Working Watching: The Creative and Cultural Labor of the Media Audience

Abstract

This article examines the audience for the products of the culture industries in the context of creative and cultural labor. It traces the history, multiple contemporary examples, and theorizations of the audience as a site of labor. It further interrogates the tension between this labor and the audience's hegemonic construction as an analytic category and object of knowledge. Finally, it argues for the political implications of explicitly foregrounding labor as a constituent condition of being an audience.

Keywords:

• media audience
• audience studies
• cultural labor
• surveillance
• social subject

Notes

1. Here I have paraphrased, albeit in a different context, Alain Desrosières’ (1998) The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning.

2. And indeed the emerging moguls consolidated their power and are particularly noted for establishing precisely this kind of “vertical integration” associated with the “classical Hollywood” studio system.

3. It is ironic that this work is to be performed by middle-class, managerial-professional, and other respectable classes precisely because the motion picture industry had become concerned that it was being too much associated with its predominant audience of immigrants, the working class, and laborers.

4. Miller et al. offer a second compelling reason involving labor as a means of rethinking intellectual property regulation by displacing the place of the author in regulatory discourse. In this sense, they note, “in many ways, the idea of the labour of consumption ironically redeploys Lockean labour theory (which traditionally underpins the romantic idea of authorship) towards a socialist vision of property rights gained through the act of adding one's labour” (Miller et al. 2001, 208).