‘Audience’ as concept relevant to Web 2.0

This week we discussed several of the articles in the First Monday theme issue on Web 2.0 in the Ljubljana seminar, and during that discussion wondered about the relevance of the (mass) communication concept of 'audience' to Web 2.0 environments. During that conversation, Maja Turnsek reminded us of the following publication that may provide a starting point for exploring such relevance:

Renckstorf, K., & McQuail, D. (1996). Social action perspectives in mass communication research: an introduction. In K. Renckstorf, D. McQuail & N. Jankowski (eds.), Media use as social action; A European approach to audience studies, pp. 1-17. London: John Libbey.

The introductory chapter in that book does provide a valuable historical overview and does develop a typology to facilitate understanding the concept audience. The text does not, however, deal with either the Internet or the Web - understandably, since the book was published prior to that era. Similarly, it does not deal with the related notion 'user generated content' (UGC). Although this last notion is generally associated with Web 2.0 developments, the idea of users generating content has a much longer history and dates back to (at least) the late 1960s with the rise of alternative media associated with the counter culture and anti-war movements in the United States and, subsequently, with the rise of public access television in that country and, later, with the coming of community radio and television in Europe during the mid-1970s. This history has been traced is various publications, notably Community Television in Amsterdam (Jankowski, 1988), The People's Voice (Jankowski, Prehn & Stappers, 1992) and Community Media in the Information Age (Jankowski & Prehn, 2002).

No one seems to have placed UGC in an historical perspective such as the one noted above, and no one seems to have considered UGC within a Web 2.0 environment from the perspective of audience. I think the latter would be useful, but I think the conclusion from that exercise would be that the conventional notions of audience lose their meaning in a UGC environment. That environment may, in fact, signal the considerable deficiency to the various formulations of audience enumerated in the Renckstorf and McQuail chapter with regard to Web-based communication - even those in which traditional mass media are active (e.g., online newspapers, Internet-delivered radio and television).