Ontological Ordering : Achieving Audience in Internet Practice

Sammanfattning: Against the backdrop of changing technological conditions of the contemporary media landscape, new questions arise regarding how audience can be can problematized and theorized. This dissertation seeks to shift the focus from conventional assumptions of what audience is to an empirical exploration of the specificities of the process through which audience is achieved in practice. This involves revisiting and questioning ontological assumptions about the nature of audience.  The aim of the study is to develop an alternative approach for theorizing audience. A three year and seven months’ exploration of one example of an audience practice, the empirical focus is on the Gallifrey Base, an internet discussion forum for viewers of the TV series Doctor Who. To explore the specifics of audience as reality-in-practice, a methodological approach is developed that adjusts ethnographic research methods to align with a concern with ontology in audience practice – an audienceography. This dissertation thereby makes questions of ontology an empirical concern, drawing attention to how practices make up realities – that is, to how ontology is achieved. By turning to theoretical and methodological insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this study sets out to particularize how audience is achieved on the Gallifrey Base.    Three chapters detail and analyze how practices on the Gallifrey Base achieve audience. Each build on the findings from the previous chapter, attending to ontological ordering in different ways, delving deeper into the details of the unfolding audience practice. The findings show how multiple ontologies can co-exist. In contrast to classic communication models, it is argued that the significance of communication by other means is about more than sending and receiving messages. An implication for the theorization of audience is that communication can have other purposes, as messages may be sent and received in order to maintain a particular communication practice.  In relation to audience studies, the dissertation makes a theoretical contribution by connecting insights from recent debates on ontology and multiplicity in STS to empirical explorations of audience, thus widening the scope of the theoretical explanatory basis. The empirical contribution is to demonstrate that rather than a natural and stable structure, much work is invested in trying to maintain multiplicity even in the single audience practice of the Gallifrey Base forum. This suggests that ontologically fixed and given theoretical notions of audience are not compatible with contemporary audience practice. Audience practice, it is found, may include a range of multiple modes, which calls for attentiveness to the situated work carried out by various actors in the achievement of audience. In light of these findings, it is argued that approaching audience as ontology-in-practice provides a foundation for further theorizations of contemporary audience.  Connecting the findings from Ontological Ordering to wider concerns in the humanities and social sciences – a concern with audience becomes a concern with the processes and implications of how we interact with media material and media devices, which in contemporary media environment is intensely technological.