The Handbook of Media Audiences

Book Detail

Author/Editor(s): Virginia Nightingale
Publication Date: May 6, 2011
ISBN-10: 1405184183
ISBN-13: 978-1405184182
Language: English
Edition: 1
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Size: 3.25 MB
Format: pdf

Book Description

Digital media have dramatically increased the nature and diversity of the ways people can access media content, and the assumption that audiences occupy a position of ‘reception’ is giving way to an understanding of audiences as media-active. As this handbook demonstrates, the study of audiences is shifting and changing accordingly.

Working from the assumption that a better understanding will evolve if future researchers have a solid understanding of the complexity of ‘audience’ and ‘audiences’ and of existing research traditions, the contributors to this handbook offer a wealth of research wisdom and expertise, depth of theoretical engagement with the field, and creativity in the imagination of research interventions. They insist that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ way of doing audience research, but that the field works best by identifying particular ‘audience problems’ and applying the best theories and research methods to solving them.

Placing the emphasis on technologies, theories, research methods and research pragmatics, The Handbook of Media Audiences brings together leading international scholars to provide a comprehensive overview of the complexity and diversity of audience studies.

About the Author

Virginia Nightingale held the position of Associate Professor with the School of Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney until retiring in 2010. Now an independent scholar, her publications include Media and Audiences: New Perspectives (with Karen Ross, 2003) and Critical Perspectives: Media and Audiences (with Karen Ross, 2003), and New Media Worlds: Challenges for Convergence (ed. with Tim Dwyer, 2007).

Reviews

This much needed volume provides the most up-to-date, cutting edge research and scholarship on one of the most researched but still little understood media concepts, that of 'the audience'. Virginia Nightingale has done an excellent job in bringing together a diverse body of contributors who write from various perspectives across medias and theories of audience. Essayists point to the ways in which our relationships with media are entwined with how we think about ourselves as citizens and architects of our own here and now, no longer simply in thrall to other people's versions of the world but creating our own.

--Karen Ross, University of Liverpool

At a time when our relations to media are in flux and established notions of audiences under question, this volume offers an invaluable guide to the state of our present knowledge, the questions we now need to ask, and the concepts and methods we can use to tackle them. Admirably comprehensive and with original contributions from leading scholars in the field this is a volume that everyone should have on their shelf.

--Graham Murdock, Loughborough Univeristy

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