New configurations of the audience?: the challenges of User-Generated Content for audience theory and media participation
Abstract
User-generated content (UGC) is seen as one of the main innovations in contemporary media worlds. As part of a digital culture that emphasizes new participatory opportunities, it claims to pose a number of challenges for our reflections about media and, more specifically, for (the more traditional forms of ) audience theory.
As enthusiastic and sometimes messianic discourses of novelty often engulf "new" media technologies and practices, in combination with calls to rearticulate (or renew) our present-day ideological and theoretical frameworks, there is an equally strong need to evaluate the novelty of these practices, to contextualize them by confronting them with media practices "from the past" (which are, as always, still very present), and to consider the applicability of the "old" (so-called outdated) theoretical frameworks to make sense of the diversity of participatory practices that characterize the media configuration of today. In order to confront the thinking about UGC with "traditional" (and fairly "old") audience theory, the first part of this chapter will give a brief overview of the core structural components of audience theory, focusing on its active- passive, participation-interaction, micro-macro, community-society, and meso dimensions.
In the second part, the specificity claims of UGC will be analyzed, in combination with the problems that arise through these acclaimed specific characteristics. Finally, the specificity claims of UGC will be scrutinized by embedding UGC and its acclaimed specific characteristics into the core structural components of audience theory.
This strategy not only will show the relevance of audience theory for the study of UGC, but also allows pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses of UGC by positioning it within the core dimensions of audience theory.