David Mathieu

Cross-media within the Facebook newsfeed: The role of the reader in cross-media uses

This study investigates the role of interpretation in cross-media uses. Highlighting the specificity of cross-media uses within meta-media environments such as Facebook, we argue that interpretative processes play a crucial role in the formation of cross-media repertoires. The methodology relies on a reception analysis for which we conducted interviews with eleven expatriates using Facebook on a daily basis, in conjunction with a commented consultation of their newsfeed. In the analysis, we show that reading Facebook’s newsfeed is an activity that contributes to the construction of the user’s mediated lifeworld. Schutz’s phenomenological approach allows us to explore how users develop reading strategies to typify their experience of the social world within Facebook, to maintain the relevance of their newsfeed and to negotiate the technological features of Facebook, shedding light on how users assemble their cross-mediated experience within meta-media.

Users’ Encounter With Normative Discourses on Facebook: A Three-Pronged Analysis of User Agency as Power Structure, Nexus, and Reception

This study asks whether users’ encounter with normative discourses of lifestyle, consumption, and health on social media such as Facebook gives rise to agency. The theoretical framework draws on reception analysis, for its implied, but central interest in agency that lies at the intersection of texts and audiences. Based on a critique of the “participatory paradigm,” a paradigm that situates the locus of agency in the structural opposition between senders and users, in the norms of rational deliberation or in the figure of the activist, gaps are identified which can be filled by adopting an explicit focus on the socio-cultural practices of ordinary audiences in their encounters with media discourses. The study investigates user agency on seven Facebook groups and pages with the help of a three-pronged perspective based on the notion of the media–audience relationship as (1) power structure, (2) nexus, and (3) reception. The analysis reveals that the structure at play on these Facebook groups and pages does not encourage user agency. However, user agency manifests itself through user interactions and expressive sense-making processes associated with reception. The benefits of such audience agency are a public, collective, and communicative sense-making process and an expansion of the professionally controlled text.

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.

Audiences, Towards 2030: Drivers, Scenarios and Horizons of the Future

The year 2030 seems to be beckoning a fair amount of prospection and critical speculation, with regard to the roles of ICTs in governance, public policy in a variety of sectors, and its interfaces with digital futures, with the arrival of Big Data. In the context of a book located theoretically within the long tradition of audience studies, we report in this chapter, from the unique third step of our foresight analysis—a horizon scanning exercise on the future of audiences in the year 2030, anticipating the ubiquity of connected technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT), amidst interfaces governed by algorithms, and the rise of datafication and its myriad consequences. Tracing a set of future scenarios along the dimensions of diverging responses to the IoT on the one hand, and the changing nature of institution-individual relationships on the other, we follow a set of 16 drivers of societal change, as audiences, users, and those who analyze them move towards 2030. We conclude, by drawing attention to media and data literacies as fundamentally crucial for audience agency in the futures we envisage.

‘The deal should be fairer!’ Stakeholder discourses on intrusive media platforms and interfaces

In this chapter, we argue that stakeholder discourses about emerging media technologies point to a widespread lack of acknowledgment of the pressures and intrusions that affect audiences today. Engaging in a consultation with stakeholders, we identify five discursive positions that characterise the ways stakeholders look upon the issues of media pressures and intrusions. Through these discourses, we observe the widespread adoption of commercial measurements, which remain inadequate for perceiving media pressures and intrusions, as well as the difficulty of keeping up with fast-changing audience habits in a media environment that is overwhelmingly complex. Our findings invite stakeholders to engage in a reflexive and systematic recognition of these issues, which is vital for a change in practice.