Audience research at the crossroads : the ‘implied audience’ in media and cultural theory

Articles available via LSE Research Online are protected under intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law discussed earlier versions of these ideas with various colleagues over the past year and am grateful for their constructive and critical responses. Audience research is at a crossroads. Looking backwards, the legacy of diverse research traditions (critical communications, feminist theory, literary reception-aesthetics, interpretative microsociology and others) which converged on audience research can still be clearly discerned. If one looks forwards from these 'new audience studies' (Curran, 1990), there seems some danger of losing one's way, although again diverse possibilities exist. Thus, this paper asks 'what next' for the agenda of audience research. I will argue that the future agenda should seek to strengthen external relations between audience research and other domains of media and cultural studies, for in these other domains the case for explicitly considering audience research has been noted but not thus far accepted. Yet what I describe as 'the implied audience' plays a significant, albeit little acknowledged, part in much of media and social/cultural theory. While there has been a mutual reluctance for audience researchers and those in policy, production or textual studies to engage in dialogue, one may also account for the poor acceptance of audience research, at least in part, by pointing to the troubled state of audience research itself. As I Livingstone, in press), audience research is losing its direction because, through an internal narrative of progress, a canonical version of audience studies is being constructed. In this canonical narrative, one of the diverse traditions of audience research, that of British cultural studies, is emerging as predominant, and overviews of the field seem to slip between talking of audience studies and cultural studies as if the former were now subsumed by the latter. studies and feminist research). In both cases, though, it is unclear which constitute the new audience research, and this seems increasingly to refer just to the cultural studies approach). A similar lack of clarity (itself a casualty of 3 problem is that this leads to a closing down of the theoretical diversity that was so exciting and productive ten or fifteen years ago. It also seems that cultural studies may be unwilling to take audience research forwards by addressing the burgeoning number of criticisms being made of the new audience studies. the convergence of …