From couch potatoes to cybernauts? The expanding notion of the audience on TV channels’ websites

Abstract

The new media rhetoric, with its emphasis on radical breaks from old media, often masks the degree to which continuity goes hand-in-hand with change. Moreover, the industry’s vision of convergence ignores the competing versions of, and struggles over, the digital future. Against this background, this article focuses on an inter-media site, broadcasters’ websites, seeks to identify the changes and continuities in the notion of the audience, and interprets these in the light of inter-media competition. Using a variant of discourse analysis, which makes hyperlinks its unit of analysis, this study has identified six understandings of the audience online: spectators, fans, consumers, citizens, students, and cybernauts. These reveal that television has merely expanded online, but not really changed its understandings of audiences, suggesting that in its struggle for dominance, television has chosen to stamp the internet with the televisual, rather than making full use of the internet’s potential.