Commercial- and governmental institutions have been generally unsuccessful in

reaching out to media audiences online because they have failed to see the
Internet as a mass medium with its own genres of discourse. The main reason is
a problematic definition of what an audience is and how these differences apply
online. Symptoms could include underestimating how much gamer fans expect to
be involved in the development of games and software, and the use of the
Internet to illegally copy and download music and film.

Although it would be fruitful and interesting to explore these symptoms, this

project will focus on arguing for a new type of audience online: the cyber-
audience. This denotation is used to indicate that different sets of audiences that
exist online must be understood from other points of view other than the
traditional models that have been used on audiences in ‘old’ media, like
television broadcasting or newspapers. The cyber-audience is significantly
different from traditional media audiences and this project will illustrate this by
giving examples of some of the symptoms and concludingly recommend that
institutions (be it commercial or governmental) should skew their view towards
audiences from a Public Relations-point of view, as publics; groups of people that
are essential for an organisation’s survival and subsequently positive
relationships must be created and maintained.

1.0 How do institutions define and maintain audiences in

cyberspace?

1.1 Governance and participatory genre

This first section will take a look at audience theory, with particular focus on the
governance cycle, as it is helpful in explaining the relationship between those
who produce media content and those who consume it. The second section will
also look into the concept of virtual communities and explain why it is more
helpful to look at virtual communities as ‘participatory genre,’ as Thomas
Erickson calls it.

Audiences exist where media texts meet with people’s social experiences and
knowledges and are used as a cultural resource. John Hartley claims it’s silly
audiences exist, but rather that of invisible fictions - a construct produced
institutionally in order to justify their existence (Hartley 1992). Previous
discussions have resolved around a focus upon audience research as a form of
social \ ideological control, ergo an assumption that the media is bad. Mark
Balnaves and Tom O’Regan suggest a ‘governance-cycle approach,’ which
focuses on the strategy, plans of action and the ethical relations of managing
audiences. It turns out audience research techniques are rarely analysed or
understood. Much policy is based on assumptions on effects of the media. These
assumptions enable groups to make claims about what an audience is or how it
functions. Balnaves and O’Regan claim that ‘[k]nowledge about media audiences
is integrally tied up with the strategies and plans of action of industry players,
professional campaigners and interest groups who take up and apply this
knowledge to prosecute their own agendas (Balnaves in Balnaves et. al 2002, p.
10)’. One example of this might be the trend for government agencies to
commission private media agencies to participate in the development of social
marketing campaigns, like the ‘Quit’ campaign of 1997-98 in Australia or the
‘Every k over is a killer’ campaign of 2001-02. What Balnaves and O’Regan
propose, is a governance cycle that enables theorists to analyse this process,
that includes a socially productive and ethical character:

According to Balnaves and O’Regan’s model, institutions are managers and

provide or regulate services. They become audience-minded when they define
their audiences in the form of media typologies. They then switch to research-
modality in order to find out how to reach their audiences. The institutions
become campaign-minded when they execute their tactics in order to reach the
audience. They then evaluate the campaign, and the audience recognises itself
as a citizen, a governed and self-governing subject. The premise behind this
theory, although implicit, is that there is a clear distinction between media
producers and media consumers.

So far, there are certain things that are comprehensible about audiences:
 Audiences only exist after being defined according to a certain ideology or
motive.
 Audience members are made up of individuals, but one thing that the
governance approach implies is that individuals exist, but are defined as a
specific typology in order for an institution exploit that segment and to
make a profit.
 Since there is a correlation between certain strategic motives of media
producers and audience research, the governance cycle approach is
helpful because it creates distance and allows for empirical analysis.

1.2 Virtual community as participatory genre

This second section will briefly discuss virtual communities and suggest a
framework of genre, proposed by Thomas Erickson will be helpful in
understanding the cyber-audience.
Terry Flew, in his chapter on virtual cultures, uses a quaint definition of virtual
community by Howard Rheingold (Flew 2002, p. 76), but this project will limit
itself to define virtual community as long term, text-based, computer-mediated
communication amongst large groups on the Internet. Flew traces the
relationship between this project’s discussion about audiences and the
assumptions ‘about the virtues of community, or of the ‘online’ and ‘offline’ worlds
(Flew 2002 p. 94)’ claiming that Internet research is very much empirical. If that is
so, this means that scholars researching the Internet are much more aware of
ideology and how it is manifested online, which is exactly what the governance
cycle tries to deal with. Implicitly, Flew argues that because the Internet is a
highly interactive medium with the option for users to be anonymous, political and
commercial ideologies are lucid in these communities. Flew’s conclusion to his
chapter on virtual cultures is proof of a point of view that is very much aware of
the ideological problem:

‘…the challenge of virtual cultures is the question of how to

positively engage with the visible and active expression of
difference, heterogeneity, and sometimes incommensurate
moral and social values, as new media technologies develop
in ways that move such questions from the ‘back stage’ of to
the centre of contemporary politics and culture.’
(Flew 2002, p. 95)

The main motive for Erickson to move away from the notion of virtual community
to what he calls ‘participatory genre,’ is the use of the concept for understanding
the underlying discourse: ‘[g]enre shifts the focus from issues such as the nature
and degree of relationships among ‘community members’, to the purpose of the
communication, its regularities of form and substance, and the institutional,
social, and technological forces which underlie those regularities (Erickson
1997)’. Erickson does, however, recognize that the concept of genre is limited
because ‘whereas most genres have a distinction between producer and
consumer, or author and audience, in on-line discourse the distinction between
the producer and the consumer is blurred (Erickson 1997).’

Because the concept of genre deals with the underlying discourse of

communication on the Internet, it is possible to draw parallels between issues
raised by post-modern scholars, particularly Michel Foucault, and include them in
discussing the nature of the cyber-audience. Since this discussion has mostly
been focused on political and commercial motives behind audience research and
finding ways to look at audiences empirically, this works well with post-modern
theory, as post modernism is a very useful tool when analysing the language of
power that exists in certain events, or texts. It looks at how realities can be
created where ‘truths’ can be stabilised by suspending it in a certain discourse of
power upheld by grand narratives.
From this section, there are a number of things that are helpful in uncovering the
nature of the cyber-audience.
 Virtual communities are highly interactive and the basis for communication
is often produced by those who consume it, thus blurring the boundaries.
 Internet researchers are very aware that producers of content are
motivated by ideology of some kind
 Looking at virtual community as participatory genre is useful when looking
at the underlying discourse of Internet based communication.

2.0 How are ideologies (or motives) evident in a new media

environment?

This section will seek to bring the pointers identified in the two preceding sections
together, and with the additional basis of post-modern theory it will discuss the
notion of a cyber-audience, contrasting with examples from case-studies.

2.1 Power lies in numbers

So far, the project has shown that the traditional view of the audience is a one-
way communication process. The placement of power is usually with the
institutions that need audiences to accumulate power. In an online setting, this
view is not sufficient.

The most important feature of post modernism is the refusal to believe in a

centralization of power and grand narratives. What describes the current view of
the audience could be best described as fragmented. Sue Turnbull in her text
Figuring the Audience (Cunningham & Turner, 2000) acknowledges that the
concept of audience-ship is truly post-modern and describes the major problem
as ‘how to pin the audience down: just how can an entire range of media
practices in which people engage be limited and defined (Turnbull in
Cunningham & Turner, 2000, p. 86)?’ Because of this it is possible to claim that
media abundance is the very source of audience fragmentation. John Banks
argues that online communities use totally different ways of constructing
‘practices, expectations, materials, tools and technologies (Banks is Balnaves
2002, p. 189)’. He speculates that the reason for the failure of online community
building between institutions and online audiences can be because of the
paradigm of one-way communication in order to influence and create audiences.
What is implicitly argued is therefore that one has to develop larger degrees of
interactivity with audiences. The question is, are institutions ready for this? One
thing seems sure, the development of a more interactive and dialogue-based
approach is unavoidable. This is especially evident in the development of games,
in this case, The Sims, as Bank also has noted: ‘The Sims game provides an
excellent case study of the computer game industry enlisting and leveraging the
online community fans into a commercially successful network (ibid, p. 198).’
Hard-core gamers increasingly expect that companies will listen to, engage with
and support the fans that build around titles. This new gamer audience follows a
logic that is similar to the discourse of power that is explained by Foucault. The
way he sees it, power is not centralized to one place. He explains that knowledge
is power, and therefore, those who control the knowledge, have the power
(Defert et al 1994). With fragmentation comes a cluster of small institutions that
know that power lies in numbers. As a result, the larger the audience, the more
power. In this case, the power balance has been divided up more evenly; the
gamers themselves have realised that they are an institution and have the
capability to influence existing power structures.

2.2 Reality vs. the Imaginary

If we follow Foucault’s argument further, he says that a text is real because it is

actively produced through discourses of power, in other words the way language
is structured around an event by the groupings that are the most influential.
Baudrillard argues that we are now a hyper-real society, no longer ‘real.’ It no
longer has to be rational, ‘since it is no longer measured against some ideal or
negative instances (Baudrillard 1988, p. 168)’. Instead, we simulate reality. Jason
Sternberg, researcher at the Creative Industries Research and Applications
Centre at Queensland University of Technology, has also noted this when
exploring the issue of ‘how audiences are ‘created’ and subsequently used as the
basis for public commentary and market development (Balnaves in Balnaves et
al 2002, p. 3)’. He explains how marketers used the concept of ‘Generation X’ to
create an audience to which it was possible to market to, but paradoxally
enough, resists definition. Sternberg argues that it is ‘a textual site created by
those power structures that can then be ‘peopled (Hartley 1999, p. 21)’ at certain
times to serve certain purposes (Sternberg in Balnaves et al 2002, p. 84). The
implication of this (which Sternberg also notices) is that it can be said that
Generation X only ever really existed within media discourse. Therefore, the
paradox of Generation X’s resistance to any type of definition is a definable
characteristic of the concept. As Sternberg explains: ‘one of the key features of
Generation X as simulacra is the blurring of distinctions between truth and
falsehood and reality and the imaginary (ibid, p. 95)’.

To summarise this section, there are some important pointers to bring further:
 The contradicting fact that media abundance is the source for the
fragmentation of audiences is important because it implies that on one
hand, it is more likely for an individual to use a specific medium if it is
more available, and on the other hand, does it mean that the same notion
can be transferred when looking at how audiences are manifested online;
is it conceivable that content abundance is the very source of audience
fragmentation online?
 It is very likely that very interactive audiences online, like the hard-core
gamer audience, are very involved in the development of content. So
involved, as a matter of fact, that they see themselves as such a group to
 be reckoned with, that the success or failure of games or software is
based on how interactive the developer is with its audience.
 It is also possible to argue that an audience, which on a basic level of
reality does not exist, can be created by actively produced through certain
discourses.

3.0 The Cyber.Audience

In this conclusion, this project will bring together the points from the previous
sections and discuss whether it is possible to extract a notion of the nature of the
cyber-audience.

One of the points of the previous section is very important to this discussion: that
media abundance is the very source of audience fragmentation. As effects-theory
has been divided between theorists, dependency theory can be useful in this
setting because it attempts to investigate the relationship between different
systems and how they affect audiences in how they use media. Sandra Ball-
Rokeach and Melvin DeFleur first proposed dependency theory. Dependency,
they say, develops when ‘certain kind of media content are used to gratify
specific needs or when certain media forms are consumed habitually as a ritual,
to fill time, or as an escape or distraction (Littlejohn 1996, p. 348)’. Needs, they
say, are not necessarily personal, but may be shaped by ‘culture or by various
social conditions (ibid, p. 350)’. That means that outside aspects act as
limitations on what and how media can be used and on the availability of
alternatives for non-media. Consequently, The lower the socio-economic status,
the more dependent an individual is on one segment or medium, and the more
they will be affected cognitively, affectively and behaviourally by that segment.
This argument also implies one thing that Terry Flew explores in great detail; the
digital divide (Flew 2002, p. 84). Following the discussion above to this, it is now
possible to ascertain that:

1. Most members of a cyber-audience are located in developed countries with

high-income economies.

Since audiences online have been identified as being highly interactive and
expect to enter a two-way communication dialogue with media producers it is
possible to say that:

2. Most members of a cyber-audience are motivated by certain ideologies when

they are active online, and they are aware of it.
Because of blurred boundaries between producers of content and consumers of
content, and because the level of knowledge is equalised, it is possible to argue
that:
3. Most members of a cyber-audience see themselves on a more equal level
with producers of content.

Because it is possible to create an audience that in reality does not exist, by

framing it in a certain type of discourse (or as this project has identified it as:
genre), much like Generation X, it is possible to argue that:

4. The cyber-audience’s primary demographic characteristic is it’s diversity, and

because of its ‘semiotic excess (Sternberg in Balnaves et al 2002, p. 95)’ the fact
that it cannot be properly defined is a defining characteristic.

Recommendations

These characteristics identified about the cyber-audience share very similar

characteristics with how Public Relations practitioners define their publics:
‘people who are somehow involved or interdependent with organisations and
social entities (Cutlip et al 2000, p. 2)’. In fact, the normal four-step PR
management process bears striking resemblance to Balnaves and O’Regan’s
governance cycle model (ibid, p. 341). An important thing to remember is that PR
programs are very much a part of the plans of action institutions implement to
pursue a certain ideology. Nevertheless, looking at how PR is defined, as ‘the
management function that identifies, establishes, and maintains mutually
beneficial relationships between an organisation and the publics on whom its
success or failure depends (ibid, 2000)’, can illustrate that when interactivity is
increased and an audience has developed expectations towards involvement
and decision-making, it becomes a relationship. As stated in the introduction,
there are many aspects of the topic that would be fruitful and fascinating to
continue exploring. Because of the limitations of this project, however, it will
conclude by strongly suggesting that to understand audiences online, an
empirical, interdisciplinary approach is needed.

Bibliography:

Balnaves, M. and O’Regan, T. (2002), “Governing Audiences,” In Balnaves, M.

O’Regan, T. & Sternberg, J. (2002), Mobilising the Audience, pp. 10 – 28
Banks, J. (2002), “Gamers as Co-Creators: enlisting the virtual audience – a
report from the net face,” In Balnaves, M. O’Regan, T. & Sternberg, J. (2002),
Mobilising the Audience, pp. 213 – 234

Baudrillard, J. (1988), Selected Writings, Cambridge: Polity Press

Cutlip, S., Center, A., Broom, G. (2000), Effective Public Relations (8th Edn),
Prentice Hall

Defert, D., Ewald, F. (1994), Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988 / Michel Foucault; edition
etablie sous la direction de Daniel Defert et Francois Ewald avec la collaboration
de Jacques Lagrange, Paris, Galimard

Erickson, T. (1997), “Virtual Community as Participatory Genre,” in Proceedings

of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 6-
10, 1997, Maui, Hawaii

Flew, T. (2002), “Chapter 4: Virtual Cultures,” In New Media: An Introduction,

Oxford Press, pp. 76 – 95

Foucalt, M. (1979), The history of sexuality, vol. 1, London, Penguin

Hartley, J. (1992), Tele-ology: Studies in Television, London: Routledge

Littlejohn, S. (1996), Theories of Human Communication (5th Edn), Wadsworth

Sternberg, J. (2002), “I didn’t get it, but I liked the name:” Generational Profiling
through Generation X,” In Balnaves, M. O’Regan, T. & Sternberg, J. (2002),
Mobilising the Audience, pp. 81 - 103

Turnbull, S. (2000), “Figuring the Audience,” In Cunningham, S. & Turner, G.

(Eds), The Australian Television Book, Chapter 12

Contents:
0.0 Introduction
1.0 How do institutions define and maintain audiences in cyberspace?
1.1 Governance and participatory genre
1.2 Virtual community as participatory genre
2.0 How are ideologies (or motives) evident in a new media environment?
2.1 Power lies in numbers
2.2 Reality vs. the Imaginary
3.0 The Cyber.Audience
4.0 Recommendations
5.0 Bibliography