There has been limited adoption of Immersive Journalism (IJ) by the audience; simultaneously, the audience’s perspective is rarely considered in the production and research of IJ. At this point, however, it is crucial to incorporate an audience perspective to identify potentially unintended effects of IJ and improve on the innovation of IJ. This study investigates the audience’s experience and evaluation of IJ by qualitatively analyzing their thoughts after viewing two IJ cases. Our results indicate that the audience may pick up on intended effects, such as a sense of presence and an intense emotional experience, but some also express unease towards these effects. Furthermore, the audience struggles to comprehend this study’s two immersive journalistic cases as part of the journalistic genre. These findings provide insight into the gap between the initial hype and the current reality of IJ and provide the basis for propositions for future IJ productions.
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Audience studies is not the vibrant field it was in its 1980s and early 1990s heyday. Cultural studies today has a more balanced interest in production, audiences and texts. A renewed focus in audience studies on everyday meaning production, identity and relations of power could benefit from recent developments. Theorization of power especially has benefited from recent work on governmentality. In accord with recent work on ‘affect’, there is an opportunity for renewed vitality and urgency. Was audience studies damaged beyond repair by the charge that it is a populist field that celebrates rather than interrogates everyday media culture? Could a concept such as cultural literacy provide a bridge to help re-establish the critical credibility of audience studies or would it burden this field with its implied notions of standards, distinction and cultural exclusion? The article discusses recent work with youth audiences to inquire into the possibilities of ‘critical literacy’. It proposes taking up questions and insights raised by affect theory, to merge appreciation, criticism and understanding of the forces that drive (the possibility of) change, and to embed critical literacy in cultural studies’ ongoing interest in the construction of (cultural) citizenship.
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In media audience research we tend to assume that media are engaged with when they are used, however ‘light’ such engagement might be. Once ‘passive media use’ was banned as a reference to media use, being a media audience member became synonymous with being a meaning producer. In audience research however I find that media are not always the object of meaning making in daily life and that media texts can be hardly meaningful. Thinking about media and engagement, there is a threefold challenge in relation to audience research. The coming into being of platform media and hence of new forms of media production on a micro level that come out of and are woven into practices of media use, suggests that we need to redraft the repertoire of terms used in audience research (and maybe start calling it something else). Material and immaterial media production, the unpaid labour on the part of otherwise audience members should for instance be taken into account. Then, secondly, there is the continuing challenge to further develop heuristically strong ways of linking media use and meaning making, and most of all to do justice, thirdly, to those moments and ways in which audiences truly engage with media texts without identifying them with those texts.
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The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as feminist scholars, might manoeuvre. To do so, we will test and triangulate three different forms of ethnographically inspired inquiry: 1) ‘collaborative autoethnography,’ to discuss male-to-female gender-bending comedies from the 1980s and 1990s, 2) ‘netnography’ of online discussions about the (potential) recasting of gendered legacy roles from Doctor Who to Mary Poppins, and 3) textual media analysis of content focusing on the casting of cisgender actors for transgender roles. Exploring the affordances and challenges of these three methods underlines the duty of care that is essential to feminist audience research. Moving across personal and anonymous, ‘real’ and ‘virtual,’ popular and professional discussion highlights how gender has been used and continues to be instrumentalised in lived audience experience and in audience research.
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In the past two years [2010-2012] we have done research on the visitor experience of music festivals. We conducted several surveys asking festival visitors for demographic variables, taste in music, their motivation for visiting festivals, mentalities and the evaluation of the festival. We also asked for the use of social media before, after and during the festival. Results show that visitors using social media have a significantly different festival experience from users that do not use social media before, during or after the festival. Results on difference in festival satisfaction are mixed.
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The paper investigates how an audience can be challenged to 'perform as interface' pointing towards the activation of a certain attitude; an active mind-set which constantly leads the attention back to the experience of our body; to perceive, critically read and make sense of this experience in relation to the interaction with(in) the technologically mediated world [16]. As a case, the paper focuses on the interactive installation "CHAIR-JUMP-CHUTE" and on the various ways the audience was induced to interact with it. The paper identifies triggers stimulating the participant to become fully - as in physically and mentally - engaged in the interaction with a technological installation in the semi-public setting of a cultural institute. Furthermore, it explores how the perceived thresholds (like other people watching, physical challenges or "apparative resistance" [9], become more than 'elements to overcome' as they can also be seen as giving meaning and depth to the interactive experience. The paper sums up what factors trigger this challenging and at the same time demanding (embodied) interaction, in order for this interaction to become an important actual / critical part of the aesthetic experience of interactive art, as it challenges the participant to perform as interface.
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The paper investigates how an audience can be challenged to 'perform as interface' pointing towards the activation of a certain attitude; an active mind-set which constantly leads the attention back to the experience of our body; to perceive, critically read and make sense of this experience in relation to the interaction with(in) the technologically mediated world [16]. As a case, the paper focuses on the interactive installation "CHAIR-JUMP-CHUTE" and on the various ways the audience was induced to interact with it. The paper identifies triggers stimulating the participant to become fully - as in physically and mentally - engaged in the interaction with a technological installation in the semi-public setting of a cultural institute. Furthermore, it explores how the perceived thresholds (like other people watching, physical challenges or "apparative resistance" [9], become more than 'elements to overcome' as they can also be seen as giving meaning and depth to the interactive experience. The paper sums up what factors trigger this challenging and at the same time demanding (embodied) interaction, in order for this interaction to become an important actual / critical part of the aesthetic experience of interactive art, as it challenges the participant to perform as interface.
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Designing for interactivity for audience engagement in journalistic narratives is a new practice that emerged after The New York Times’ success with Snow Fall in 2012. Journalists have begun collaborating with designers in interdisciplinary teams to design these interactive narratives. Few studies describe the new practice that is the result of this collaboration. In this study, we examine the production processes of three journalistic interactive narratives and their design for audience engagement by focusing on the imagined user as part of the production process. Our analysis shows how producers develop the role of users by considering the narrative’s experience and accessibility. Together, these two concepts underpin the practice of designing for audience engagement and subsequent entextualisation. Our findings show that, although producers claim that they approach users differently when designing texts for interactive audience engagement, their concepts of the interactive user are grounded in more traditional notions of authorship and audience in journalistic practices.
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This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the sign language interpreting profession drawing on data from a fourth and final survey conducted in June 2021 as part of a series of online “living surveys” during the pandemic. The survey, featuring 331 respondents, highlights significant changes in the occupational conditions and practices of sign language interpreters due to the sudden shift towards remote video-mediated interpreting. The findings reveal a range of challenges faced by interpreters, including the complexities of audience design, lack of backchanneling from deaf consumers, the need for heightened self-monitoring, nuanced conversation management, and team work. Moreover, the study highlights the physical and mental health concerns that have emerged among interpreters as a result of the shift in working conditions, and a need for interpreters to acquire new skills such as coping with the multimodal nature of online interpreting. While the blend of remote, hybrid, and on-site work has introduced certain advantages, it also poses new challenges encompassing workload management, online etiquette, and occupational health concerns. The survey’s findings underscore the resilience and adaptability of SLIs in navigating the shift to remote interpreting, suggesting a lasting transformation in the profession with implications for future practice, training, and research in the post-pandemic era.
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