Audience Transformations : Shifting Audience Positions in Late Modernity

The concept of the audience is changing. In the twenty-first century there are novel configurations of user practices and technological capabilities that are altering the way we understand and trust media organizations and representations, how we participate in society, and how we construct our social relations. This book embeds these transformations in a societal, cultural, technological, ideological, economic and historical context, avoiding a naive privileging of technology as the main societal driving force, but also avoiding the media-centric reduction of society to the audiences that are situated within. Audience Transformations provides a platform for a nuanced and careful analysis of the main changes in European communicational practices, and their social, cultural and technological affordances.

Nico Carpentier is Associate Professor at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium and Lecturer at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is also an executive board member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).

Kim Christian Schrøder is Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies at Roskilde University, Denmark.

Lawrie Hallett is Senior Lecturer in Radio at the University of Bedfordshire, UK.