Brita Ytre-Arne

Women’s magazines and their readers: The relationship between textual features and practices of reading:

Research on women’s magazines has provided important insights about magazine texts as possible purveyors of ideology and pleasure, and about magazine reading as a social practice situated in everyday life. While the methodological focus has shifted from textual analysis to ethnography, very few studies actually combine audience studies with the textual analysis of magazines as they appear to readers. This article explores the possible connections between magazine reading as a social practice, investigated through a qualitative questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with magazine readers, and magazines as texts with certain characteristics, investigated through reader-guided textual analysis. The aim of this approach is to gain a more profound understanding of the relationship between practices of reading and textual features.

Women’s magazines and the public sphere

This article explores the relationship between women’s magazines and the public sphere, arguing that women’s magazines can be positioned as having a marginal or an important role in the public domain — depending on how the functions of popular media in democracy are understood. Women’s magazines are generally not associated with the forms of journalism which bring citizens information of crucial democratic importance. Nevertheless, research on women’s magazines emphasizes their political relevance as purveyors of ideology about class, family structures and women’s role in society. In addition to this implicit political dimension, women’s magazines also include journalism which deals explicitly with political issues. Because of this, women’s magazines constitute an interesting case for fundamental debates about the categories of private and public. Drawing on feminist contributions to public sphere theory and using Norway as an empirical case, this article offers a broad exploration of the role of women’s magazines in the public sphere. The empirical data include interviews with readers and editors as well as analysis of texts and media policy debates.

Critical, agentic and trans-media: Frameworks and findings from a foresight analysis exercise on audiences:

We write this article presenting frameworks and findings from an international network on audience research, as we stand 75 years from Herta Herzog’s classic investigation of radio listeners, published in Lazarsfeld and Stanton’s 1944 war edition of Radio Research. The article aims to contribute to and advance a rich strand of self-reflexive stock-taking and sorting of future research priorities within the transforming field of audience analysis, by drawing on the collective efforts of CEDAR – Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research – a 14-country network (2015–2018) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, United Kingdom, which conducted a foresight analysis exercise on developing current trends and future scenarios for audiences and audience research in the year 2030. First, we wish to present the blueprint of what we did and how we did it – by discussing the questions, contexts and frameworks for our project. We hope this is useful for anyone considering a foresight analysis task, an approach we present as an innovative and rigorous tool for assessing and understanding the future of a field. Second, we present findings from our analysis of pivotal transformations in the field and the future scenarios we constructed for audiences, as media technologies rapidly change with the arrival of the Internet of Things and changes on many levels occur in audience practices. These findings not only make sense of a transformative decade that we have just lived through but they present possibilities for the future, outlining areas for individual and collective intellectual commitment.

Gendered Citizenship: The Politics of Representation

This chapter introduces the topic of the book and discusses why representation is a relevant prism for understanding and exploring new avenues to gendered citizenship globally. We trace some of the roots of the concept of representation, focusing on the duality between representation as “standing in for” and as “re-presenting”. This duality, oscillating between the dilemmas of representational democracy and various conceptions of politics in the spheres of media, arts and culture, provides the context for the more specific investigations of representation and gendered citizenship that are to follow. We also introduce the different chapters of the book, highlighting their approaches and contributions to this problematic.

Approximately Informed, Occasionally Monitorial? Reconsidering Normative Citizen Ideals:

This article identifies gaps between normative ideals and realistic accounts of news use in democracy today. Starting from the widespread but unrealistic ideal of the informed citizen, and its more realistic development through notions of the monitorial citizen, we analyze comprehensive qualitative data on news users’ experiences. We describe these news users as approximately informed, occasionally monitorial. This description emphasizes the limited, shifting, and partial figurations of societal information that citizens are able to obtain through their use of journalistic and social media, and thereby challenges normative ideals. How do monitorial ideals function when the citizens are only occasionally on guard? By zooming in on three key gaps between even a less demanding ideal and actual practices in news use, we underline the need to further reconceptualize our expectations of citizens’ news use.

An agenda in the interest of audiences: Facing the challenges of intrusive media technologies

This article formulates a five-point agenda for audience research, drawing on implications arising out of a systematic foresight analysis exercise on the field of audience research, conducted between 2014 and 2017, by the research network Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research (CEDAR). We formulate this agenda in the context of the rapid datafication of society, amid emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things, and following a transformative decade, which overlapped with the pervasion of social media, proliferation of connected gadgets, and growing interest in and concern about big data. The agenda we formulate includes substantial and intellectual priorities concerning intrusive technologies, critical data literacies, labour, co-option, and resistance, and argues for the need for research on these matters, in the interest of audiences.

A New Crossroads for Audiences and Audience Research: Frameworks for a Foresight Exercise

What futures can be envisioned for audiences and users of emerging media technologies, and how can audience analysis respond to the challenges of the future, in exploration of uncertainties yet to unfold? This chapter introduces CEDAR—Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research—a team of audience researchers from 14 countries across Europe, funded (2015–2018) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, which came together to conduct a foresight analysis exercise on developing current trends and future scenarios for audiences and audience research in the year 2030. The chapter positions this work in the context of longer and shorter histories of interest in audiences and locates the network’s critical, agenda, trans-media framework in the context of the rise of datafication and technological intrusions in the context of emerging technologies and the internet of things.

Designing a foresight analysis exercise on audiences and emerging technologies: CEDAR’s analytical-intuitive balance

This chapter presents the methodological foundations for a foresight analysis exercise, the findings of which are presented in this book. We do this through a detailed discussion of three distinct exercises in foresight methodology which were adapted to a critical academic purpose. We discuss our understanding of foresight and our reasons for conducting such an analysis. The chapter argues that the idea of systematic intuition has been important to this book, as we have strived for a balance between analysis and intuition, and for the network conducting this work to function as an intellectual hive-mind. The chapter goes on to present a detailed account of the exercises trend analysis, stakeholder consultations and horizon-scanning, to present the methodological framework for our approach.

In the Interest of Audiences: An Agenda

This chapter formulates an agenda, in the interest of audiences, in the context of the rapid datafication of society amidst the arrival of emerging technologies including the Internet of Things. We develop our priorities in this agenda following a collaborative analysis of emerging trends and gaps arising in the field of audience studies over the past transformative decade—a decade marked by conversations on ‘transforming audiences’, and one which overlapped with the pervasion of social media platforms, the arrival of connected gadgets, and growing interest in and concern about datafication. We focus in this chapter on formulating an agenda with substantial and intellectual priorities for the field of audience research, also touching upon systemic and research-political matters.

Everyday lives of audiences in a future Europe: tracing emerging issues from scenarios to experiences in 2030

This chapter considers the scenarios from the previous chapter, and asks what futures they envision for audiences, across generations, and in the context of a changing Europe, towards 2030. Our discussion emphasizes the challenges of conceptualizing agentic capabilities of audience experiences that are yet to unfold in the trans-media environment of the future. As these phenomena are yet unavailable for empirical research, we apply the foresight methodology technique of story building to advance our discussion. This enables us to reflect upon dilemmas in everyday lives of audiences across generations in 2030, utilizing the scenarios to pinpoint diverging challenges and opportunities.