Discourse swings in understanding audiences: : Case studies on Hollywood's cooptation of audience activity(s) as emergent discourse

Abstract

Traditional discourses of the relationship between media producers and consumers have been challenged as of late in post-industrialized countries. The blurring of established consumer/producer identities due to changes in the mediascape, forecasted for decades, has changed how both academics and media professionals characterize the role of people in media engagings. The initial conceptualization of “audience-as-commodity” was challenged by increased recognition of the audience as active consumers, or “audience-as-agent”. Recently this recognition has led to the Hollywood media industry’s cooptation of these consumers, conceptualizing the people who engage with their media products as a combination of the previous two, or "audience-as-pusher". This paper is an account of this discourse swing through the description of case studies that demonstrate the utilization of interactive marketing schemes to co-opt pre-existent and emergent audience activity(s). The emergent conceptualization and its relationship with previous ones present academics with challenges and opportunities for theorizing and studying the relationships between the media industry and the people in their everyday lives.