Martin Barker

I Have Seen the Future and It Is Not Here Yet …; or, On Being Ambitious for Audience Research

Audience research, after a promising period during which some crucial advances were made, seems to be in decline in several ways, yet its tasks remain as important as ever. This article, originally a presentation at the 2003 Versailles Conference on the Future of Audience Research, makes the case for expanding our vision of the field’s possibilities. To do this, it revisits some of the forgotten achievements of the Uses and Gratifications tradition, offers a critique of the dominant “Hall model” for conceiving media/audience relations, and outlines the key concept of an alternative approach: the concept of a “viewing strategy,” which has been at the heart of the 2003–2004 international project on the reception of The Lord of the Rings. This essay was previously published in Comment sont reçues les oeuvres? Actualites des recherches en sociologie de la réception et des publics. Charpentier, I. (ed.). Paris: Creaphis (diffusion: Le Seuil), 2006. Reprinted with permission.

Crash, theatre audiences, and the idea of ‘liveness’

Abstract In 1996 David Cronenbergs film of J.G. Ballards Crash led to a huge controversy in Britain, much of which turned on claims of what the film might do to its audience, claims which were the subject of a major ESRC-funded study. In 2001, in Aberystwyth, David Rabey mounted a stage adaptation of Ballards book. This essay presents the first findings of an AHRB-funded research project into audience responses to the stage adaptation. One theme in particular is explored: the complicated meanings of ‘liveness’ to audiences, and how they conceived the differences between stage and screen. This, it is argued, connects with a deep-going assumption about the superiority of stage over screen. The essay examines the tensions within this assumption by their relations with Philip Auslanders Liveness.

The Lord of the Rings and ‘Identification’: A Critical Encounter

The concept of ‘identification’ remains a commonly called-upon resource for considering how media audiences might be influenced into taking up moral and cultural positions. Yet very little empirical evidence exists to support its claims; and recent critical conceptual work has significantly undermined many constituent parts of it. This article draws upon the very large data set gathered in the course of the Lord of the Rings international audience research project, to mount critical tests of the concept’s claims. The article then uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence to explore the different bases on which audiences chose nine of the films’ characters as their favourites. An alternative approach to theorizing audience relations to characters is briefly outlined.

The ‘problem’ of sexual fantasies

This essay explores the nature and implications of sexual fantasies. The essay begins from the apparent paradox that while it is frequently condemned for its absolute explicitness (‘leaving nothing to the imagination’) it is at the same time condemned for arousing ‘uncontrollable fantasies’. Several strands of theorization are reviewed, attending in particular to their shared assumption that such fantasies are essentially compensatory – making up for either stored-up problems from childhood or signs of inadequacy in a persons sexual maturation. Challenging these accounts, the essay draws on evidence from a major investigation into the meanings and pleasures of pornography conducted in 2011, which garnered more than 5000 responses to a complex online questionnaire combining quantitative and qualitative questions. Ten motivations for using and enjoying sexual fantasies are distinguished, within which five distinct ways of understanding the relations between pornography and fantasy are outlined: as magnifyi...

Assessing the "quality" in qualitative research: the case of text-audience relations

A number of recent works on methodology for media and communication studies have sought to embrace the contributions from cultural studies qualitative investigations, in particular for their contribution to our understanding of media texts. But a problem is emerging from this. While their discussions reference the characteristic measures of validity for quantitative research, no equivalent measures of the strength of qualitative researches have yet emerged. This article draws on David Silvermans work to formulate a number of proposals to remedy this gap. These are tested against four recent investigations of one phenomenon: women as viewers of violent/horror films.

Audiences for stardom and celebrity

Even if we expanded this to include the study of audiences for celebrity, the suggestion of a ‘smattering’ of work still remains largely apposite in the decade since this was written. Indeed, in Celebrity in 2001, Chris Rojek observed how previous structuralist and textualist approaches to celebrity had marginalised the ‘knowledge, desire and judgement’ of the audience (2001, p. 43), and he foregrounded how the social and cultural functions of celebrity ‘can only be concretely established through empirical investigation’ (2001, p. 92). That is not to suggest, as this introduction goes on to explore, that significant work does not exist (work which has had an important impact on the field), but only that such work has often tended to be sporadic or small scale. In turn, such texts (for example, Gamson 1994, Stacey 1994) have historically then been fetishised as examples of what all ‘audiences’ do with stars and celebrities, rather than revealing what those audiences did, in those particular research contexts. The earliest empirical studies of audience relations with star/celebrity culture are often seen to be Richard Dyer’s (1986) chapter on Judy Garland and gay men (which used letters to explore how Garland functioned as a gay icon), Jackie Stacey’s (1994) Stargazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (which used letters and questionnaires to explore women’s relations with Hollywood stars in the 1940s/1950s) and Joshua Gamson’s (1994) audience chapters in Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (which used focus groups to explore how people responded to the epistemology of the celebrity system). Yet although these works marked the advent of such investigations in an academic context, they are predated by sociological studies – sometimes industry commissioned – of film audiences, which frequently incorporated questions concerning audiences’ relations to stars (see Mayer 1948, Tudor 1974). It is not possible or necessary to give detailed attention to each and every piece of work subsequently published in star and celebrity studies, although we aim to sketch out broad themes here. For example, Stacey’s (1994) work marked the beginnings of a longer trend in examining how gender – or more specifically female gender – plays an important role in shaping audience engagement with stars/celebrities. In fact, successive work in this area includes a considerable proportion of the empirical work produced in star and celebrity studies, including Rachel Moseley’s (2002) generational study of female responses to Audrey Hepburn; Samantha Barbas’ (2001) historical exploration of fan materials emerging from Hollywood’s formative years; Joke Hermes’ (1999) investigation of readers’ perceptions of famous figures in women’s magazines; Rebecca Feasey’s (2008) focus group study on readers of heat magazine; and Linda Duits and Pauline Celebrity Studies, 2015 Vol. 6, No. 1, 1–5, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.995894

Finding Audiences for Our Research: Rethinking the Issue of Ethical Challenges

This essay is a fleshed-out version of a presentation to the 2011 COST Action workshop on the challenges of audience research. In it, I explore what I see as some overlooked problems in research ethics protocols, relating to the assumptions and models about our relations with research participants which resonate with wider “figures of the audience,” which occur widely. In place of these, I outline a notion of “trust” as the proper goal of researcher-participants relations.

‘Doonesbury does Iraq’: Garry Trudeau and the politics of an anti-war strip

This paper explores the ideological ramifications of using the theme of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a comic strip. The strip in question is Doonesbury, specifically a story involving the war in Iraq, and the entry-point for talking about ideology is an endorsement written for one of the Doonesbury reprint books by a prominent Republican politician. The essays twin questions are: what does it mean for an anti-war strip to focus on PTSD (what ideological work is it doing), and, by extension, what are the implications of the apparent ‘commonsenseness’ of our understanding of the PTSD category?

The problems speaking about porn

This article began life as a presentation at the founding conference of Onscenity (London, 2011). I examine the difficulties that are associated with speaking about ‘porn’, because of the ways in w...

‘I’m just curious and still exploring myself’: Young people and pornography:

Young people’s encounters with sexual media are the subject of intense concern, but the research underpinning policy debate and public discussion rarely pays attention to the complexity of these. In this article, we show how encounters with pornography are increasingly presented as matters of health and well-being, but often from a standpoint of ‘exposure and effects’ that offers little in the way of understanding the significance of pornography in people’s lives. We consider what our recent research on porn consumption suggests about young people’s encounters and engagements with pornography – focusing on porn as an ‘outlet’, the development of porn tastes and the relation of porn to young people’s developing sex lives and imaginations. We argue that it is productive to understand pornography as a site for developing sexual identities and relationships, as a form of sexual leisure and play, and in relation to the broader emergence of mediated intimacies.