Media Audiences and Public Voices — Terms of Engagement

In this chapter we turn our attention to ‘media audiences’, and develop an account of how audiences both make sense of and evaluate sources of the political portrayed in non-news media genres, working within the terms of our enquiry into the intersections and overlaps of ‘political’, ‘civic’ and ‘popular’ culture.1 When it comes to posing questions about their varying relationships with mediated politics, we can construe audiences as citizens, conscious of their political rights and responsibilities and with expectations of the media based on that consciousness; we can construe them as primarily consumers, seeking pleasure, knowledge and information in a media marketplace. In their interactions with mediated politics, audiences also choose (with varying degrees of self-consciousness and in response to a range of textual and contextual cues) the manner of their engagement. They do this by identifying with or contesting political ideas and values (as individual viewers or through shared experiences); by adjusting their levels of attentiveness or interest; by making cognitive and emotional connections via a range of dispositions (empathetic, ironic, rational); and by choosing whether or not to participate directly in related activities, which may be productive (e.g. commenting on a blog post) or merely cathartic in dialogic potential (e.g. shouting at the TV).