A brief look at the contemporary “audience”.
These days, more than in any previous era, citizens of the “civilized world” live as audiences and Internet users of old and new media and communication devices. This condition in which we spend several hours a day receiving, sending and exchanging information with others, many others, known or unknown, allows us a great capacity to send and receive images, sounds and data in different channels and formats, which may amuses us or makes life and work easier for us, but at the same time it makes us more vulnerable as citizens, precisely because the data, content and meanings that we construct and exchange are exposed, and most of the time beyond our control.
A paradox of current times is that while we have the possibility of accessing more information, as it had never been possible, at the same time we leave a lot of our own and even intimate information available to others, as we never would have imagined. In terms of communication, citizens today are increasingly vulnerable to hackers, the exhibitionism of data or intimate images, the improper use of our image, the theft of our desires and preferences, or the theft of our ideas and productions.
Audiences as objects of a new colonization.
This contemporary situation demands a new perspective for the research of today’s audiences/users. A perspective that, at the same time that makes it clear to us citizens the way in which we are being colonized by informatics, gives us elements to avoid the growing espionage of our actions and the systematic looting of our data, resulted from our information exchanges.
What the current situation makes more evident than ever is that, despite decades of research, the audience-Internet users remain unknown by themselves. Audiences are only known to commercial groups, digital information monopolies like Facebook, Amazon, etc. and increasingly by governments and national and extra-national political agents.
The widespread ignorance of audiences as audiences is not a casual result, less a necessary result or the price to pay for the usufruct of various contemporary technologies. Nor is it due to their own negligence, or lack of care regarding the information they upload, share and post. Their self-ignorance is the product of a research that systematically excludes them. A research that historically has focused on the extraction of data from audiences for the benefit of others and even for the abuse and exploitation of the same audiences.
This has been the case of rating, later the case of opinion polls, and later of focus groups implemented by the mass media, and it is the case with the various observations and records of citizens’ digital interactions by computer consortia and government agencies or by big streaming and VoD service companies like Netflix and Amazon; what today are known as algorithms.
Extractive strategies in audience research.
Television audiences, especially, as a subject and object of communicational research continue to feed increasingly accurate rating studies to define the market’s advertising and sale policies on the various television channels and on social networks. From companies such as Nielsen or IBOPE, now Kantar-Ibope, and others, the methodology of “counting”, or rating, has been sophisticated and for several years it is possible cross-matching data on purchases in shopping malls by those who watch certain programs at certain times, or use particular social networks, which provides advertisers with valuable knowledge to be more accurate in the moments and programmatic content in which they would be most likely to be seen by those audiences who like those products. The rating data has been a gold mine for advertisers who, with increasing certainty and lower spending, achieve their sales objectives.
In parallel with the rating, they developed opinion polls that, in a way, make respondents feel privileged, because they are asked for their opinion on important events or people, and that regardless of their docile acceptance to answer the questions, most times they don’t get to know the results. It is the pollsters who count and draw trends and conclusions that serve various purposes, most of them political, in the short or medium term.
In many opinion polls, at least the respondents are approached personally and directly, either individually or in groups; and although the data collection is visible, unlike the rating or algorithms, that are invisible, they cannot be openly influenced by those from whom the information is extracted. That is, by those who have submitted their answers
As with the rating, opinion polls to citizens, more than proper scientific research methods, have been and are increasingly better structured political marketing strategies, which serve those who implement them to have fast and accurate information to know the moves to make, whether in the definition of public policies or against external threats or simply for the election of their candidates. Other altruistic purposes for the poll-taking, even for the benefit of the respondents themselves, do not eliminate the extraction that is carried out, nor the secrecy or opacity in the handling of information and the definition of conclusions that affect them.
Algorithms, like the rating, are fundamentally quantitative strategies for audience research whose leitmotiv is the extraction of data and knowledge about the various audiences, not for their benefit but for their submission to the will of big commercial and political companies.
The algorithms contain information that can only be obtained by quantitatively extrapolating individual data, most of it extracted from the participation of citizens in social networks. Data on the behavior of millions of citizens that are inadvertently captured and counted to have a “meta-information”, that is, information beyond itself, and thus a great cognitive advantage from which to derive knowledge to make decisions about the supply and sale of tangible or non-tangible goods.
As suggested by Garcia Canclini (2020), algorithmic information is only known by companies capable of gathering millions of individual data from specific citizens, to have an overall vision on certain issues.
Citizens cannot access the algorithms, but we do feel their effects. For example, when Netflix offers us a personalized menu on our screen, such as the following: “Since you watched this series, you may be interested in watching this other…”
The scientific paradigm behind extractive audience research.
A big problem with audience research is that its strategy of “data collection” was justified at the time – and continues to be so – by the predominance of a positivist scientific paradigm, for which producing scientific knowledge is synonymous with producing data through a quantitative perspective of understanding reality and its objects and phenomena. Thus, the dominant idea of scientific research in the field of communication and audience studies has been to value as scientific knowledge what can be counted and therefore verifiable, and therefore reliable to make decisions regarding the reality it refers to. Decisions, not coming from those who give the information, but of those who collect that information
In the 1980s took place what has been called the “battle of the paradigms”, fought, mostly although not exclusively, by, in and from the universities. For example, at Harvard (where I was studying my doctorate: 1983-1985) courses on cultural analysis, ethnography, in-depth interviews and other qualitative research methods or strategies were added to the offer of courses on “scientific method”.
In other academic locations and universities the same thing happened. In 1987 The British Film Institute convened what has been the first international conference on the investigation of TV audiences: Television and its Audience, held in London, in which among others were Sonia Livingston and David Buckingham, who have been since then prolific qualitative researchers of audience interactions and their television literacy (Orozco, 1988).
At the IAMCR (International Association for Media and Communication Research) audience studies were understood as quantitative studies. Several colleagues: Klaus Jensen (Denmark) Robert White (England) and James Lull (USA), all audience researchers, and myself (Mexico) proposed in 1990 to open a working group within the Association that we called: Qualitative Audience Studies. This proposal was approved, but it was on trial for several years, until in the mid-1990s it was formally accepted as a formal research group in the Association.
This was not only a bureaucratic victory, but also an international academic recognition of the qualitative perspective in the “scientific” investigation of the audiences. The space at the IAMCR meant a legitimate call for audience researchers from any country to present the results of their qualitative research at conferences. This legitimation effort culminated in a qualitative multinational investigation in nine countries, including Mexico, the results of which were published as a book: News of the world. World cultures look at TV News, edited by Klaus B. Jensen (1998), coordinator of the global research.
Towards a horizontal, empowering knowledge in qualitative audience research.
Although the qualitative research perspective allowed asking other questions about the audience and focusing on other elements to understand in a more comprehensive way the impact of the media on their culture, on their beliefs and on their entertainment, by itself it did not modify the vertical intervention towards the investigated subjects, nor the formulation of conclusions, “outside” the research situations.
The missing key to this historical process has been the very conception of the production of the knowledge sought and the type of questions and research methodology with the audiences, as well as their inclusion in the research results as interlocutors, not only as respondents.
Martín-Barbero (1980) has posed this challenge very clearly when he emphasizes that what is serious is not so much that the research objectives are external to those investigated and their particular circumstances, but that the research structures themselves are exogenous: question guide, diagnosis of the situation, etcetera. This has to do with the subject-object relationship, and especially with the researcher-researched link. It is in the type of link that is established where the horizontal production of knowledge is defined as an epistemological and methodological perspective to carry out an inclusive research of the investigated subjects (Corona, 2020).
Achieving the inclusion of those investigated and “their worlds” must give up the idea of science, but not the idea of the validation of the knowledge that is sought and obtained, to focus precisely on the production of collective knowledge. Knowledge that arises from a process of dialogue between the participants of an investigation. A process that begins with the shared objective of what to know and how to do it, and that continues with the analytical exchange of information considered useful to build a new understanding about a situation or information and its repercussions on the participants
An inclusive research, then, moves away from the use of detached techniques, to rely on language itself and on dialogue, from which understandings of the dialogic object and new questions should emerge to enrich the dialogue.
The key to a non-colonial knowledge, that is, “not extracted from” but “co-produced by” the participants in a peer-to-peer audience research is not what these audiences receive but what they produce from their reception in a process of interlocution with the screen and with others. The role of the researcher in an investigative-emancipatory process of the audiences is then to make evident what is not, by itself, to build from that recognition the dialogue of the group of participants and reach conclusions
Bibliography
Corona, Sarah. (2020) Producción Horizontal del Conocimiento. CALAS, University of Guadalajara, Mexico.
García- Canclini, N. (2020) Ciudadanos reemplazados por algoritmos, CALAS, University of Guadalajara, Mexico.
Jensen, Klaus B. (1998) News of the World. World cultures look at television news. Routledge, London.
Martin-Barbero, Jesús (1980) Retos a la investigación de comunicación en América Latina, Comunicación y Cultura No. 9. Mexico.
Orozco, Guillermo (1988) Research on cognitive effects of non-educational television: an epistemological discussion. In Drummond and Paterson : Television and its Audience. British Film Institute. London.
Guillermo Orzco-Gomez, Emeritus National Researcher, University of Guadalajara, Mexico. Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7943-2217