[ecrea] new journal issue: 'Interrogating audiences: Theoretical horizons of participation' (free download)

Special CM Journal Issue 'Interrogating audiences: Theoretical horizons 
of participation', edited by Nico Carpentier & Peter Dahlgren

The special journal issue 'Interrogating audiences: Theoretical horizons 
of participation', edited by Nico Carpentier & Peter Dahlgren has just 
been published in the academic journal CM (Communication Management 
Quarterly). This peer-reviewed special issue aims to contribute to the 
development of participatory theory within the framework of 
communication and media studies. As always, this requires careful 
manoeuvring to reconcile conceptual contingency with the necessary 
fixity that protects the concept of participation from signifying 
anything and everything. In order to deepen the theorisations of 
participation, two strategies have been used in this special issue: In a 
first cluster of articles, the concept of participation will be 
confronted with another theoretical concept or tradition that will 
enrich the theoretical development of participation. In the second 
cluster of articles, the workings of the notion of participation will be 
analysed within a specific topical field, which will allow deepening 
participatory theory by confronting participation with the 
contextualised logics of that topical field.

The entire special issue can be downloaded from the Cost TATS website at 
the WG2 download page:
http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu/node/303

The direct link is:
http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu/system/files/pub/CM21-SE-Web.pdf

Alternatively, the special issue can also be downloaded from the CM 
webpage, at:
http://www.fpn.bg.ac.rs/2011/10/24/cm-casopis-za-upravljanje-komuniciranjem-2/

Here, the direct link is:
http://www.fpn.bg.ac.rs/wp-content/uploads/CM21-SE-Web.pdf

The theoretical work captured in the articles of this special issue 
originates from the Working Group on "Audience interactivity and 
participation" of the COST Action "Transforming Audiences, Transforming 
Societies" (TATS), which is financed from 2010-2014. The main objective 
of the TATS COST Action is to advance state-of-the-art knowledge of the 
key transformations of European audiences within a changing media and 
communication environment, identifying their interrelationships with the 
social, cultural and political areas of European societies. This COST 
Action comprises more than 230 scholars from 30 countries. Its Working 
Group on "Audience interactivity and participation" focuses on the 
possibilities and constraints of mediated public participation; the 
roles that old and new media institutions and professionals (including 
journalists) play in facilitating public participation and in building 
citizenship; the interlocking of mainstream media and non-mainstream 
media and their production of new hybrid organisational structures and 
audience practices.


Table of contents
Interrogating audiences: Theoretical horizons of participation
CM Communication Management Quarterly, 21, 2011
ISSN 1452-7405

Introduction: Interrogating audiences - Theoretical horizons of 
participation
Nico Carpentier and Peter Dahlgren

The concept of participation. If they have access and interact, do they 
really participate?
Nico Carpentier

Social capital: Between interaction and participation
Manuel José Damásio

Applying genre theory to citizen participation in public policy making: 
Theoretical perspectives on participatory genres
Marie Dufrasne and Geoffroy Patriarche

Parameters of online participation: Conceptualising civic contingencies
Peter Dahlgren

Competing by participation - A winning marketing tool
Nóra Nyir?, Tamás Csordás and Dóra Horváth

Mediated public voices need theory to be heard
Nurçay Türko?lu

When the museum becomes the message for participating audiences
Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt and Pille Runnel

A critical analysis of two audience prototypes and their participatory 
dimensions
Miroljub Radojkovi? and Ana Milojevi?

The participatory turn in the publishing industry: Rhetorics and practices
Francesca Pasquali

Abstracts

Introduction: Interrogating audiences - Theoretical horizons of 
participation
Nico Carpentier and Peter Dahlgren

No abstract available

The concept of participation. If they have access and interact, do they 
really participate?
Nico Carpentier

Summary: Participation is a concept that is being used in a wide variety 
of fields, and that has obtained an evenly wide range of meanings. This 
article attempts first to ground participation in democratic theory, 
which allows introducing the distinction between minimalist and 
maximalist forms of participation. In the second part of the article, a 
broad definition of the political will be used to transcend to logics of 
institutionalized politics, and to emphasize that the distribution of 
power in society is a dimension of the social that permeates every 
possible societal field. Both discussions are used to describe the key 
characteristics of participation, and to increase the concept's 
theoretical foundation. The article then zooms in on one of these 
characteristics, namely the difference between access, interaction and 
participation, as this distinction allows further sharpening the key 
meanings attributed to participation as a political process where the 
actors involved in decision-making processes are positioned towards each 
other through power relationships that are (to an extent) egalitarian.

Social capital: Between interaction and participation
Manuel José Damásio

Summary: The purpose of this article is to discuss different ways of 
conceptualizing social capital in order to bring out the contested and 
multidimensional character of the concept and relate that with both 
social interaction and participation in the context of media and network 
technologies use and consumption. Throughout its history the media have 
always included a mix of centralized practices and interpersonal 
communication processes that shape different patterns of relationship 
between subjects and technologies and generate different social 
outcomes. The emergence of the communication and networks paradigm as 
central to the processes of social interaction and community building, 
invites us to look closely at the mechanisms that individuals use in 
order to interact and participate in the social networks in which they 
move themselves. Social capital is one of such mechanisms, a 
multidimensional concept with different dimensions and features. We 
discuss social capital's complementary and sometimes antagonistic 
dimensions in relation with subjective forms of participation and 
interaction with and via the media. Finally, we will also tap into the 
different constructs that social capital allows for and exploit their 
potential for the argument around network media potential to generate 
original forms of interaction and participation.

Applying genre theory to citizen participation in public policy making: 
Theoretical perspectives on participatory genres
Marie Dufrasne and Geoffroy Patriarche

Summary: This research is aimed at constructing a theoretical framework 
for the study of citizen participation in public policy making, based on 
genre theory. Drawing on various approaches to genre (rhetorical 
analysis, literary analysis, sociolinguistics, media studies, 
organisational communication, user interface design, and 
computermediated communication), this paper suggests a series of 
theoretical perspectives on participatory genres, a notion freely 
borrowed from Erickson (1997) and applied to the methods, activities or 
applications of citizen participation in public policy making (e.g. 
consultations, petitions, citizens panels, opinion polls). The proposed 
theoretical framework takes into account the contexts of participation 
(conceived as both situations and communities) as well as the 
interrelationships between participatory genres, and focuses on the 
repertoires of elements (Lacey, 2000) that characterize participatory 
genres in terms of 'why', 'how', 'what', 'who/m', when' and 'where' 
(Orlikowski & Yates, 1998). It is argued that approaching citizen 
participation in public policy making through the lens of participatory 
genres is valuable to both researchers and practitioners.

Parameters of online participation: Conceptualising civic contingencies
Peter Dahlgren

Summary: The new online media obviously offer very impressive 
opportunities for participation. Yet, we need to specify more carefully 
what we mean by participation, and try to illuminate its key elements. 
Thus, after first presenting some overarching, scene-setting 
perspectives on participation and digital media, this presentation 
offers five basic parameters of participation, a conceptual framework 
intended to be empirically useful. The five are: trajectories, 
modalities, motivations, sociality and visibility. Each parameter has 
some further subcategories; for example, I suggest three basic 
trajectories: consumption, civil society and politics. These obviously 
are entangled with each other in the real world, yet the distinctions 
allow us to focus on political participation as a specific form. To what 
extent and how participation is realised depends on many factors. Here I 
highlight the notion of contingency, underscoring the point that a 
complex interplay of conditions and circumstances both make possible and 
delimit political participation. I look at three sets of contingencies: 
institutional features of online media (illustrated with a brief look at 
Google), attributes of the mainstream online environments that have a 
clear hegemonic character, and established social patterns of use that 
can also impact on this environment. For the latter, I highlight what I 
call the solo sphere as an emerging feature of online political 
participation - the tendency towards isolated, individualised 
communication. I then run these three types of contingencies across the 
five parameters to arrive at a preliminary perspective on how the online 
environment both facilitates and deflects political participation of the 
non-mainstream kind.

Competing by participation - A winning marketing tool
Nóra Nyir?, Tamás Csordás and Dóra Horváth

Summary: In the new media and communications context audiences are more 
empowered than ever to make their voices heard. Audiences, consumers are 
actively influencing the marketing activities of firms and brands. In 
the new dominant logic of marketing, firms are constrained to engage in 
complex processes of exchange with their consumers. To be able to keep 
up with the competition and media noise, it is crucial for companies to 
involve their audiences, potential consumers. Consumer participation in 
this context does not end with special attention for the brand, as 
companies turned to electronic word-of-mouth and other interactive 
messages concerning the company. Consumers themselves not only create 
advertisements and broadcast them in favour of or against organizations, 
they also create new products via a number of co-creative procedures and 
they are pushing the organizations to launch new pricing models. 
Therefore the scope of user-generated content is rather diverse from a 
marketing perspective. By generating an overview of the participation 
phenomenon in marketing and marketing communications literature, this 
article endeavours to reconcile the related taxonomy used in the 
business and marketing literature by an extended summary and explanation 
of the key terms. This will allow us to conclude that the most important 
central theme of the very diverse literature of audience participation 
lies in the fact that it is inspired, facilitated, established or 
maintained by the participating corporation as a core element. As such, 
participating corporations manage to extract a source of additional 
satisfaction and thus an added value that in a long term can be 
transformed into a competitive advantage.

Mediated public voices need theory to be heard
Nurçay Türko?lu

Summary: This article, grounded in the need for critical theory for a 
better comprehension of the social world, engages with the concept of 
critical media literacy as an example of a combination of distance and 
involvement. Critical theory, and more particularly critical media 
literacy, is seen as a wordly matter that can play a significant role in 
both theoretical and practical worlds. The article then focuses on the 
mediation of public voices and the need for critical media literacy to 
deal with media participation. Motivated by mediatic hopes, audiences, 
media scholars and media professionals can appeal to critical media 
literacy to go beyond the barriers of conservatism, intolerance and 
consumerism. At the same time, all three groups face many different 
restrictions that impede upon the organisation of critical media 
literacy, and its focus on participation.

When the museum becomes the message for participating audiences
Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt and Pille Runnel

Summary: This article aims to analyse the notion of participation in the 
museum context using an audience studies perspective. Museums are 
increasingly competing for the attention of the public in the arenas of 
leisure and education, the process of which is part of the 
commercialisation of the museum institution. In addition, a turn towards 
interactivity is taking place in museums, and while that might serve 
well to revitalise the museum and bring it closer to its audiences, it 
does not sufficiently support realisation of the change of the museum 
institution into a laboratory-type museum (de Varine, 1988; van Mensch, 
2005) - a concept defined through the communicative and democratic 
aspects of the museum. As is the case with many public institutions, the 
democratisation of society is increasing the need for transparency and 
accountability, which in turn has brought public engagement to the 
attention of the museum. According to Simon (2010), museums need to find 
a balance between the activities of the museum and audiences: the 
(potential) need to overcome the shyness of expertise combined with the 
need to organise the (potential) flood of amateurs. These different 
evolutions - the ambiguity of expertise, the move towards interactivity 
and the need for public engagement - increase the need to understand 
participation at museums. This paper discusses the ideas of what 
participation means in the museum context through Giddens' framework of 
democratising democracy (1995) by looking at the museum through three 
key roles: as cultural, economic and public institutions, each of which 
has different reasons for and meanings of museum participation.

A critical analysis of two audience prototypes and their participatory 
dimensions
Miroljub Radojkovi? and Ana Milojevi?

Summary: This article discusses how the concept of audience theory has 
been developed within two basic intellectual traditions, resulting in 
two basic prototypes. On one side, there is the trajectory of the "mass 
audience" that was created and developed parallel with the emergence of 
the media of mass communication. The mass audience is regarded as a 
multilayer collectivity, residing at the end of a successive linear 
communication process - sender, channel, message, receiver and effects. 
In this one-way communication model, the audience is primarily the 
receiving structure, with little or no opportunity for feedback and 
participation in the communication process. The other prototype is 
linked to the development of new digital media and the internet; here 
the public is theoretically considered as "cross media" and active. The 
audience of new media is seen as a heterogeneous and structural 
collective in the communication model that characterizes the flow of 
information "many to many". This prototype attributes to the new, active 
audiences or users unlimited power to participate and shape the 
communication processes. We discuss features of the two prototypes, 
including media usage, media access, information resources, time 
engagement and functions derived from media use. The most important 
feature we take up, however, is participation. We point out the problems 
and limitations of both prototypes in this regard. On the one hand the 
study of audiences has long been rooted in the concept of mass audience 
and limited with its primal orientation towards the effects of mass 
communication, while on the other hand, the emerging prototype 2 is all 
too easily granted participatory capacities, especially concerning the 
public sphere. Therefore, the theorists of new and old media must step 
outside the prevailing postulates and consider the audience beyond the 
two prevailing prototypes in order to further deepen our knowledge and 
understanding of contemporary audiences and their participation.

The participatory turn in the publishing industry: Rhetorics and practices
Francesca Pasquali

Summary: One of the cultural and media areas in which the issue of 
participation - with all its ambiguity - has recently emerged to full 
significance is the area of literature and publishing. Following the 
music, film and television industries, the publishing industry is in 
fact facing a vast renewal due to digitalization processes (assuming 
digitalization as a complex negotiation between social and technological 
forces). New textual formats and devices (such as e-books), new forms of 
distribution (e.g. online retailing), new marketing strategies (e.g. in 
the social media), new models of business (e.g. the print on demand) are 
becoming increasingly popular. At the same time digitalization has 
enabled the creation of a whole new participatory, grassroots publishing 
market, while grassroots storytelling and social media (e.g. Twitter, 
Facebook), used as a collaborative writing environment, bring out 
participatory forms of online writing that continue the tradition 
started almost fifteen years ago by the so-called "hypertextual fiction" 
and the avant-gardes before that. In this context, by addressing the 
theoretical debate and recent social discourses on the e-book, this 
article suggests a recognition of the diversity of the forms of 
participation that are ascribed to the new publishing scenario. Secondly 
- moving from the Foucauldian notion of author-function - the article 
solicits the relationship between author and reader in the contemporary 
digital publishing scenario and addresses the question whether and under 
what conditions the supposed participatory turn in writing and 
publishing we are facing promotes the construction of a polyphonic, 
co-authored, recognizable, collaborative dialogue, or rather points to a 
cultural landscape where "all discourses […] would develop in the 
anonymity of a murmur" (Foucault, 1969).
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