly changing. Meanwhile, audiences themselves are driving changes in the media environment: they are doing things that are taking communication in new directions. To think about audiences, then, is to think about, with, and through change.

Image by Edar from Pixabay

Let’s take a look at changing audience behaviour in Australia. A 2016 report by Regional TAM, OzTAM, and Nielson found that Australians were increasingly engaging in multi-screening – that is, spreading their media activity across multiple screens; for example, using a mobile phone to access social media while watching television. The report found that 76% of Australians multi-screen and 33% access content on three or more devices at once (i.e., triple-screening).

This has significance for communicators trying to reach and engage audiences, but it also radically reshapes the way communication practices are embedded in everyday life. As we saw in Chapter 2, mobile devices have changed the relationship between audiences and media, not just because they allow us to move our media consumption outside fixed spaces (like the living room or the home office), but because they allow us to weave media and non-media practices together in complex ways. As multi-screeners, we can watch the latest episode of our favourite TV drama while expressing our opinion about the episode’s plot developments on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter). As media multitaskers, we can listen to a podcast while jogging in our local park, or play an augmented reality mobile game while strolling down the street.

Flash forward six years. In Australia in 2022, according to ACMA (the Australian Communications and Media Authority), most (95%) of audiences used some form of communication or social media website or app. 77% of young Australians aged 18-24 used four or more social media and digital communication tools in a week, and 43% of these young Australians used TikTok. To communicate, we used mobile calls, texts, and messaging or calling apps. We also used websites or apps to actively engage with content (sharing, commenting, liking) and to post or create content. Facebook was the dominant service for digital communication, although Meta-owned products appeared to be declining in popularity. Spotify was the dominant service for audio streaming and Netflix was the preferred subscription-video-on-demand provider. On average, we spent 16.1 hours per week watching video content, not including user generated content or short form online video services such as TikTok. 81% of us accessed news from online sources (ACMA 2022a and 2022b).

Compare these patterns of audience behaviour to the way you communicated and engaged with media in your childhood. Even if you’re much younger than me, you’ll notice significant changes. So why are we doing all these new things? Because we can? Because we have no choice? Because it suits us to do so? None of these answers fully captures the complexity of the way we, individually and collectively, are positioned in the relationship between media content, media industries, and everyday life.

The end of “the audience”?

In the midst of all this change, is “audience” even the right word to describe all that we do within networked, digitised webs of communication?

Media critic Jay Rosen argued back in 2006 that it was not. In a famous piece of online writing, Rosen called today’s media consumers “the people formerly known as the audience”, and argued that our media consumption has evolved beyond this word and its connotations of darkened movie theatres and eyes fixed passively on a screen.

There is merit to, and also many problems with, this argument. We can’t easily separate old and new audience practices, no more than we can separate digital and virtual from embodied and emplaced experiences. The more we try to draw these lines, the more we are in danger of reading our communication landscape – and ourselves – in an oversimplified way.

The term “audience” certainly has currency today and has not disappeared from use. However, this term now encompasses a range of practices. We’ll explore this more fully in Chapter 8, but it deserves mentioning now. Audiences don’t just listen, watch, and read. They also make, share, play, recreate, and speak back. Professional communicators engage with their audiences in increasingly dialogic ways – and the boundary between professional and amateur communicators is becoming increasingly blurred.

Interestingly, this movement across the boundary between senders and receivers means that those traditionally thought of as “audiences” must now, as content creators and communicators themselves, think about other audiences for their work. This may be as simple as considering the number of likes you receive for a post on Facebook, or contemplating the professional brand you’re curating on LinkedIn. In other words, the practice of imagining an audience is no longer solely the purview of those in professional communication roles – it is an everyday practice applicable to anyone who uses digital platforms to communicate with those in their own personal or professional networks.