New Audiences, New Textualities

Intentionally or not, audience research often equals fan research, as anti-fans and non-fans are ignored or assumed. However, televisual anti-fandom and non-fandom involve different viewing practices, different proximities from the text and, thus, different textualities. This article therefore argues for the necessity of more research into anti-fans and non-fans, proposing that such research will shed further light on the nature of televisual textuality and on the role of media talk and intertextuality in forming it. The text remains a mysterious figure in media and cultural studies, and this article aims to bring us closer to understanding it. First, fan research and its own implicit assumptions of relations between text and audience are discussed; then, an `atomic' model of textuality is presented, accounting for fans, anti-fans and non-fans; and, finally, a method for studying new audiences and textualities is offered.

[1]  R. Maltby,et al.  Identifying Hollywood's Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies , 1999 .

[2]  Janice Radway,et al.  Reception Study: Ethnography and the Problems of Dispersed Audiences and Nomadic Subjects , 1988 .

[3]  A. Gray.  Audience and Reception Research in Retrospect: The Trouble with Audiences , 1999 .

[4]  T. Bennett,et al.  Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero , 1987 .

[5]  Andrew Ehrenberg,et al.  Television and its audience , 1988 .

[6]  Horace M. Newcomb,et al.  Family on Television , 1997 .

[7]  M. Bakhtin,et al.  Speech genres and other late essays , 1986 .

[8]  Joke Hermes,et al.  Reading women's magazines : an analysis of everyday media use , 1995 .

[9]  N. Abercrombie,et al.  Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination , 1998 .

[10]  J. Lull.  Culture in the Communication Age , 2001 .

[11]  Ien Ang.  Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination , 1985 .

[12]  R. Barthes,et al.  Image-Music-Text , 1977 .

[13]  L. Lewis.  Is There a Fan in the House?: The Affective Sensibility of Fandom , 2002 .

[14]  M. Gurevitch,et al.  Mass Media and Society , 1992 .

[15]  Jane M. Gaines.  Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (review) , 2011 .

[16]  C. Geertz,et al.  The Interpretation of Cultures , 1973 .

[17]  J. Lull.  SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNICATION AGE , 2002 .

[18]  L. Lewis.  The adoring audience : fan culture and popular media , 1992 .

[19]  Kurt Lancaster,et al.  Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media Universe , 2001 .

[20]  C. Geertz.  Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture , 1973 .

[21]  R. Lembo.  Thinking through Television: Social science , 2000 .

[22]  Nick Couldry,et al.  Inside Culture: Re-imagining the Method of Cultural Studies , 2000 .

[23]  Pertti Alasuutari,et al.  Rethinking the Media Audience: The New Agenda , 1999 .

[24]  Stuart Hall,et al.  Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 , 2003 .

[25]  Constance Penley,et al.  Nasa/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America , 1997 .

[26]  D. Morley.  The Nationwide Audience , 1980 .

[27]  Gérard Genette,et al.  Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation , 1997 .

[28]  David Buckingham,et al.  Public Secrets: Eastenders and Its Audience , 1988 .

[29]  C. Brunson.  Problems with quality , 1990 .

[30]  D. Morley.  Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies , 1992 .

[31]  Martin Barker,et al.  Knowing Audiences: ""Judge Dredd,"" Its Friends, Fans and Foes , 1998 .

[32]  A. Appadurai.  Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy , 1990 .

[33]  Jane P. Tompkins.  Reader-response criticism : from formalism to post-structuralism , 1981 .