Audience frictions

Abstract

Against a backdrop of new ways of engaging and configuring audiences across technologies, platforms, regions and modes, there is a revitalisation of audience studies, offering fresh theoretical and empirical territories that follow the frictions of social tensions and resistance in challenging modes of being an audience. As audiences engage with media, including artificial intelligence and related technologies, they are encountering and dealing with expanded resources for viewing, listening and interpreting their thoughts and actions, feelings and emotions. These various modes of audiencehood generate frictions, sources of both productive and negative energies to encounter and contest different conditions for a digital commons. This contribution is part of the Cultural Commons special issue on ‘Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique’, edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood.

Against a backdrop of new ways of engaging and experiencing mediation and of configuring audiences across technologies, platforms, regions and modes, there is a revitalisation of audience studies, offering fresh theoretical and empirical territories that follow the patterns of social tensions and resistance, uncomfortable feelings and contradictory experiences. In this short commentary on the theme of digital commons, we use the metaphor of frictions to reflect on current research by a range of scholars researching both positive and negative energies that emerge when transnational audiences have frictional encounters with digital environments, including the opportunities and tensions that arise in engaging with technologies and content driven by global capitalism, and alternative digital spaces that claim to be open to audiences as publics, citizens, players and performers. Frictions capture the sparks that arise from being audiences; and the positive and negative energies that are a feature of doing audience research on contemporary digital experiences.

When researching audiences, empirical and theoretical reflections can result in varieties of frictions. Friction can be understood as an energetic spark. Think of fans and creative frictions, or friction fiction in storytelling for film and television audiences. The term friction can also refer to social tension and conflict (and social power relations), for example making witness videos for social activism, or the various ways in which audiences constitute their context of viewing and ways in which being an audience is integrated with everyday life.

Similar to Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005), we see research on media audiences as a site of productive friction. In research on global capitalism and the Indonesian forest, Tsing applies an anthropological perspective on ‘the messy and surprising features’ of ‘encounters across difference’ which can inform our understanding of the global and the local, of the ‘unexpected and unstable aspects of global interaction’ (2005: 3). For Tsing, cultural encounters are contingent and generate friction: ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (2005: 6). Such a focus on friction as interconnection across differences can be extended to media audiences, as questions of agency, instability and contingency are paramount to research on our encounters, engagement and experiences with media. This understanding of friction as an essential element of social relations is something that Berlant (2022) also explored in research on inconvenience within social experience. In a similar way, friction as uncomfortable or ambiguous social relations is entwined within audience research on the relational dynamics of media, including linear, streaming and digital (dis)connections.

What follows is a short overview of audience frictions, drawing from The Companion to Media Audiences, published in 2024. There are seven sections for the Companion edited by a range of scholars: theorising audiences (Lunt in Hill and Lunt, 2024), imagining audiences (Chambers in Hill and Lunt 2024), modes of audiences (Gambarato in Hill and Lunt 2024), engagement and experiences (Hill in Hill and Lunt 2024), identity and affect (Hermes in Hill and Lunt 2024), environments (Hill and Lunt 2024) and methods (Schofield Clark in Hill and Lunt 2024). These seven sections offer new ways of thinking about the frictions that emerge in the shift from linear broadcast media and nationally imagined audiences and publics, towards the mixing of old and new forms within hybrid media environments.

The layering of older and newer media technologies and storytelling practices in the digital commons generates both positive and negative energies; it builds on, mixes and reforms different audience identities – including citizens, users, fans, producers and influencers – across broadcast and public service media, and streaming platforms, social media and activism. The layering of different theories and methods also generates productive frictions, offering multiple perspectives for audience research, including phenomenology, cultural studies, semiotics or digital anthropology, thus forming the present and future of audience studies and expanding its intersection with other areas of study. Through their emphasis on empirical research with transnational audiences, and reflections on theories and representations of audiences, scholars in the Companion to Media Audiences advance our understanding of what audiences do in the digital commons, while recognising that both digital and common experiences of technologies and content are difficult to capture in any single empirical data set or theory.

In brief, previous collections in audience research have signalled different moments in the changing audience landscape and helped to define the field for those particular times. For example, Hay et al. (1996) synthesised the convergence of audience research across disciplines, highlighting the re-alignment of distinctions between quantitative and qualitative research, administrative and critical research, and cultural studies and social science approaches to the audience in the age of television. Nightingale (2011) captured reconceptualisations of what it means to be an audience, introducing new theorisations of the audience and discussions of the diversification of audience measurement, audience regulation, the relationship between audiences and brands, and the lively debates over new methods in audience research. Butsch and Livingstone (2014) recognised the implications of globalisation and transnational audiences for rethinking the histories and cultural comparisons of audiences. Other collections captured legacy and non-linear trends as well as digital (dis)connections in audience research (Das and Brita Ytre-Arne, 2018).

One of the responses to new trajectories in audience research in the Companion to Media Audiences is a focus on the concept of friction. Contributors theorise audiences beyond the Western canon as part of a productive friction within audience studies. For example, Morley (2024) examines friction in the transportation of goods, people and ideas in his discussion of the ‘techno normal’ in global communications infrastructures. Friction also captures the shifting, sometimes ambivalent orientation of audiences to media as they navigate the contingencies and contexts of audience experience – for example, seeking alternatives to the pressures of fast-paced work and precarity through the calming ambience of slow media (Hill and Liao, 2024). Friction also serves as an apt metaphor for exploring the relationship between audiences and affective communities, including, for example, immersion in the felt atmospheres of media experiences such as gaming or talk shows (Lunt, 2024).

Friction is a term that also allows authors in the Companion to Media Audiences to reflect on the relations between different kinds of audiences and techno-social ensembles. Within audience theories, there are frictions inherent in the constitution of techno-norms and in how audiences are conceptualised. This opens up to new developments in the study of media ensembles rather than individual technologies, including older legacy media such as public service media, and new digital technologies such as AI and algorithms. For example, there can be frictions between citizens and publics, or audiences and users, regarding conflicting knowledge and information, in particular frictions within signs and making meaning, as explored in the work of Andacht (2024). Or, there are techno-data frictions regarding artificial intelligence and its power over us in professional and private spheres, as researched in Wark’s (2024) work on platform power and audience configurations. When it comes to creative frictions, there is an established area of research in art, film, photography, the moving image, and radio and podcasting that explores the creativity of friction in storytelling, editing, or characterisation – for example, in transmedia journalism and anti-storytelling approaches to representing environmental harms, as researched by Gambarato (2024).

Productive frictions also emerge in research on gender, class, race and intersectionality as frameworks for understanding audiences. Audiences feel friction in their daily lives, from the contingencies of media engagement to the tensions surrounding trustworthy information during conflict and crisis. In social relations, friction is often something audiences are encouraged to smooth away – think, for instance, of ‘how to’ books on winning friends and influencing people. Yet social tension can also be cultivated for activism and social movements. Such cultivation of friction, however, is not always productive. For example, research on Latin American feminism has shown how tensions within social media environments can turn digital engagement into a form of simulated feminism (Castillo-González and Gabarrot, 2024).

Transnational audience research recognises frictions shaped by differential power resources across the global north and south; authors across the collection address this dimension of friction, for example, in work on transnational fandom studies. As a marker of difference, the frictions explored within feminism, race and intersectionality, as well as (dis)ability studies and non-normative communication, highlight the standpoints researchers adopt to understand unequal power relations. This is exemplified in Sobande’s work on black audiences, brand voice and affective communities, and in Wood’s (2024) examination of class and culture within audience research. When friction is entwined within social relations, audience researchers are prompted to critically reflect on their methods and situated contexts in order to listen to and better understand the varieties of media experiences.

Not least, techno-social frictions associated with the datafication of audiences point to the question of agency for audiences in digital environments. Engagement patterns are shaped, nudged and pushed by algorithms, chatbots and other related digital technologies, including the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and generative models. These dynamics generate new modes of interconnection in live streaming digital environments such as gaming and immersion. In Paasonen’s (2024) research on boredom, the experience of zoning in and out is shown to generate productive frictions that enable daydreaming in digital settings.

In these examples of frictions discussed by authors in the Companion to Media Audiences, we note a wariness of making assumptions about audiences smoothly working through interconnections between devices, data, affordances of platforms, affect and identities, environments and other cultural dynamics. Instead, the collection highlights the unexpected and unstable aspects of these connections – disruptions that generate frictions in our everyday experiences of digital and legacy media. As audiences are already alert to the sparks, conflicts and differences that shape their relationships with and without media, the study of what audiences do remains more than ever a dynamic field of research.