Espen Ytreberg

Formatting Participation within Broadcast Media Production

The article proceeds from a basic assumption that participation in the broadcast media is about mastering a set of performance roles that are given by the production context and by the requirements of the format. It discusses how a media production team is able routinely and systematically to manage the process of formatting participation; that is, the process whereby production teams prepare non-professional participants for the programme’s performance requirements. It elaborates on the various roles allotted to participants and introduces the concepts of ‘format consonance’, ‘format dissonance’ and ‘format incarnation’ to account for the formatting process. It also aims to demonstrate the way that formatting mechanisms operate in production where the professionals emphasize informality, everydayness and making participants ‘feel good’. The article draws for concrete examples on an ethnographic study of the production of Mamarazzi, a daily popular journalism format on the Norwegian public service youth channel P3.

Small Talk Makes a Big Difference: Recent Developments in Interactive, SMS-Based Television

The article discusses key features of SMS-based television. It has a particular focus on the shift from one-way broadcast communication toward two-way interactivity, and on new forms of user participation through SMS-based televisions interactive design interfaces. The article presents a multimodal analysis of design in SMS-based television formats, a discourse analysis of their roles and interactions, and a typology of their degrees of interactivity. It also draws on interviews with industry decision-makers and on relevant statistics. The article develops a conceptual interest, introducing some neologisms to account for the original textual features of SMS-based television. Its designs are analyzed using a concept of “zones,” while its roles and interactions are seen as linking these zones by means of “axes.” In closing it is suggested that SMS-based television presents us with interactivity as a realized, albeit mundane, fact rather than as a future promise.

Working Notions of Active Audiences Further Research on the Active Participant in Convergent Media Industries

Recent research on the media industries has been centrally concerned with the blurring of boundaries between production and reception in an era of digitalization and convergence. The article argues for a need for research to consider more closely the importance of notions of the ‘active audience’ within today’s media industries. Overall conceptual work has been done on ‘convergence culture’, and much scholarly debate currently centres around the pros and cons of convergence; whether it empowers ‘produsers’ or the industries themselves. Important as they are, these debates run the risk of stagnation if they are not informed by further empirical research on the concrete ways that media institutions put ‘activity’ to strategic use. The article reports from a survey on how notions of activity, sociability and technological novelty function as strategic ‘working notions’ for Norwegian media industry executives.

Erving Goffman as a theorist of the mass media

The work of Erving Goffman has been influential in media studies, primarily via adaptations of selected concepts like “region” and “frame.” However, relatively little attention has been paid by media researchers to Goffmans own theoretical work on the mass media. Taking its lead from the later work of Goffman, this essay shows how it contains elements of a theoretical framework for mass-mediated communication, through the concepts of “hyper-ritualization” and “dramatic scriptings.” I emphasize the way that Goffman situates mass communication in relation to the interpersonal realm as a model version of the latter, as mass communication is crafted, concentrated, and planned to a degree that interpersonal communication is not. I conclude that Goffmans critical approach to informality in broadcast talk and interaction is a valuable tool for the researcher in a time when the rhetoric of informality has become a dominant mode of legitimation in broadcasting.

Premeditations of performance in recent live television A scripting approach to media production studies

The article discusses the ways that performances in television are premeditated. Its focus is on practices of scripting performances in current interactive and reality TV. With a basis in empirical material on television production, the article describes concretely some cases of scripting in international television formats. Its focus is particularly on forms of scripting that are seldom recognized as such, thus contributing to a feel of the real, the authentic and the immediate. Three forms of scripting are discussed: ‘cueing’, scripting of social settings and scripting of temporal sequencings. The article shows how current television formats that strive for the unscripted feel in fact could be said to involve radical extensions of scripting beyond conventional practices. In more general theoretical terms, the article suggests looking to the scripting of mediated performances as an alternative approach to the tradition of media production studies.

Ideal types in public service television: paternalists and bureaucrats, charismatics and avant-gardists

Over time, the broadcast media develop conventions of self-presentation that are formulated more or less explicitly by academics and media professionals as ideal types. The article discusses four such ideal types of self-presentation in television: paternalists and bureaucrats, charismatics and avant-gardists. It demonstrates how they have been formulated and evaluated by researchers and media professionals. Following Raymond Williams’s notion of ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ forms, the article also discusses the historical interactions and contests between them. Examples are drawn from Nordic and British public service broadcasting. A case is made for acknowledging the coexistence of several ideal types, rather than taking at face value notions of some general ‘slide’ from a paternalist past to a charismatic present. The article draws particular attention to the importance of bureaucratic modes of self-presentation for understanding early public service television, and of avant-gardist modes for understanding more recent developments.

Keeping Them and Moving Them TV Scheduling in the Phase of Channel and Platform Proliferation

The article explores television scheduling in the phase of proliferation, a period following phases of monopoly and competition, characterized by a drastic multiplication of content, television channels, and new platforms. Based on interviews with professionals involved in scheduling and cross-platform promotion at Norway’s four main broadcasters, a sample study of actual cross-platform promotion, and relevant statistics for the Norwegian TV market, the article explores changes in scheduling with a particular focus on the distinction between commercial and public service television. The transformations in scheduling are addressed in relation to the broader question of how television is developing in the “post-network” era. The article argues that contrary to claims that scheduling has become obsolete, analyses show that it continues to be a central craft within the television industry, one responding actively to times of change, revising its tools and developing new ones.

Non-professional Activity on Television in a Time of Digitalisation

Abstract This article presents an empirically based examination of how the Norwegian television industry incorporates audience activity and audience-generated material, and of how audiences respond to the opportunities presented. It explores three main research questions: First, how extensive is audience activity on television? Second, to what degree do different television activities correspond to familiar patterns of social stratification? And third, is there any evidence for the view that digital feedback channels, such as SMS and the Web, provide access to television for new groups of people? To investigate these questions, a case study of the Norwegian media market has been carried out, based on two data sets. The extent of audience activity is examined through a representative audience survey conducted during a period of two weeks in 2004. The second data set is a one-week survey of Norwegian television output on the six Norwegian-language channels in 2005.

Towards a historical understanding of the media event

The English-language research tradition of studying media events is widely considered to have started with Dayan and Katz’ Media Events. This seminal work is characterised by an emphasis on liveness and broadcast technology as conditions of eventfulness. The German-language tradition of research on historical media events provides a very different approach to studying media events, starting from the 16th-century advent of mechanical production and distribution. Bringing together these strands of research, the article argues for a deepening of the historical dimension in conceiving of media events. After a critical review of the English-language tradition and an overview of key media-historical research contributions particularly from Germany, it discusses three main themes: the role of temporal acceleration over time by means of media technologies; the role of premeditation in events and the tradition of discussing media-generated events as ‘pseudo-events’, and the historically shifting relationships between mediated and non-mediated communication in the event. By way of conclusion, the article relates a historical perspective on media events to recent research and discussion around mediatisation.

Plenary Session II. Where Do the Front Lines of Media and Communication Research Run Today? Notes on Current Nordic Media Research. Notes on Text Production as a Field of Inquiry in Media Studies

‘Text production’ denotes an area of media research which studies the production process and the resulting texts with a degree of theoretical, methodological and empirical integration. Text production research has a somewhat equivocal status within the field of mass communication and media research. On the one hand, the number of studies that focus on text production and the text are rather few, at least relative to the number of studies that combine a focus on the text with studies of reception processes. At the same time, studies of text production and the text are central to the idea of integrating, of unifying media research as a discipline. Meanwhile, the very notion of ‘integration’ is contested. Even within the research community it is common to regard mass media research as a loosely knit assembly of disciplines around certain common objects of study. Nonetheless, it is a fact that the development of media studies as a discipline is intimately bound up with the idea of an integrated perspective on the processes of mass communication. To the extent media studies can claim to have a common foundation, the notion of a continuum that links production, text and reception is quite central. This notion also represents much of the basis for media research as an interdisciplinary project, as well. Like reception studies, studies of text production are the setting for meetings between humanities approaches to the text and social science analyses of contexts and institutions. The integration project has been institutionalized – not least in the Nordic countries – through the creation of numerous research centres and departments that apply interdisciplinary approaches to the media and mass communication. In this article I shall discuss studies of text production in the light of these larger research agendas: the desire to see mass communication as a continuous process, and the idea of integrating studies of the text in the humanities tradition with social science approaches to context. Most of the examples I use here will be borrowed from studies of television. If there is a narrowness of focus in terms of the media considered, it will be counterbalanced by the inclusion of television studies undertaken in a broad range of disciplines and research traditions. For, whereas studies of text production have been few to date, they are scattered within several sub-disciplines. We find them in journalism research, in production studies, and in research on media institutions. PLENARY SESSION II