Media Experiences

Engaging with Drama and Reality Television

Annette Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781136245169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

Media Experiences: Engaging with Drama and Reality Television travels across people and popular culture, exploring the pathways to engagement and the various ways in which we shape and are shaped by the media landscapes in which we move. This exploration includes the voices and bodies, sights and sounds of audiences as they experience entertainment through television drama, reality TV, at live events, and within digital television itself as actors, participants and producers. It is about the people who create the drama, live events and reality entertainment that we experience. This book traverses the relationships between producers and audiences in shared places of a media imagination.

Annette Hill's research draws on interviews and observations with over 500 producers and audience members to explore cultures of viewing across different genres, such as Nordic noir crime drama The Bridge, cult conspiracy thriller Utopia, and reality television audiences and participants in global formats MasterChef and Got to Dance. The research highlights how trends such as multi-screening, catch up viewing, amateur media and piracy work alongside counter-trends in retro television viewing where people relish the social ritual of watching live television, or create a social media blackout for immersive viewing.

Media Experiences bridges the divide between industry and academia, highlighting how producers and audiences co-create, shape and limit experiences within emerging mediascapes.

1

PATHWAYS TO ENGAGEMENT

The Bridge entangles you and it’s difficult to leave.

(30 year old Mexican-Colombian male lawyer)

Media Experiences is a book about people and popular culture, about the pathways and tracks people make as they criss-cross the media landscape. We can imagine producers, including executives, creatives, performers and participants, creating byways and highways for audience orientation, making pathways to engagement with media content in national and transnational settings. We can also imagine audiences in topographical terms as roaming around storytelling, including viewers and listeners, fans and consumers, who are not only following pathways but acting as pathmakers in their media experiences. ‘Roaming audiences’ is a metaphor that captures the dynamic practices of people as they experience storytelling that takes place across dispersed sites of production, distribution and reception. This way of thinking about the media as an imaginary landscape shows the regions, borders, and contours of the cultural terrain, the enclosed spaces for commercial uses and the public byways for common land: in such a way we are shaped, and in turn shape, the media landscapes in which we move.

There has long been interest in the relations between places and people, where landscape is connected to storytelling that helps to create a feeling of belonging. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane has written about the experience of walking, talking about the strong bond between people and places. In his book The Old Ways, for example, he sets off on ancient byways, thoroughfares and barely-there tracks across Britain, reflecting on what he calls a bio-geography (2012: 32). By this, Macfarlane is referring to a topography of the self as a means of understanding our relationship with landscape and nature, and the wider significance of movement, stillness and imagination as a means for self reflection. He writes about how we can use walking through the landscape to make interior maps to help us navigate these psycho-social terrains (2012: 26). He explains: ‘we think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it’ (ibid.).

FIGURE 1.1 Pathways, places and people: going to the launch of Bron/Broen season three Malmö Live, Sweden 2015

Source: Photograph Tina Askanius.

MacFarlane observes that whilst we are fairly adept at asking what we make of places, we are less confident about asking what places make of us (2012: 27). This is a useful way of thinking about media landscapes – as places that shape and are shaped by us. Media landscape is a metaphor that works in two ways: Bolin (2017: 46–47) maps the metaphor as referring to both technological landscapes, such as the material dimensions of television aerials and satellite dishes, and symbolic landscapes, such as representations, values, and ideologies within media content. This is a metaphor drawn from place, and following Shaun Moore’s (2012) analysis of mobility and media in everyday life, the emphasis here is on the cultural, spatial and temporal work of placemaking as telling us something about lived experience.

As audiences roam around entertainment content, the pathways and tracks they make are shaping their experience of television and related social media. People’s movements say something about what kind of media matters to them and how they reflect on these experiences. This symbolic power of media is connected to the social imaginary. Charles Taylor’s idea of a modern social imaginary is ‘a broad understanding of the way a given people imagine their collective social life’ (2004: 23). What is important for Taylor is that the way ordinary people imagine their social surroundings is not through theories but ‘carried in images, stories, and legends’ (ibid.). This is suggestive of the cultural work of audiences in their various understandings of the social imaginary within popular culture. There is an affective relationship, a sense of legitimacy, where people have an emergent sense of rights to roam across media storytelling. The movement of roaming audiences is played out in mobile media spaces and across geographical and economic boundaries. A right to roam thus evokes a sense of television storytelling as open to all, and if we watch and share content, or remix stories into new narratives, then we help to shape a shared collective experience that is determined and sustained by use.

The laws and regulations surrounding content and communicative rights do not allow audiences to freely move across public service and commercial platforms and across national television and transregional content. The business model for television is to restrict access and monetise audiences, both in the interests of the political economy of media institutions and as a means to measure audience engagement through ratings and social media analytics that are collated within national boundaries. For those who resist these media laws and regulations, they are trying to generate an alternative vision for what Deborah Chambers (2016) calls a media imaginary where these technologies enable freedom to watch without restriction. Thus, there is a symbolic power to a right to roam media without economic barriers, time constraints or geographical borders. These kinds of roaming audiences are disrupting the ability of media industries to monitor and monetise consumers and users, and they are doing this in the spirit of first release media citizenship (Lobato and Thomas 2015).

This media landscape is a story of place and belonging, but to something that is changing. We hear talk of television institutions in decline, amateur media on the rise, platform players dominating the global market, and algorithms and wearable technologies telling us what to eat, who to date and when to sleep. This is a restless viewership for a digital age (Boyle and Kelly 2012), a fickle audience no longer loyal to broadcasters, channels or timeslots. We might think that being an audience today is all about the new. But when you listen to people and observe their cultural practices you often find a mixing of past and present in their various ways of experiencing media. As Macfarlane (2012) observes, our pathways and thoroughfares lead outwards to society and culture; track backwards to history; and inwards to the self.

There are the old ways, the traditional experience of television and radio, books and print media, in the home; the old ways are visible in those moments when people sit down on the sofa with a cup of tea to watch their favourite show, or curl up in bed with a crime novel. This is an image of audiences fixed in one place and time and transfixed by storytelling in the media. Nowadays, this old school mode stands in stark contrast to the always online, streaming, play all mode. Television, radio, print and social media are part of connected viewing (Holt and Sanson 2014), typified by people multi-screening and multi-tasking; picture an image of the audience in forward motion. A mother ship TV show connects with a branded universe of social media, gaming, and fan remixing. This is an image of audiences with freedom of access, choice of screen culture, and agency to fit favourite shows into personalised schedules. It’s a promise of limitless media and opportunities for creation, but there are restrictions to access, distribution and consumption, with subscriptions for video on demand services, monthly fees for high speed internet access, data roaming charges for mobile users, and gated content for regional audiences. Not everyone has the resources (money, time, skills, support) to experience a streaming, play all mode of engagement.

New ways of experiencing media suggest audiences are moving in multiple directions at the same time. For example, there’s an underground piracy culture that captures the latest TV series, films, music and sporting events and shares such content in a deliberate act of first release media citizenship. A black market exists for live television, where for a monthly fee you can watch content from your homeland in your hostland, unlocked from geoblocking. Informal routes to screen culture abound, through the sharing of friendly passwords, clouds and sticks. Most of us know someone who knows how to freely roam the digital landscape, a technologically savvy friend who can get us into media spaces with ‘no trespassing signs’ and security fences. Alongside these new ways of experiencing media, there’s a need to slow down and take time out from binge watching, snacking and multi-tasking. One example is the social media blackout, a new way that draws on the old ways of watching television without interruption, making ‘me time’ (Nowotny 2018) where the mobile is turned off and media devices are in sleep mode – a still moment out of the slipstream of life.

Push-pull dynamics

All these ways of engaging and experiencing media are connected to how institutions and creative producers craft content for audiences. One means of theorising and analysing both production practices and audience engagement is to try to find concepts that enable an integrated approach to both areas of study. One such concept is push-pull dynamics. There is a push and pull to the dynamics between producers and audiences. There is a way cultural production pushes audiences into content, for example through distribution and branding for television drama across live transmission or subscription services. And there is a way audiences are pulled into the here and now of storytelling, for example through strong characterisation and multi-layered narratives in serial drama. Another dimension relates to how audiences pull different kinds of content and artefacts into their everyday lives, for example by choosing to engage with a specific television series over another one, or embedding material into their family routines. Such push-pull dynamics offer insights into broader changes in the media industry. This push and pull between producers and audiences works both ways, as restless consumers and users can push back, for example through alternative fan practices, disengaging with content, or illegal viewing. Thus, the idea of push-pull dynamics is understood as complicated power relations in the transactions between media industries and audiences.

For example, in the case of television drama we find varieties of experiences depending on the systemic power of television in public service and commercial environments, subscription video on demand services, and illegal distribution flows. If we take the case of the American-Mexican adaptation of the crime drama format The Bridge (FX and Fox Mundo 2013–2014) we can see the push and pull of the relations between institutions, producers and audiences generates problems for the performance of the format (see Hill 2016a). The original Scandinavian drama Bron/Broen is a Nordic noir drama that thrives in public service environments, with immersive viewing for Danish and Swedish audiences. But remakes suffer in commercial markets for more dispersed audiences and users, and the series was axed after the second season due to poor ratings. In particular, the constitution of commercial television in America and Mexico pushed viewers away from live screening towards catch up and illegal viewing. Here was a drama at the forefront of a DVR revolution in America, and part of illegal downloading in other regions, and yet the dominant audience information system of overnight and consolidated ratings could not capture the diversity and strength of audience and fan engagement. FX needed patience for the kind of viewers who streamed, downloaded or recorded, and stored up the show to watch in a quiet moment in their busy lives. Months after the show aired, viewers were finding the drama and spreading the word on The Bridge Facebook groups. They started ‘bring back The Bridge’ campaigns on social media. One fan summed up the reasons for its cancellation: ‘I was amazed that it was cancelled. I think their problem was that they didn’t wait, they didn’t have patience’ (23 year old American male swimming pool maintenance worker). He thought the show could have been like FX’s Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013), gathering audiences over time for binge watching and catch up viewing. He felt FX sabotaged the show with ‘horrible advertising … when you do that it is like you are going towards failure no matter how good the show is’. In a performance of power, we witness audience practices that resist how the television industry measures and understands its viewers. This particular case illustrates a push-pull dynamic strained to breaking point, where structural factors work against producer–audience relations.

A key point is that the push-pull dynamics of producers and audiences underscores the particularities of power for media industries and audiences. Coleman urges researchers to think of ‘power in performative terms’ (2010, 127) in order to understand the contradictions and mediation of cultural performance. Push-pull dynamics highlights what power looks like within the cultural production and reception of television. The argument put forward here is not an overwhelmingly negative one of power relations as one way, flowing from institution, to producer, to audience. Nor is it a reversal where all the power is in people’s hands. This is the particularity of power as it is performed in the push and pull of producer–audience relations, showing us a story of the reality of power and the struggle over how producers and audiences make sense of transnational media.

The idea of a push-pull dynamic poses challenges for research that explores production and audience studies. It’s a challenge because as previous studies have shown, there are points of connection, disconnection and contradiction between cultural production and engagement (see Mayer et al. 2009). For example in relation to reality television, there are points of connection with the constitution of television, such as commissioning, distribution and marketing, which push audiences towards multi-platform entertainment experiences, from television to second screen, from apps to pop up events. Alongside commissioning decisions, or branding and marketing campaigns, producers craft content that immerses audiences in storytelling. For points of disconnection, poor scheduling can sabotage a reality series, and in the case of global formats there is the added complication of territorial distribution, where different versions of the format may be showing in the same region, hampering the chances of success of an adaptation when the original is already available. And in terms of contradictions, audiences are fickle. A reality television series can engage audiences, but just as easily people disengage. As such, we see how audiences can pull creative content into their viewing routines, making a series part of social rituals in the home, and we see how audiences can push back against broadcast television, turning to other content and streaming services that better suit their own personalised schedules.

Spectrum of engagement

In a similar way, engagement is another means of simultaneously analysing and reflecting on production practices and audience research as integrated, rather than separated, within different fields of research. By focusing on the notion of media engagement we can address industry definitions and refine the dominant ways of thinking about and measuring audiences so that academic theories of attention, interaction and engagement can enhance ways of understanding media engagement in a more holistic fashion. Perhaps more importantly we can address how audiences actually engage with a wide range of media through formal and informal routes, learning more about their multi-faceted ways of engaging with popular culture.

Media engagement is a broad term for research into how we experience media content, artefacts and events, from our experience of live performances, to social media engagement, or participation in media itself. Media engagement explores the dispersed connections across industry contexts, cultural forms, and audience experiences. We want to understand industrial contexts for engagement, including performance metrics, production practices and policy discourses; and we want to understand people’s shifting and subjective relations with media as live audiences, catch up viewers, illegal users, as consumers and users, fans and anti-fans, contestants and participants. Media engagement thus encapsulates research on audiences, fans or producer-users, and the ways these different groups co-exist with those making content and driving policy and politics (see Hill and Steemers 2017).

The concept of a spectrum of engagement captures how integral engagement is to transformations in digital media production and audience experiences. It’s a term that highlights how audience engagement is changing currency, combining ratings and social media trends with cultural resonance. A spectrum of engagement shows the cognitive and affective work of audience engagement; where engagement is experienced in myriad ways, and extends across an emotional range so that people switch between positive and negative engagement, or disengagement. A spectrum of engagement also works across different contexts, such as time, including fleeting engagement with a live event, or long form engagement with a brand on broadcast schedules; and space, including live venues, distribution and digital spaces, and the spaces of everyday life.

There is a dynamic interplay between producers and audiences about the value and meaning of media engagement, something played out in the contexts of the format industry, distribution and everyday routines. When power is slipping from the constitution of digital television to disparate sites of media content across multi-platform environments, producers risk disrupting an all-important dialogue with audiences. People wish to be treated as intelligent viewers, performing and participating, streaming and binge viewing; in short, people feel they have a right to experience content in their own way. Overall, the research argues for the soft power of audiences who push beyond commercial frames, engaging with culture in ways that complicate, frustrate and outpace traditional media.

Researching media experiences

This book arises from a big picture project that explores what it means to be an audience today in a digital media age. What follows are some reflections on how the project is situated in a qualitative approach to the study of people and popular culture, an approach that is embedded in my own experience as a researcher. Some of the lessons learned from doing this project, and collaborating with industry professionals and other researchers, have enabled me to conceptualise roaming audiences for contemporary mediascapes, thus shaping the arguments in the book overall.

FIGURE 1.2 Bron is on: launch event for t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Pathways to engagement
• 2. An analytic dialogue
• 3. Roaming audiences: The Bridge
• 4. Spectrum of engagement: Got to Dance
• 5. The cool heart of Nordic noir
• 6. Illegal audiences: Utopia
• 7. Embedded engagement: Reality talent shows
• 8. Authentic reality TV: The case of MasterChef
• 9. Warm up acts
• 10. Audiences as pathfinders
• Appendices
• References
• Index