related to reception and interpretation â that is, activists as audiences. In this ..... ries, which propose that subjective meanings are actively created in the minds of.
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Participation Beyond Production Possibilities for Reception and Ritual in the Study of Activist Audiences Jennifer Rauch
ABSTRACT In an era of “social media” technologies, instrumental goals such as networking, organizing, and information-sharing hold great sway over the study of activist culture. Researchers often conceptualize activists’ media use as participation in message production and dissemination, while overlooking practices related to reception and interpretation – that is, activists as audiences. In this chapter I propose that the moments in which activists engage with media as listeners, readers, and viewers are just as interesting to scholarship as those in which people create and/or share media relevant to activism. By shifting some emphasis from the transmission mode of activists’ media use to the ritual or symbolic dimension, we can better understand how media habits help sustain activist identities and a sense of belonging, which serves as a precursor to participation. I also assert the importance of low-tech media, face-to-face communication, and offline participation among such audiences, whose members aim to connect mediated activities with real-world ones, and identify some social limitations in technological activism. The chapter concludes by suggesting avenues for future study that explore why activists choose to receive certain messages and how ritual contributes to people getting and staying involved with activist communities.
The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, First Edition. General Editor Angharad N. Valdivia. Volume IV: Audience and Interpretation. Edited by Radhika Parameswaran. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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“We the Media.” “Be the Media.” “Become the Media.” When we think of activist media use, we tend to focus on practices related to producing and disseminating messages of social change as embodied by phrases like these. Such slogans have become so widespread since the turn of the twenty-first century that they’ve been espoused by everyone from punk-rockers and political activists to communication professors and tech gurus to media critics and professional journalists. For example: • In 2000, one-time Green Party presidential candidate (and singer for the Dead Kennedys) Jello Biafra ranted against globalization in a spoken-word album called Become the Media, a motto also used by Jen Angel, the social activist inspired by World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle to launch Clamor, an awardwinning magazine of radical culture. • Dan Gillmor, a technology writer for the San Jose Mercury News who chronicled the dot-com boom and bust, focused on citizen journalists and bloggers in his 2004 book We the Media, which helped popularize the notion of the “former audience.” • The 2009 handbook Be the Media, whose logo depicts an upraised fist clutching a microphone, features contributions and endorsements from the likes of Ben Bagdikian, Jeff Cohen, Rachele Kanigel, Kevin Kelly, Robert McChesney, Craig Newmark, Douglas Rushkoff, Norman Solomon, and Pete triDish. More people are probably participating in media production and dissemination now than in the pre-Internet era, especially through new technologies that were once called “alternative” media (see Hamilton, 2001). The very concept of participatory communication, once an alternative model trumpeted by activists, has gone mainstream (e.g., Bowman & Willis, 2003). In an atmosphere of increasing fragmentation, interactivity, and convergence, the formation called “audience” may look like it’s evaporating. While some talk about the “people formerly known as the audience” as though they are extinct (see Gillmor, 2004; Rosen, 2006), others propose alternative categories such as “produser” or “prosumer,” which collapse the producer or professional and the user or consumer. Nonetheless, even people who engage with media at some moments of their lives as transmitters of information – including activists, whether as amateurs, native reporters, citizen journalists, or professional communicators – are, at other moments, readers or viewers or listeners of media. And those moments of reception matter a lot. While activists are, undoubtedly, just as active in the production and distribution of content as anybody else – and arguably even more so – I would like to defend the “audience moment” in the media experiences of people who are working for political or social change. Audience moments are important because they represent instances wherein individuals have chosen, from the vast array of available media, to receive and pay attention to particular messages relevant to activism. Such acts might or might not lead people to create their own media responses or further circulate the activist content that speaks to them. It is likely that many audience members will subsequently become media producers or distributors – but first they must attend to such messages in the
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original form. Activists can be defined as people who care enough about issues to devote time and money to their causes (Oliver & Marwell, 1992) – in which case audience activities such as subscribing to alternative publications or paying attention to community broadcasts can play a central role in social change. Reader-reception, active audience, and ritual theories offer many useful approaches for studying such audience moments. Especially interesting, to my mind, is the role played by media in activists’ daily lives, in what James Carey (1989) has memorably deemed the “ritual” mode of communication. Most work on activist uses of media has privileged the transmission mode, perhaps because activism is typically understood in instrumental and goal-oriented terms. One might argue that sitting on a sofa reading The Nation or Human Events is a passive activity and that audiences aren’t “really” activists unless they’re waving placards in the streets or sending online petitions or posting on political blogs. But such a limited stance does not hold up to close scrutiny. Choosing to read alternative media instead of the mainstream ones that dominate our culture is an intentional act of communication that can contribute incrementally to the creation and sustenance of activist identities. Thus I propose shifting the emphasis of media studies research on activism from the transmission or instrumental uses of activist media to ritual or social ones, which help build and maintain audience members’ connections – both informative and affective – with activist networks, thus strengthening individual commitments and group solidarities. In other words, activist media do not only produce texts; they also produce communities. This chapter begins by considering activists as transmitters of information, with an overview of the literature whose conceptual and methodological frameworks emphasize media production. Next I examine the implications of the research gulf between activist producers and their audiences, wherein intersubjective meanings can be overlooked and media effects taken for granted. After discussing recent empirical work on such audiences, I examine how ritual acts of media consumption in interpretive communities help build commitments and sentiments that might spur activist participation. Then, in light of the social limitations of online activism, I reassert the importance of scholarship that has focused on low-tech media audiences, face-to-face communication, and offline participation. I conclude by offering avenues for future study and by urging more attention to be paid to activist audiences in general and to the ritual aspects of their media consumption practices in particular. Such research can contribute to knowledge about why and how people use activist and alternative media to get and stay involved with activist communities; such knowledge is useful not only to advance academic discussion but also to inspire and improve forms of social action.
Untangling Activist and Alternative Audiences The primary focus of this essay is activist audiences (as opposed to active, or even interactive, ones) and, to a lesser extent, alternative media that are central to the
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activism. The terms activist and alternative are often used interchangeably, including as a descriptor for media, but they’re not necessarily the same thing (Waltz, 2005). I understand activist audiences as people who care enough about (a) given issue(s) to regularly seek out and consume information beyond what’s available in mainstream press coverage, and who take intentional actions to effect social change on the basis of those messages; the resultant actions might or might not include producing and participating in activist media. It follows, then, that activist media aim to bring about social change; that they engage in structural analysis concerned with class, gender, ethnic, or other forms of domination; and that they are committed to democratic communication principles such as popular access, participation, and self-management (Huesca, 2008, p. 9). By comparison, alternative media are often recognized for featuring critiques of mainstream media, espousing non-commercial or non-profit orientations, and providing counterinformation for sociopolitical action (Rauch, 2007). Activist media and alternative media are more alike than different, especially in terms of promoting participation in activism (an advocacy function that once set these two forms of media apart from mainstream journalism – now, perhaps, a fading distinction), to the extent that the former can be treated as a subset of the latter. Hallmarks of activist audiences include a commitment to alternative media, a belief in the need for mobilizing information, and involvement in real-world events such as protests and campaigns that in turn influence how activist audiences interpret media content. Activist audiences resemble the general public in many ways, for instance in their capacity for active interpretation and in their use of mainstream news sources. Although there is substantial overlap between the categories “activist audience” and “alternative audience,” the two are not entirely equivocal. Research suggests that, while many activists prefer to symbolically distance themselves from corporate and commercial media, in fact they use more news sources, both mainstream and alternative, than the average person (Boyle, 2005; Rauch, 2007). The audience for activist and alternative media products sometimes includes people who accept mainstream politics and don’t engage in much activism, but it is likely to be comprised mainly of people who self-identify as activists.
Activists as Transmitters of Information The Independent Media Center movement, which pioneered activist uses of the Internet, is a robust example of modern participatory media (Wall, 2002). Usually called IMC or Indymedia, it was founded in Seattle in 1999, as a clearinghouse for independent or citizen journalists documenting World Trade Organization protests. The Seattle IMC was remarkable for reporting evidence that police used sub-lethal weapons against demonstrators at a time when mainstream media like Cable News Network (CNN) denied this had happened. Its work became a “prototype for a global
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anti-corporate domination social movement that will increasingly rely on the Internet” (ibid., p. 40), and thus an influential antecedent of Occupy Wall Street Independent Media Centers (IMCs). These IMCs are based in hundreds of cities on six continents and mainly publish information online, but they have also launched a handful of radio stations and newspapers in English and Spanish, as well as a TV show. People consider Indymedia “activist,” in terms of both form and content: an openpublishing model, citizen journalism values, and coverage of under-reported issues and events – especially protests (Atton, 2004; Downing, 2003b; Haas, 2007; Kidd, 2003; Pickard, 2006; Platon & Deuze, 2003; Wall, 2002; Waltz, 2005). Indymedia are examples par excellence of participatory communication axioms such as “Become the Media.” Literature on the Indymedia phenomenon illustrates how scholarship tends to explore the motives and practices of activist producers, and the content they produce, more vigorously than it explores their audiences. This trend goes back at least to the 1960s, when histories of that decade’s activism typically centered on the activities of editors, writers, and artists for the alternative press while neglecting the role that readers played in the successes or failures of that press. More recently, scholars have begun to focus on activist networks that produce and circulate media – overwhelmingly, through new channels such as the Internet (e.g., Arquilla, Fuller, & Fuller, 1998; Atton, 2002b; Bennett, 2003; Castells, 1997; DeLuca & Peeples, 2002; Dunbar-Hester, 2009; Friedland, 1996; Kahn & Kellner, 2004; Redden, 2001; Ronfeldt, Ford & Gil, 2001). Other activist transmitters who have received significant attention include Zapatista rebels in Mexico and their transnational supporters, the US movement for public access to television broadcasting, and community radio such as low-power frequency modulation (FM) and the non-profit Pacifica network (Atton, 2004; Cleaver, 1998; De Angelis, 2000; Downing, 2001; Dunbar-Hester, 2009; Eliasoph, 1988; Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Lasar, 1999; Opel, 2004; Ronfeldt et al., 1998; Stein, 2001), with ample research on Occupy media produsers and producers now in progress. A solid body of case studies has explored activist communication strategies for organizing, publicizing, and framing activist issues and events, as well as the constraints that such collective actors face (see Keck & Sikkink, 1998; McCluskey, 2008). For instance, Gamson and Modigliani (1989) took a constructionist approach to media activism aimed at influencing public opinion on nuclear power. Van Zoonen (1992) discussed how the women’s movement used media to build a public identity. Ryan (2004) looked at how labor activists formed media campaigns around a Teamsters strike against United Power Service (UPS) in order to communicate messages to a mass audience. These studies often provide useful lessons for activists on how to produce events that draw press attention, how to influence media discourse, and how to create their own representations. In fact, the goal of transmitting messages often takes the form of handbooks for activists, for example Prime-Time Activism: Media Strategies for Organizing (Ryan, 1991), Making the News: A Guide for Activists and Nonprofits (Salzman, 2003), and Be the Media: How to Create and Accelerate Your Message . . . Your Way (Mathison, 2009).
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The “Disturbing Gulf” between Activist Producers and Audiences Communication scholars have told us a lot about activists as producers, which has been a fruitful area of research. But studying producer intentions does not necessarily clarify the roles that publications, programs, or websites play in generating social change or in sustaining activist commitments. The influence of activist and alternative content on audiences is often taken for granted, and questions about how and why readers use such media are often ignored. For instance, in his analysis of Indymedia as a form of radical online journalism, Atton (2004, p. 52) notes that the nature and impact of Indymedia uses by activists and others “remain open to question.” With communication technologies enabling interactivity in so many intriguing and novel ways, activists as audiences get short thrift. “Participation” in activist media is also often muddled with the issue of activists becoming producers of media texts, whereas it could be a serious mistake to reduce “involving audiences” to “creating media creators” (Waltz, 2005, p. 33). Gathering and distributing information is necessary to activism, of course, but it’s not wholly sufficient. Few empirical studies have looked closely at activists as audiences, a neglect that is problematic considering that social movement organizers and critical–cultural scholars alike seem interested in, and would benefit from, learning how people consume media as resources for activism. John Downing, a leading voice on alternative and activist media, has called this research gap “a distinctly disturbing gulf ” between our scant knowledge of how audiences use media and the mass of descriptions and theorizations of those media (Downing, 2003a, p. 625). It’s a paradox, he says, “that so little attention has been dedicated to the user dimension, given that alternative-media activists represent in a sense the most active segment of the so-called ‘active audience’ ” (ibid.). So why is audience research on activists lacking? The producers of such media might have compelling reasons for not conducting these studies themselves. To wit: activists who launch and sustain media projects, often on a volunteer or non-profit basis, have little time and resources left for pursuing user research; political repression of dissent may dissuade some from implicating their audiences or themselves; others may resist the commercial or marketing paradigms underlying much audience research; or certain activist media producers may simply lack interest in their users (ibid.). Activist producers who conduct audience research often do so in pursuit of instrumental goals such as improving outreach, increasing revenue, or expanding readership. The task of examining the broader social or cultural aspects of activist media, then, falls disproportionately on scholars who face their own conceptual and practical obstacles to studying these audiences. The academic inclination towards media production could be a theoretical one: because audiences are not visibly “doing” anything when they consume alternative media, they’re perceived as passive, or not even recognized as activists. Other biases
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against studying activists in the receptive and ritual modes could be methodological. Most work on activist media usage focuses on the efforts of individuals or organizations to promote a message or to influence public opinion – in other words, it focuses on the moment when they’re engaging in transmission. In part this derives from the relative ease with which one can get access to a particular group’s ideas and actions through its website and/or to a group’s spokespeople in order to research a case study on, say, Indymedia or Pacifica or Zapatista practices. What’s more challenging is to reach individual members of the activist audience in those diffused moments when they’re using alternative media in a ritual mode. It’s simpler to persuade key members of a group, especially one that’s “trying to get a message out” anyway, to cooperate with a research project that might help publicize that message and recognize their work. Individual audience members are less willing to spend precious time participating in a study – unless they’re given an incentive, usually financial – and there are too few academics who can afford to give one. Scholars might find it more difficult to study activist audience members (who are anonymous and dispersed throughout society) than activist texts (which are fairly convenient to collect and analyze) or activist producers (who are easy to identify and contact through their organizations or online presences). Audience research projects are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and unattractive to major foundations that prioritize mainstream media over alternative ones. And, as any activist can attest, papers are easier to organize than people. The prospect of gaining access to real people, especially strangers, might be daunting – though researchers interested in social change likely have affinities with activists working to create it. Such practical problems are sur mountable when people have the will to overcome them, as is proven by the fact that researchers have already produced a great deal of empirical work looking at media reception, consumption, interpretation, and use by other audiences.
Current Approaches to Activist Audiences Activist scholarship can learn much from reader reception and active audience theories, which propose that subjective meanings are actively created in the minds of people who read, listen to, or watch media – rather than assuming, as the instrumental view of communication has tended to do, that producers transmit objective media messages that are received and acted upon by the audience. The field of audience studies has benefited from interpretive analyses that explain how people use media, how they make sense of polysemic messages, and what the rituals of media consumption mean in people’s everyday lives (Lindlof, 1987b, 1991; Radway, 1991; Bird, 2003). This research has already brought to light the pleasure, creativity, and emancipation that some people find in using everyday media products such as soap operas, tabloid newspapers, and romance novels. The meaning of these media genres is often tied to their symbolic or ritual uses and to the collective sense of community they
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create. Audience researchers have not yet paid much attention to similar uses of, say, the alternative media genre by activist readers and viewers. Among the few studies to consider the potential implications of message reception for activists is a content analysis that identified the theme “we are not alone” in alternative press coverage of protests (McLeod & Hertog, 1999). The study concluded that such content increases the knowledge of activism’s potential within a group, links radical movements nationally and internationally, provides information and inspiration to mobilize future events, and conveys a sense of community (ibid.). Rather than gauging audience attitudes or behaviors through empirical methods, however, this research assumed that opportunities for exposure to such positive frames would yield these effects. Some uncommon surveys of alternative media users by Boyle have generated equally interesting insights. One study confirmed that activists use both a greater number of alternative media and a wider range of news sources than non-activists, challenging the perception that activists avoid mainstream media (Boyle, 2005). Another study found that use of alternative media such as protest websites was positively related to participation in protests (Boyle & Schmierbach, 2009). Another notable study aimed to measure activist audiences for Indymedia content in order to determine how many people were reading news on this alternative outlet during the US invasion of Iraq (Opel & Templin, 2005). Internet server reports showed a spike in traffic at several IMC websites around March 2003, as activists and other audiences sought out information about the military action from sources outside the mainstream press – a finding that suggests connections among alternative media use, periods of crisis, and activist mobilization. In their attempt to collect this audience data, however, the scholars faced resistance from some Indymedia pro ducers, who likened the researchers’ request for user information to government surveillance à la Patriot Act. Opel and Templin concluded that the Internet’s power to monitor users “is viewed with a fair degree of suspicion by many within the IMC community, and that this suspicion presents a significant research barrier to further analysis of server traffic reports” (p. 15). Despite occasional obstacles to gaining trust from community members, which is a concern common to all audience research, more such quantitative work is welcome. It’s crucial also to explore the audience dimension of activist media use via qualitative analyses, whether in a critical, cultural, social–constructionist, or interpretive vein. Focus groups, long interviews, and ethnographic methods have been widely used and proven useful by scholars in reader-response and audience research who contextualize audience members’ media consumption in relation to their lived experiences (Lindlof, 1991). In advocating for research on activist audiences, Atkinson (2005) points to the lessons of feminist and social constructionist theory: that nonquantitative methods can reveal the subjective meanings that participants make when consuming media texts. He argues that such research will help scholars better understand activist audiences, whose members use alternative media both to build a critical understanding of reality and to construct community (ibid.). A rich example of the non-quantitative yet empirical approach is Gamson’s (1992) effort to understand how, if people are generally uninterested in politics or badly
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informed about issues, so many of them do become active in social movements. Instead of relying on survey data of college students, as many scholars of public opinion do, Gamson conducted discussions with groups of people working mainly in the service industry or in clerical and office jobs. In their conversations about controversial issues such as nuclear power, affirmative action, and the Arab–Israeli conflict, his analysis identified the seeds of political action in the minds of working-class US citizens. While not intended as audience research per se, this study sheds light on how ordinary people interpret actively mainstream media messages such as op-ed columns, political cartoons, and network news programs – by reference to personal experiences, popular wisdom, and interpersonal conversations – rather than receive them passively. As another example of the potential of audience research for explaining why activists use certain media and how they interpret them, consider my discourse analysis that examined how US activists articulated the “third-person effect,” a widespread perception that others are more influenced by media messages than one’s self is (Davison, 1983). This approach contrasted with the surveys and experiments prevalent in much third-person effect research: groups watched a news program and responded to non-directional questions in a naturalistic context where activists were allowed to express mobile and conflicting identities (Rauch, 2010). These activists, who reported feeling better informed about current events through their alternative media use in comparison to those who relied primarily on mainstream media, identified themselves, in alternation, as invulnerable and vulnerable to media influence. Despite distancing themselves from a “mass” audience, participants used discursive strategies such as role-playing, inventing dialogue, and posing hypothetical statements to imagine themselves as also being susceptible to mainstream news. A large body of qualitative audience research has shown that groups whose members share specific psychological factors, social behaviors, or media orientations – as many activists do – tend to receive media texts in a distinct range of ways. For example, it is likely that activist audience members (1) select different media content (e.g., a greater proportion of alternative or activist content) from that selected by the general public; (2) interpret mainstream media messages in different ways from non-activist audiences; and (3) take different action from what other groups do, as a result of having been exposed to activist messages. Engaging in more rigorous audience research on activist audiences could make useful contributions to understanding both how social-movement messages are received, interpreted, and acted upon in the transmission mode and how activist communities are built and sustained through ritual communication.
Theorizing Activist Audiences as Participants in Ritual As a prelude to discussing ritual and transmission modes of communication, I will offer some clarification of those terms here. Ritual refers to a symbolic act that brings people together in fellowship through the “creation, representation, and celebration of shared even if illusory beliefs” (Carey, 1989, p. 43). On the other hand, transmission
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denotes “the extension of messages across geography for the purpose of control” – to employ a transportation metaphor (ibid.). According to Carey, the first conception emphasizes meaning, culture, and the maintenance of society in time, whereas the second stresses information, power, and the efficacy of communication across space. The transmission view, which tends to draw attention to discrete instances of demonstrable effectiveness and to yield case studies of successful media projects, has, to date, exerted a disproportionate influence on activist research. I’m not suggesting that transmission is bad and that ritual is good – Carey didn’t either – but that a fuller understanding of activist media requires both. Carey keenly observed that empirical communication research has long embodied the transmission metaphor rather than the ritual one, a trend recurring in this literature on activist media. He thought that the continuity and coherence of communal life depended on resolving the tension between ritual and transmission views. Indeed, communicative rituals coexist with, and can serve as precursors to, instrumental acts; in other words, they can activate inquiry and direct action. “The purpose of news is not to represent and inform but to signal, tell a story, and activate inquiry,” Carey said (1989, p. 82; my emphasis). He shared Dewey’s belief that the extended, impersonal webs of relations in postindustrial “great society” should be converted into more intimate, geographically bound ones of a “great community” through communication. This strengthening of weak ties would build social capital, “so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action” (Westbook, 1991, p. 309; my emphasis). Audiences need facts and information, of course, but they also need discursive and interpretive resources to aid them in forming opinions, following arguments, understanding other people’s viewpoints, and debating the alternative goals that a community might formulate and pursue. One must note that the power of ritual – as a set of practices, as an object of study, and as a tool for criticism and social change – has been questioned on several fronts. Ritual practices are sometimes seen as politically dangerous, anachronistic, conservative, arational or irrational, or as the politics of spectacle (Cottle, 2006). Ritual studies are sometimes criticized for promoting an uncritical, orderly, and homogeneous view of society or for disregarding power, ideology, and resistance (ibid.; Atkinson, 2005). Some scholars have equated an instrumental orientation with “active” media use and presuppose that a ritualized orientation must be “passive,” leaving little possibility of a dynamic relationship between the two (see Metzger & Flanagin, 2002). Nonetheless, there are persuasive arguments that a ritual approach to communication can serve democratic impulses, since “symbols, emotion, rhetoric and performance are constitutive of human communication” that guides participation (Cottle, 2006, p. 413). The interaction between ritual and transmission modes of communication has proven productive to scholars of activism, including protest studies that use both rational action models and ritual symbol frameworks. In the twenty-first century, ritual and noninstrumental approaches to communication have found support in research on “affective intelligence,” which explains the
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competences and behaviors of busy, distracted citizen-voters (see Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000; Marcus, 2002; MacKuen, Marcus, Neuman, & Keele, 2007). Much as Carey and others have clarified the role of rituals in communication, scholars of the “affect effect” have asserted the primacy of emotions like enthusiasm or anxiety in activating political deliberation (Marcus et al., 2000). Empirical tests demonstrate a dialectical relationship between affect and reason that prompts people to engage in thoughtful action, confirming that emotion can have a rational impact and, of course, that reason can yield an affective result. Similarly, reconciling the ritual and transmission aspects of communication might help explain why some people pay attention to alternative media and participate in activism while others do not. Research on activism also shows that many people find their way into politics through emotionally motivating experiences (Teske, 1997). It follows that activist media practices often employ spectacular rituals to get attention and to generate anxiety about or enthusiasm for causes, in order to strengthen member loyalties and group allegiances (Marcus, 2002). Social change research has, to its detriment, overlooked the relevance of emotion to collective mobilization and individual activation, as Downing proposed (2003a). Renewed interest in the emotive and affective dimension of alternative media use is therefore “crucial” (ibid.). The affective and arational dimensions of activists’ communicative experiences could be fruitfully explored within the scope of reception analysis or ritual studies, drawing on some of the aforementioned knowledge already accumulated in allied fields of study such as sociology and political science.
Contributions of Ritual to Media Research Various scholars have explored the social, symbolic, and ritual aspects of communication that help build and maintain communities by representing shared beliefs, by enabling civic conversation, and by activating participation. For example, Anderson (1991) looked at the daily ritual of reading national newspapers that helped foster “imagined communities.” Nord (2001) examined how newspaper readers throughout US history have used journalism to form community attachments and to engage in civic life. Rothenbuhler (1998) explained how ritualized media events such as the Olympic games or state funerals do not just reflect group memberships but help define them. Zelizer (1990, 1993) analyzed reporters’ first-person narratives about the Kennedy assassination, which followed the profession’s logic of ritual in first establishing journalistic authority. Zelizer has also studied how journalists’ collective interpretations of Watergate and McCarthyism reveal the ways in which this pro fession’s narrative rituals help establish journalism’s legitimacy. Several researchers have drawn upon the concept of the interpretive community, a group that shares understandings of social reality, intersubjective meanings, and strategies for decoding certain texts (see Fish, 1980; Lindlof, 1987a; Zelizer, 1993;
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Rauch, 2007). These communities include interpretive communities of production, such as journalists or television producers, as well as ones of reception, such as newspaper readers or activist audiences; people might belong to several, even conflicting, interpretive communities. When members share a commitment to certain inflections on behavioral norms and dominant ideologies – as activist audiences often do – interpretive communities can also be considered “subcultures” (Lindlof, 1987a). As Lindlof explains, media audiences that habitually use specialized, deviant, or obscure communications media or media content will tend to collectivize and to form interpretive communities, subcultures, and interest groups (ibid.). My own work has considered progressive activists as a subcultural interpretive community, because members of this audience hold similar orientations toward political engagement and they use alternative media, which have the potential to generate unusual interpretations that go against the norm or subversive meanings that threaten the social order implicit in mainstream media content. Two empirical studies I have undertaken attuned me to the importance of rituals in interpretive communities. The first project interviewed independent publishers of zines, small idiosyncratic magazines that usually espouse do-it-yourself aesthetics and participatory ethics (Rauch, 2004). The vast majority of zine producers who talked to me engaged in these modest labors of love not for instrumental reasons – such as earning money or spreading a message – but mainly for affective reasons. They immersed themselves in ritual acts of production, circulation, and reception alike. They enjoyed the feeling of community that springs from sharing and exchanging zines in person, in meaningful everyday contexts. An observation that Waltz (2005, p. 79) makes about zine readers applies also to activists: they seek self-valorization through the consumption of media that mirror their own views and make them feel as if they are part of a social group (albeit one whose members may never meet in person), or that might even challenge their views and identities in ways that help clarify their own beliefs or expand their system of values. The concept of ritual also proved useful to understanding another interpretive community I studied: an audience of activists involved with the movement “against globalization” or for democratic communication and global justice (Rauch, 2007). This community is rooted in the political ideals of the 1999 Seattle uprising, and it is committed to the communicative ideals of Indymedia (self-described as grassroots, collective, anti-corporate, democratic, decentralized, and autonomous). When I asked activists why and how they used alternative media, I expected, frankly, that they would talk about instrumental or transmissive concerns such as media bias, missing information, and getting the word out. They didn’t. Instead they focused on the role that alternative media consumption played in their daily lives. They said that it connected them to a community of like-minded people and recursively reflected and shaped their identities as activists. Those discussions underscored the important role that just reading, watching, or listening to alternative media – not necessarily producing it – plays in building and maintaining a sense of belonging even in communities that, like this one, prize participation. And, while those activists consumed a great deal of
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mainstream news, they ritually downplayed their attention to these sources and performed the role of “alternative media user” when talking to other activists (Rauch, 2007).
Social Limitations of New Activist Media People interested in activist media often celebrate the power of digital tools and online networks to encourage two-way communication and user-generated content. While activists are surely using new technology in novel and important ways, we must not overlook the continued cultural relevance of old media such as print or broadcasting, which still play a crucial role in connecting message creators with their audiences and in building activist communities. Carpentier and De Cleen (2008, p. 7) explain: “In this dazzling techno-optimism, we often forget that the routines, identities, practices, convictions, and representations that circulate in the old media system have not been lost and still co-structure the new media system.” New media provide an important channel for distributing activist messages – but they are not the only significant channel. I argue that we should retain a high regard for realworld activities, including both old media and unmediated communication, relevant to the audience moment. Following are some examples of research indicating how a renewed interest in older forms of communication, which aligns with some reappraisals taking place under the rubric of “slow media” (Rauch, 2011), could help inform our study of activist audiences. Activist networks have been using a wide range of means – electronic and other – to exchange “user-generated content” and to create alternative channels of twoway communication for a long time, as Keck and Sikkink (1998) document in their comprehensive study of transnational advocacy groups. While communication has increased in quantity since the 1990s, partly due to new media technologies that speed up information flow and simplify contact between activists, these scholars stress that the formation of such networks relies on conferences and other face-toface encounters where activists can share information as well as gain trust and discover common concerns (ibid.). Their global perspective reveals not only the limitations of techno-optimism, which can overlook the continued influences of interpersonal, print, and broadcast communication, but also those of ethnocentrism, since many regions and communities in the North and the South are less affluent and less dependent on new media than those where many researchers live and work. Legions of activists and proto-activists around the world continue to engage with social-change messages in a low-tech audience mode, whether by attending a conference in Brazil or by reading a pamphlet in Vietnam or by listening to a radio program in South Africa. In the case of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, transnational activists used information as ammunition in a “social netwar” that helped resist the oppression of
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indigenous insurgents (Ronfeldt et al., 1998). New technologies helped enable organizational networking there, but activists also “swarmed,” both physically and electronically, from around the world into the Mexican state of Chiapas to serve as local witnesses to the unfolding events (ibid.). Printed messages, faxes, and unmediated communication through human couriers – along with mixes of old and new media technologies – were also essential to this indigenous protest (ibid.). People studying the Zapatistas and other movements have concluded that the Internet was mainly useful to the extent that it fed an activist mechanism, carried online participation offline, and created “a synergy between the producers and the receivers of information, enabling different groups to make contacts and find new allies” (ibid., p. 116; Wojcieszak, 2009). The worldwide protests against Wall Street that began in 2011 derived their strength not only from information shared through social media but also from physical occupation of public spaces. We would benefit from knowing more about who receives activist information and how it feeds offline participation – for example whether and, if so, how alternative media actually activate audiences. This critique of the myopic focus on new technology also rests in part on the assumption that “former audience members,” who visibly participate in activist media by producing (readily accessible) texts, represent the most salient aspects of those phenomena or the most notable audience for those messages. As Atton (2002b) has noted, activist media often aim to give voice to the voiceless and invert the hierarchy of access by developing media spaces where activists and ordinary people might present accounts of their own experiences and struggles. Yet the people who participate in online activist communities likely belong to a subset of “ordinary people” that is not very ordinary; ordinary or unmarked people do not all seek a voice or choose to participate in public media conversations (ibid.). For example, many scholars have studied people who write letters to editors but who, interesting though they might be, comprise a minority compared to newspaper readers who do not write such letters. The desire to participate in media conversations or media production – especially over the Internet – might not be as common among global activist audiences as some assume. With the costs of new technologies decreasing and worldwide access to them increasing, the efforts of activists and researchers might increasingly focus on the Internet, both to their benefit and to their “peril,” as Wall writes (2002, p. 40). The time is ripe for renewed study of activist audiences from perspectives that take into account the importance of social interactivity versus the technological kind, of techno-skepticism versus unqualified celebration, of cultural diversity versus ethnocentrism, of older forms of slow and unmediated communication versus exclusively digital ones, and of the full range of audience members versus participant-performers who actively mark themselves. These far-ranging concerns should dampen the optimism of Internet boosters who believe that “becoming the media” is the worthiest goal of activism and the most deserving object of scholarship. And Carey – who questioned the cultural import of an electronic revolution that he considered “illusory” and “mythical” – provides many insights that support this reasoning.
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Future Directions This chapter has shown how research on the relationship between media and activism has, to date, provided ample description and analysis of activist producers and their messages. Yet those producers are not just creating messages, texts or products; they are also participating in the production and maintenance of activist interpretive communities. Not all people who participate in activist media do so through acts of production; those communities are equally maintained by acts of consumption, interpretation, and reception. That’s why it makes sense for scholars to pursue the following goals: first, a better balance between studies of activist producers and activist audiences, the latter being preserved as a distinct category; second, a better balance between the transmission and ritual aspects of media use by activist audiences; and, third, a better balance between audience uses of old and new forms of media. Relatively little work has focused on activist audiences, and we can still learn much from examining how they receive the messages that activist media produce. Some research on activist audiences could be placed under the rubric of transmissive communication, by focusing on media content and its effects. Exploring the dialectic of transmission and ritual communication modes is crucial to expanding empirical research on activist audiences and to counteracting the current imbalance toward producers. Neither account suffices without the other. Some of the questions offered here to guide future research could be approached from either viewpoint: • Who pays attention to activist media products, and why? Future research could examine why and how activist audiences (or, less often, mainstream ones) receive alternative media content. This could illuminate media strategies for breaking through to mass media and would be useful, from an administrative perspective, to activist producers trying to understand their messages’ impact. • What do activists do with the information that they receive from media sources? For example, they probably use activist (and non-activist) content as resources in their daily lives: for making decisions, understanding personal experiences, managing social interactions, and organizing their time. Scholarship often takes the influence of activist media for granted, but it could profit from more evidence that exposure to activist content affects real-world attitudes or behaviors. • How does consumption, reception, or interpretation of alternative media differ between progressive activists and conservative ones? Though work on activists’ media use has focused on the left, activists might subscribe to any political ideology: progressive, anarchist, conservative, far-right, and so on. The little existing research on rightwing activists has focused on nationalists and neo-Nazis (Atton, 2004; Wojcieszak, 2009), the latter being provocative by linking the attitudes of discussion forum users to their offline actions. • What kinds of media products do activists choose to consume, and why? We don’t know much about what kind of media activists actually use. Some findings suggest that
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•
•
•
•
they use a lot of alternative media, but also that they use more mainstream media than the general public does (Boyle, 2005; Rauch, 2007). Do activists prefer alternative media to mainstream sources, and why? We need to consider audience definitions of “alternative media,” a phrase that scholars have explicated in myriad ways (e.g., Atton, 2002a; Rauch, 2007). More empirical work is needed to understand why readers, viewers, and listeners value alternative media and, specifically, their opinions and impressions about the “alternative” qualities of the media they respect and admire. How do activists interpret the messages they read, view, and hear in mainstream or in alternative media? Studies might look at how activist audiences receive mainstream content – interpreting it against the grain, perhaps – and how they receive alternative content, in cases where activist media are effectively preaching to the converted (and thus embodying a literal meaning of “ritual” communication). Activists’ interpretations of protest coverage would be one rich subject for exploration. How do activist audience groups in various cultures, regions, and socioeconomic conditions consume, receive, or interpret mainstream or alternative media products differently? Researchers could take a closer look at international activist audiences – especially from developing nations and poorer communities – whose media practices and preferences might contrast with those of affluent US and European ones. What rituals of media consumption or reception do activists engage in? Do people consume activist and alternative media at particular times, in particular places, in particular audience groupings? Some activist consumption of mainstream or alternative media has an instrumental and rational orientation, while other acts of reception are oriented toward feeling a sense of social connection or collective purpose. Research might investigate activists’ habits of media use more broadly, as well as their rituals in the narrower sense, along with possible contradictions between the two.
Research along these lines on activist audience practices could help (1) draw attention to the role of specific media coverage or events in the birth and growth of movements; (2) address questions about the credibility of activist or alternative news sources; (3) examine alternative media’s influence on users’ oppositional consciousness; and (4) understand the role of emotion and affect in social involvement, as Downing suggested (2003a). Such results would be enlightening not only for scholars of activism but also for members of activist communities.
Conclusion The dearth of work on activist audiences means that intellectual opportunities abound for interdisciplinary research on this topic from a wide range of theoretical
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and methodological perspectives. Scholarship on activist audiences could be pursued in the social sciences or humanities; according to humanist, critical, cultural, or interpretive paradigms; and through the application of quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods. In particular, ethnographic studies offer the potential to contextualize the reception processes of activist audiences, who bring their preceding identities and wider commitments to bear in media encounters (Bird, 2003). Contextualization is especially important to this area of research, because ritual depends on the willing involvement of media participants who are not necessarily producers: It only “works” when we want it to, when we volunteer something of ourselves, our collective identities, sentiments and aspirations within it [. . .] Ritual only comes alive experientially, emotionally, subjunctively, when actively read by audiences/readerships who are prepared to “participate” within it as symbolically meaningful to them, and who are prepared to accept the imagined solidarities on offer. (Cottle, 2006, p. 428)
This chapter has outlined some of the potential contributions of reception and ritual to our knowledge about media’s meanings in activist lives, both individually and collectively. In this discussion I have defined “ritual” in a somewhat loose manner, insomuch as everyday media consumption can be considered habitual and “ritualized” (Couldry, 2003). Some scholars have recommended defining ritualized media use as “a symbolic activity for participation in some larger order of meanings” and rigorously delimiting it as something exceptional, to be distinguished from mere “habits” and noninstrumental media use (Rothenbuhler, 1998, p. 83). The rational dimension of ritual hints that such acts of media consumption might also serve audience uses such as gaining pleasure, or they might provide social functions such as making connections; however, there is still much space for social reflexivity and critique beyond Durkheimian, neo-Marxist, or uses-and-gratifications theory (Cottle, 2006). For the sake of simplicity, I have focused here mainly on the binary distinction of production–consumption, which risks obscuring the circulation of media among activist audiences. Discussions about so-called former audiences, which tend to mistakenly collapse the producer with the consumer, risk eliding the distinction between producing a new activist message and just distributing an existing one. For instance, screening an existing documentary to a new audience might be a significant act, but it is quite distinct from actually producing a brand-new activist film. Ditto forwarding friends or colleagues a link, via email, to a story published on an alternative-press website. Although circulation has received somewhat short thrift here, the concept has yielded constructive insights in my work on ritual, which reveals some of the social limitations of new media. A good illustration can be found in my research on zine producers, who circulated their printed creations by hand, in elaborate rituals of distribution. Those producers felt that print xerography offered a more gratifying and immediate way of making personal connections with their audiences and of building the zine community – where producers are also readers, and readers might become producers – than online publishing did. Material circulation by, to, and through audiences might likewise play an important role in building activist
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communities, which share many participatory ideals, and perhaps rituals, with the zine community. Research on activist audiences and interpretive communities that embraces ritual– transmission reflexivity could help explain how media consumption practices and preferences contribute to participation in democratic society writ large. Whereas people often assume that public disengagement and apathy are correlated with not paying attention to current events (see Couldry, Livingstone, & Markham, 2007), activists comprise an audience that’s both engaged and attentive. As information overload grows and attention spans shrink in the digital age, a continued emphasis on activist media production, at the expense of consumption, is exceedingly troublesome. Somebody has to listen to the activist messages available in alternative media . . . and, presumably, to act as a result of having heard those messages. With access to the means of producing and circulating information now more widespread than ever, public attention itself might be the scarcest resource. After all, as Gitlin (1980) has compellingly demonstrated, the lesson of 1960s activism was not just that people were recording what happened, but that the whole world was watching it, too.
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