Reviving audience studies

ABSTRACT

Audience measurement data are increasingly central to what many media corporations produce, yet much of these data are inaccessible to scholars. I therefore argue that cultural studies is in need of an audience studies revival. Fan studies continues at strength, but a wider range of audience studies is required to counter and to interrogate the occasional proclamations that companies such as Netflix, Facebook, and Google share with us about audiences and users.

KEYWORDS:

• Audiences
• audience studies
• audience measurement
• cultural studies
• algorithms

Notes on contributor

Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, Television Entertainment, Television Studies (with Amanda D. Lotz), and Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality, and co-editor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2nd ed. forthcoming in 2017), The Companion to Media Authorship, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, and Keywords in Media Studies (forthcoming in 2017).