6. New Media Technologies and Platforms that Engage Audience Participation

This chapter begins by providing an overview of the key issues associated with new media and audience participation. It then moves to a specific case study of mobile technologies and public service media (PSM) through the MyBurb case study. During 2011, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Pool project developed an experiment that sought to combine emerging augmented reality (AR) technology with the archival collection of the ABC. Communication scholars have argued for the significance of one’s representation of space and place through the increasing use of mobile media by providing a unique context to the location. Additionally, the field acknowledges the role of cultural institutions as critical to add context to the ‘mobile media space’ by providing access to their archival content collection. The MyBurb project attempted to alter Australian suburbs by augmenting ABC archives in contemporary suburban environments to explore the blur between physical and digital spaces with its citizens. Mobile media, specifically geo-locative AR applications such as Layar are ‘one of the most widely used mobile AR applications’ (Liao and Humphreys in New Media & Society, Online: 2, 2014) and challenge the sociological implications of hybrid spaces as ‘[m]obile interfaces … allow users to be constantly connected to the Internet whilst walking through urban spaces’ (de Souza e Silva in New Media & Society 13: 261, 2006). The project was successfully implemented, but was rarely utilized by the audience it sought to engage, revealing a division between aspects of the ABC’s remit and engaging its audience through mobile technology and environmental hybridity. This observation supports the cultural production gap Hesmondhalgh (The cultural industries, Sage, London, 2007) identified between the production and consumption of cultural goods, where this chapter argues the cultural production gap could be facilitated through technological intermediation as part of the broader concept of cultural intermediation. This chapter then focuses on how cultural intermediation can facilitate the collaborative production of cultural goods to include the affordances of geo-locative media whilst avoiding the disconnection between the MyBurb project and its stakeholders. Further, this chapter seeks to explore the concept of governmentality as it highlights the tensions that exist between users and facilitators of institutional co-creative spaces, and the governance under which they operate.