Book of the Week: Radio Audiences and Networked Listeners (2) : The Four Ages of Participation

* eBook: Radio Audiences and Participation in the age of Network Society. Ed. by Tiziano Bonini and Belen Monclus. Routledge, 2015

Key theme: The listener as producer: the rise of the networked listener

In this second installment, editor Tiziano Bonini attemps a periodization of the evolution towards audience particpation and asks whether it is a new model of exploitation:

From Mass Audiences to Networked Listeners: The Four Ages of Listener Participation:

“There have been several attempts to periodise the history of audiences. One of the best known analyses is that by Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998). They identified three broad periods of audiences: the simple, co-located, face-to-face audience; the mass audience; and the diffused audience, which is “no longer contained in particular places and times, but rather part and parcel of all aspects of daily life” (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998, in Livingstone 2005, 26). The diffused audience seems to be the most appropriate category for describing contemporary audiences, but Abercrombie and Longhurst published their work in 1998, at the beginning of the web 1.0 era, and their periodisation now needs to be updated, given the great changes in the use of media content caused by the Internet and its further developments (web 2.0, social media). For this reason, this work aims to propose a different historical periodisation of radio listening, one that is similar to Abercrombie and Longhurst’s work, but more suitable for the comprehension of the properties of a media public in the age of the network society. The periodisation developed in the following pages identifies four historical ages corresponding to four different auditory regimes, the last of which is characterized by the hybridisation of broadcasting media with networked media. It remains clear that the emergence of a new regime and a new type of audience does not mean the disappearance of previous ones. As Lacey maintains, “at any one time there are likely to be multiple ‘auditory regimes’” (2013, 22) that coexist.

The periodisation proposed here will attempt to portray how audience participation in radio has changed over time, and investigate the causes that have determined the emergence of a new relationship between radio and its publics. This work does not want to focus on the progressive increase in the public’s participation, corresponding to new technological integrations (telephones, mobile phones, the Internet, social media), but will instead highlight the different potentialities of the public’s participation, inscribed in each auditory regime. Regardless of how the radio broadcasting public has often been described, as “disciplined and docile listeners in a space, drastically separate not only from that of the performer but from the fellow public as well” (Hilmes 1997, 186), the historical analysis proposed here shows us how interaction and participation have always been permanent features in the history of the radio audience. Listeners, as Lacey (2013, 113) claimed, “have always been active”. Audiences have always longed to participate in radio, but over time this participation has taken on different forms and features.”

* Co-Creation or Exploitation?

“Radio makers (authors/presenters/producers) and radio listeners, once they are connected through SNS, belong to the same horizontal and multipolar network. On the SNS stage everyone, radio makers and listeners alike, is able to perform, to take part, to alternatively play the role of the actor (contributing with content) and of the audience (contributing with comments and liking). As Benjamin hoped, the boundaries between authors and “readers” have potentially been broken down.

The connection that has now been established between radio makers and listeners through social media also allows for new forms of content production to emerge, some of which will be analysed in this book (see chapters 7, 8 and 10). The extent to which listeners take part in these production processes is still controlled by radio makers, who decide how to give value to user-generated content. Much has been written about the ambivalent status of this content as a source of both intrinsic reward and potential exploitation, as social media corporations’ value, Andrejevic argues, relies on the “private enclosure of productive resources” (2013, 162). When can we still speak of co-creation, and when does cooperation become free-labour exploitation (Terranova 2000; Fuchs 2010; 2014)? Andrejevic (2013) claims that exploitation in social media not only occurs when audience labour (in terms of user-generated content) is not paid, but also when users lose control over their productive and creative activity. Ippolita et al. (2009) maintain that exploitation is embedded in SNS: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited.

The free labour exploitation theorists have built their propositions on a consolidated criticism of the economic policies of commercial media, which was very popular in the 1970s. To a certain extent, the attention of a passive public required by traditional media was already a form of exploitation and production of economic value: this was the late-1970s approach of Canadian media theorist Dallas Smythe, who claimed that viewers were exploited as their viewing time was appropriated by media companies and sold on as ‘audience commodity’.

From a Marxist perspective, audiences have always been put to work by media corporations, who have made a living on the back of their audiences. From newspapers and radio to television, commercial media (Hearst’s newspapers of the early 20th Century; NBC and ABC radio in the 1920s; today’s commercial television networks like Fox News, just to name a few) have always sold the ‘work’ (attention paid to media content) of listeners to advertising.

Marxist researcher Christian Fuchs is one of the best known scholars to have contributed to the revival of Smythe’s approach to the political economy of media. In Fuchs’ view, “citizens who engage in everyday politics” and those “radio listeners and television viewers who call in live” (2010, 187) are somehow ‘unpaid’ knowledge workers being exploited by capital. For Fuchs, it seems, any participation by citizens in the public sphere itself is exploited labour, as opposed to the practical contributions to the democratic formation of public opinion that these citizens themselves clearly understand their actions to be. Fuchs goes even further in framing audience ‘labour’ as exploitation. He claims that digital users are also exploited: in the case of corporate social media, “the audience commodity is an Internet prosumer commodity” (2013, 217). Therefore, according to the free labour theories, the main reason for the exploitation of the audience’s work is its appropriation and commodification, operated by both traditional and new commercial media. As Murdock (1978) already noted, Smythe’s approach really only applies to advertiser-supported media. In the case of Facebook, it was Zuckerberg himself who, in 2010, publicly admitted the extraction of value from audience engagement in Facebook: “Our focus is just to help you share information and when you do that you are more engaged with our site and there are more ads on the side of the page and the more you do it the more the model works out.”

But even if we want to believe in the expropriation of value by commercial media, we would realize that yes, this value exists, but it is derisory. For example, let’s take the three Italian public service radio channels (Rai Radio1, Radio2 and Radio3, which are also financed by advertising) and divide their total advertising revenue from 2012 (€35.3 million, according to Rai 2013) by the grand total of their listeners on an average day (9.3 million, according to Eurisko 2012). This gives us the alienated surplus of every single listener, which corresponds to €3.79 per person for an entire year of listening. If we apply the same theory to Facebook’s earnings, we obtain similar results: if Facebook made a profit of $355 million in 2010 (according to its own figures), when the active users were around 500 million, this would mean that each Facebook user was a ‘victim of exploitation of surplus value’ to the extent of $0.70 a year. Gauntlett (2011) has made the same calculation for YouTube videos, showing that each video uploaded by users is worth approximately $1.20.

Smythe’s argument – that audience ‘work’ can be seen as being exploited in terms of the Marxian labour theory of value – was already controversial at the time of its publication (Hesmondalgh 2010). This argument by Smythe and his “sons”, such as Fuchs, has been criticised for two main reasons: 1) what they call audience “work” cannot simply be called work, because it lacks coercion, and 2) their approach doesn’t take into account the pleasures of participation (Hesmondalgh 2010).

Similarly, Arvidsson and Colleoni (2012) claimed that making the simple observation that just because media companies like Facebook or branded corporations like Apple live off audience and consumer co-production, does not necessarily mean that the value of such co-production can be estimated in terms of the Marxian labour theory of value. They argue, in response to Fuchs (2010), that the labour theory of value does not apply to the activity of online prosumers, because “the value of online advertising is not primarily dependent on the number of users that a site can attract” nor on the “time spent [in] online viewing or interacting with a particular site.” Instead, “value is ever more defined according to the ability to mobilize affective attention and engagement” (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012, 144; see also chapter 14). Jenkins et al. claim that television (and radio too) is shifting from an attention economy that they call an “appointment based model” towards an “engagement based paradigm” (2013, 116).

Banks and Humphreys (2008) and Banks and Deuze (2009) claimed that users clearly enjoy and benefit from online activities, even if they generate value for commercial media companies. They suggest that user-generated content should be understood in terms of mutual benefit (identity and reputational benefits) rather than of exploitation. The idea that listener participation in radio’s valuable production (in terms of both attention and actions performed on the social media linked to the radio) can be a source of exploitation, is a useful point of view in order to defuse the rhetoric of participation and user generated content, which new and old commercial media have appropriated. Even so, this work supports the view that the new wave of Marxist criticism of the exploitation of content generated by networked publics, in both traditional and digital media, is unable to comprehend the real value of this participation.

As Jenkins et al. noted: “we feel it’s crucial to acknowledge the concerns of corporate exploitation of fan labor while still believing that the emerging system places greater power in the hands of the audience when compared to the older broadcast paradigm” (2013, 58).

We believe that many different distinctions can be found between these two extremes of exploitation and co-creation. A model for the analysis of the public’s participation in the production of media (especially radio) content, which this work finds to be highly capable of considering these distinctions, has been proposed by Carpentier (2007; 2011): the AIP model. Carpentier claims that “the key defining element of participation is power. The debates on participation in institutionalized politics and in all other societal fields, including media participation, have a lot in common in that they all focus on the distribution of power within society at both the macro- and micro-level. The balance between people’s inclusion in the implicit and explicit decision-making processes within these fields, and their exclusion through the delegation of power (again, implicit or explicit), is central to discussions on participation in all fields” (Carpentier 2011, 24). Participation is not the same as access or interaction: replying to a radio host’s call for action with an SMS is a matter of interaction, not participation; liking, commenting, sharing or retweeting a message published by a radio host on his/her social network doesn’t mean participating, but ‘only’ engaging with radio content. Participation, according to Carpentier, “deals with participation in the production of media output (content-related participation) and in media organizational decision-making (structural participation).” (2011, 68). Carpentier asserts that we can only truly call it participation if the listeners are recognized as holding a certain amount of power in the decisions over what content should be broadcast, or even in the broadcaster’s editorial and business choices. Even in this case, no single model for participation exists, but there are different forms and degrees. Audience participation is organized in many different forms by media institutions.

Carpentier’s model is invaluable for clearly defining the theoretical differences between access, interaction, and participation, but the complexity of the participative and cooperative processes generated by the compounding of old and new media in today’s context requires a model that is even more complex. One model for the analysis of the forms of networked publics’ participation, which builds on Carpentier’s considerations and goes into even greater detail, is that proposed by Hyde et al. (2010). According to the authors, in order to collaborate, participants must be aware of the fact that they are part of a collaborative project, and they must share its goals. If there is no intentionality, there is no collaboration. This first statement allows us to better respond to criticism coming from the free labour theorists. The aggregation of content produced by others (often unknown to them), which we may read as exploitation, is one thing; passionate and aware participation is another. There is a difference between the free appropriation of user generated content performed by big newspaper editors (i.e. users’ photographs of a particular news event taken from Instagram), which may even occur with the creator knowing nothing about it, and the participation of passionate listeners in a radio programme by telephone and through social media.

Hyde et al. (2010) have proposed a series of 11 criteria in order to evaluate the quality of participation.

This series of criteria provides a general guide for the qualitative assessment of the cooperative relationship. This work finds these to be excellent criteria for evaluating a co-creational or collaborative project, in either radio or online platforms such as BitTorrent, Slashdot, Wikipedia, Flickr, Vimeo, open source operating systems, etc.

If we adopt the points of view presented by Carpentier (2011) and Hyde et al. (2010), the forms of participation utilized by both traditional and networked listeners can be seen under a new light, equidistant from both the democratizing rhetoric of participation and user generated content, and that of the apocalypse of the exploitation of “work” extracted from the public.”

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.