INVITING AUDIENCES IN

Abstract

If content‐driven niche marketing gave rise to the industrial cultivation of fans, contemporary multiplatforming strategies accelerate encounters between audiences, television texts and spheres of production. Audiences are no longer merely cultivated as fans, but also invited in, asked to participate in both the world of the television text and the processes of its production. This paper first examines the economic exigencies served by these strategies. Why invite audiences in? Explored second are the means by which audiences are encouraged to enter both narrative space and the spaces of industrial production. How are audiences invited in? How do these strategies alter the spatial relationships of audiences, narrative and labor? Lastly, attention shifts toward the consequences of these new spatial arrangements between audiences, content and production. How does the proximity of audiences create new challenges for the industry? Ultimately, I argue that multiplatforming reconfigures and enables closer proximity between the spaces of consumption, narrative and labor, magnifying potential for intense audience investments that can potentially conflict with executive and corporate interests. Yet that same proximity often enables the industry to manage such challenges, contrary to claims about the newfound power of fans over producers.