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Television & New Media
2019, Vol. 20(2) 170­–183
Audiences in an Age of © The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1527476418811118
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Sonia Livingstone1

Abstract
This article critically examines how fears of audience gullibility, ignorance, and
exploitation impede media studies’ response to the pressing challenges posed by the
growing power of social media platforms and their innovative datafication practices. I
revisit the history of audience research to show how empirical findings contested the
pejorative conception of the audience problematically yet persistently imagined by
theorists of media power during the twentieth century. As media studies joins other
disciplines in responding to the growing datafication of society, I propose that the
circuit of culture model can help theorize media (including platform and algorithmic)
power by opening up the hermeneutic and action space between production and
consumption. In this way, critical scholarship might more effectively analyze such
metaprocesses as mediatization and datafication precisely by recognizing rather than
erasing audiences’ relation to both the everyday lifeworld and the public world of
citizen action, regulatory intervention, and the wider society.

Keywords
audiences, media power, mediatization, datafication, audience commodity, circuit of
culture

Hopes and fears about media audiences have oscillated over history, tightly linked to
society’s hopes and fears about the power of the media and the uses to which they are
put (Butsch 2008). Claims about audiences during the (more recent) history of media
research have oscillated in tandem (Katz 1980). When public and intellectual concerns
over state, commercial, or media power are high, and when new media technologies

1London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Corresponding Author:
Sonia Livingstone, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political
Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: [email protected]
Livingstone 171

emerge, critical attention is rightly drawn to the media’s ideological influence on and/
or economic exploitation of audiences. In more equitable times, critical recognition of
ordinary people’s agency and values in engaging creatively with and through media
texts and technologies in diverse lifeworld contexts comes to the fore. In today’s heady
climate of media panics—over so-called fake news, election hacking, Internet and
smartphone addiction, the algorithmic amplification of hate speech, viral scams, filter
bubbles and echo chambers, discriminatory data profiling and data breaches, the crisis
in quality journalism, the demise of face-to-face conversation, and a host of digital
anxieties about youth—fears about audience gullibility, ignorance, and exploitation
are again heightened in popular and academic debate.
Critical attention in media studies and beyond is urgently examining what it means
that the global tech companies Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and
others already dwarf the mass media (and all other) corporations that dominated in the
twentieth century (Moore and Tambini 2018). Audiences’ attention for the press and
broadcasting is declining, turning toward a fast-changing array of online and social
media service. The emerging forms of digital engagement extend far beyond the tradi-
tionally bounded genres of information and entertainment seemingly to encompass
every dimension of people’s public and private lives, hurtling us toward the “media-
tion of everything” (Livingstone 2009).
To theorize recent and profound changes, media scholars are reasserting monolithic
accounts of power that tend to downplay or exclude audiences and the significance of
the lifeworld. One example is the current European fascination with “mediatization,”
the “double-sided development in which media emerge as semi-autonomous institu-
tions in society at the same time as they become integrated into the very fabric of
human interaction in various social institutions like politics, business, or family”
(Hjarvard 2008, 30). More broadly, however, media studies is adding its voice to a
much wider debate among the social sciences, policy-makers, and the public over
“datafication”—the quantification, recording, and analysis of a phenomenon or, more
ambitiously, the world and the human activity it includes (Mayer-Schönberger and
Cukier 2013). But in “this age of ubiquitous computing, high levels of social media
use and sensor-embedded physical environments . . . digital data about people’s behav-
iours and bodies are ceaselessly generated, on their own behalf and by others” (Lupton
and Williamson 2017, 782). The result is a new form of power exercised by “those
with access to databases, processing power, and data-mining expertise” (Andrejevic
2014, 1676).
What does it mean for ordinary people—whether conceived as audiences, publics,
citizens, consumers, or users—that their personal data (and therefore they them-
selves?) are increasingly tracked, sorted, and monetized? Some predictions about
datafication border on science fiction, conjuring dystopian imagery of the displace-
ment of human by artificial intelligence or the transmogrification of people into
cyborgs in ways reminiscent of the Wachowskis’ dystopian cinematic vision of The
Matrix (1999) or, a more relevant if less critically acclaimed film, The Circle (2017),
based on Dave Eggers’ book of the same title. Of course, there is nothing new about
science fiction’s fascination with technological dystopias. But as The Washington Post
172 Television & New Media 20(2)

said of The Circle, it is not only a “relentless broadside against the corrosive effects of
the connected life . . . as subtle as a sponsored tweet,” but it relies on a view of ordinary
people as “distracted into idiocy by the insatiable demands and worthless pleasures of
the Internet” (Charles 2013). In the digital age, Eggers suggests, people will prove
themselves manipulable, naïve, and without critical analysis, irrespective of gender,
class, or culture and of the collective power that these social determinations can mobi-
lize. If, as portrayed, people voluntarily give their attention, disregarding their privacy
and sacrificing their autonomy out of a misguided perception that what is on offer is
what they want and need, global platforms will surely impose on society unchecked
their discriminatory, exclusionary, and exploitative logics, until we “find ourselves
toiling productively away in the DotCompound, narrowcasting the rhythms of our
daily lives to an ever smaller and more exclusive audience of private corporations”
(Andrejevic 2002, 246).

Lessons From Audience History

Tensions between media power and audience agency have always been theorized,
more or less explicitly, more or less adequately, against the backdrop of wider socio-
political transformations (Katz 1980; Livingstone 1993). While an even longer history
of audiences can be and has been told (Butsch 2008; Fornäs 2014), the framing of
audiences in relation to their times—and especially the assumption of a gullible audi-
ence at a time when misuse of media power was widely feared—can be illustrated by
what Pooley and Socolow (2013) termed “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic.”
Conducted at a time of rising political crisis followed by world war, Hadley Cantril
(1940) studied the audience reception of what we would now call “fake news” in H.G.
Wells/Orson Welles’ radio drama announcing a Martian invasion. But empirical analy-
sis revealed, notwithstanding the widespread if mythical claims of a gullible audience,
that the vast majority of the audience exercised critical literacy of one kind or another
to check, deconstruct, contextualize, and resist unreasonable media influence.
Contestations over what is assumed or learned about audiences can run deep: Herta
Herzog’s (1944) early reading of soap opera fans, also from the Columbia School, is
another case in point (as discussed by Brunsdon 2000). My first lesson from history is
that, like any other text, what audiences say and what is said about them is open to
multiple readings; we must, thus, critically attend both to audiences themselves and to
what is said about them at the time and subsequently.
Notwithstanding the promise of such early studies, it seems they were out of step
with a socio-political climate, which preferred to construe audiences (in both the popu-
lar and elite imagination) as gullible, homogeneous, and unthinking. Boosted by major
funding for American social science, the quantitative tradition of media effects
research instead became dominant, seeking to harness the power of the mass media to
serve the propaganda needs of the state. This was followed by an even greater effort to
deploy that same power to service commercial interests during the 1950s consumer
boom. Yet media effects research struggled on scientific grounds for the reasons that
Cantril, Herzog, and others had already identified. Having to resign themselves for the
Livingstone 173

next few decades to the thesis of minimal effects (far from the mythical hypodermic
needle or silver bullet of media messaging hoped for by powerful funders), media
effects researchers found themselves forced step by reluctant step to complicate their
linear models of mass persuasion by adding ever more variables relating to the particu-
larity of audiences, meanings, and context. The second lesson, then, is that audiences
are not so gullible as popularly feared, precisely because they are neither homoge-
neous nor unthinking.
Nonetheless, the postwar rise of the theory of political economy of communication,
while rightly critical of media power, and pioneering in tracking the increasingly
global transformations of media companies along with the gradual capture of the state
by corporate power, has been persistently vulnerable to charges of technological and
economic determinisms because of its equally persistent neglect of social, psychologi-
cal, and cultural processes (Babe 2009). Empirical audiences—plural, located, reflex-
ive—are easily lost in the abstract nouns of political economy theory (market, civil
society, population, public opinion, the digital divide). In this tradition, neither the
quantitative findings of minimal effects nor the qualitative findings of critical audi-
ences received much of a hearing (with the possible exception of George Gerbner’s
ingenious but ultimately flawed effort to amplify minimal effects within the frame-
work of cultivation theory). Rather, a received version (of which more later) of the
idea of the commodified audience (“if you’re not paying for it, you are the product”)
attributed to Dallas Smythe and, before him, to the Frankfurt School, appears to have
legitimated the critical neglect not only of empirical audiences but also of those who
researched them. Or as Oscar Gandy ruefully remarks, on reviewing Richard Butsch’s
The Citizen Audience (2008),

I actually believed that I had audiences down pretty well from my little corner of critical
political economy. For me, audiences were industrial products, packaged for sale (or
short-term lease) to folks with something to sell. But Butsch’s finely detailed cultural and
political history of audiences in America offers another perspective that I believe is well
worth considering.

While such a rethinking is just what an audience researcher hopes for, this instance
came several decades after Stuart Hall’s (1973/1980) essay on encoding and decoding
triggered what Hall himself described as an “exciting” resurgence of critical interest in
audiences internationally.
For Hall and his colleagues at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, the desire was to know more about the everyday lives of people living in
media culture, including their interests and experiences as audiences, without taking
these as given. So researchers went out and talked to people, confounding those who
preferred staying in their office studying texts or imagining audiences to the quotidian
world of unpredictable living rooms, endless cups of tea, and knotty research ethics
procedures (Livingstone 1998). The payoff was considerable, however. Considerably
extending the insights of early qualitative research, a transformative picture emerged
of an active audience, an interpretative audience, far from simply subject to the causal
174 Television & New Media 20(2)

influences of powerful others. Not only were media effects minimal, but texts also
proved to be polysemic, necessarily open to audience interpretation, even resistance.
Technologies were found to be domesticated in unexpected ways, with unintended
consequences. Audiences were found to be diverse in ways unanticipated by producers
and marketers because of their diverse culture, history, community, and politics.
Among many outcomes, one was a critique of the implied audience still endemic
within critical theories of dominant media power. My third lesson, then, is that it is
time to end the binary formulation that pits media power against audience power,
instead recognizing that the circulation of meanings includes not only encoding but
also decoding and, today, audience encoding too. This should not be read as a celebra-
tion of individualism but, rather, as recognition of the structurally unequal yet semioti-
cally open processes of the circulation of culture (du Gay et al. 1997).

The Mediatization of Society

Over recent decades, I had thought media studies had reached a quiet (or, perhaps,
tired) settlement that recognizes both the theoretical co-constitution of the concepts of
media and audience as well as a commitment to exploring their empirical and contin-
gent interdependencies. But today, the nature of media power is shifting substantially,
along with deeper geopolitical changes, leaving critical scholarship scrambling to
keep up. In the rush, fragile settlements are easily undone. I illustrate this first by
reflecting on a debate close to home for European media studies and revealing of our
disciplinary assumptions. The theory of mediatization—“an historical process whereby
communication media become in some respect more ‘important’ in expanding areas of
life and society [and . . .] institutionalized technologies of communication expand in
extension and power” (Fornäs 2014, 484)—has captured the imagination of many
notable scholars as a way to conceptualize the changing role of media in history
(Couldry and Hepp 2017; Hjarvard 2008; Lundby 2014; Lunt and Livingstone 2016).
But it already supports Katz’s case that as attention is drawn to the analysis of media
power, interest in audiences is eclipsed.
The theory of mediatization builds on earlier ideas of mediation. Again, the wider
socio-political context is relevant—in the last decades of the twentieth century, we saw
the end of the postwar settlement, the rise of lifestyle politics, reflexive modernity, and
the risk society, and above all—globalization. Questions of power were being newly
contested, newly theorized—as more dispersed yet more extensive, as more diverse in
form yet more convergent in effect. For many scholars, the sense of new possibilities
was expressed by the theory of mediation—“the fundamentally, but fundamentally
uneven, dialectical process in which institutionalized media are involved in the general
circulation of symbols in social life” (Silverstone 2005, 189). Audience researchers
began to research the experiences of people who live in media (Deuze 2012), in a media
world (Bird 2003), and hear their stories (Thumim 2012). The established focus on
audiences sitting in front of TV sets at home, in discrete times and places, gave way to
a recognition of audiences being everywhere and nowhere (Bird 2003), reconnected to
society through their roles as citizens and consumers, elites and migrants, homeworkers
Livingstone 175

and activists, and more. Audience as object became audiencing as process (Fiske 1992),
transcending binaries of public/private by refocusing on people’s mediated participa-
tion in society, whether through fandom, protest, or other forms of public connection
(Couldry et al. 2010; Livingstone 2013).
A range of consequences followed, as audience researchers embraced the global-
ization of our topic, centering ourselves less in the West and more around the globe,
opening up new questions about identity, positionality, and voice. We decentered both
media and audience by contextualizing processes of mediation in a wider landscape
(Couldry 2012). We reconnected the audience within the larger circuit of culture,
including with production (Mayer 2016). We became more reflexive about how audi-
ence knowledge was used, offering less neutral description open to all-comers and
more support for emancipation. So when I said, a few years ago, that everything was
mediated (Livingstone 2009), I meant to position “the media” historically among other
societal mediations—money, language, goods, or urban planning (Silverstone 1994).
It was not a claim about the growing concentration of power in the hands of a few
global conglomerates, though such institutions must remain in view, or about the
exploitation of audiences, although this is clearly a concern. Rather, it was an invita-
tion to attend to the conditions of meaning-making, to amplify audiences’ voices in the
interests of social justice, and to imagine with them alternative futures.
But the media moved on fast. And they are moving us on too. With growing eco-
nomic significance, new forms of networking, and ever-more powerful players, the
media’s own story of its importance is changing, as is ours. Recognizing that “tradi-
tional social institutions (family, church, labor union, political party, etc.) have been
stripped of much of their traditional purpose by the impact of mass-produced com-
munications” (Smythe 1981, 253; see also Hjarvard 2008), mediatization theory con-
ceives of all parts of society being reconfigured according to “media logics.” This is to
go beyond the claim for an observed and contingent increase in “mediation” to argue
that “the media” are becoming more important, and more influential, in ever more
complex ways. Rather than Silverstone’s “fundamentally uneven, dialectic process” of
mediation, it suggests more of a takeover. Moral panics have often gained potency at
times of changing media power, reinscribing a generally pejorative view of the audi-
ence as passivized and homogeneous, and simultaneously naturalizing that view so
that the empirical research that might check or contest it seems unnecessary. Seemingly,
and perhaps surprisingly, this potency extends to the academic domain.
In accounts of the mediatization of societal domains or fields (say, of politics,
education, family, sport, and so on; see Lundby 2014), the lived experience of audi-
ences is largely invisible, partly because audience research favors “voices from
below,” while mediatization theory examines the workings of power “from above”
(Lundby 2016). It is also because mediatization theory tells a story that spans decades,
if not centuries (Lunt and Livingstone 2016), this posing a particular problem of evi-
dence since compared with other parts of the circuit of culture, “the social and
cultural aspects of mass media reception are literally disappearing before our eyes
and ears” (Jensen 1993, 20–21; see also Mihelj and Bourdon 2015). The result is a
double exclusion, not just of audiences, but especially of the experiences of the
176 Television & New Media 20(2)

nonelite—young and old, poor or foreign, or simply ordinary—who rarely make it

into the historical record.
We are left with a contradiction—the media are becoming more and more impor-
tant across ever more fields of society, and yet people’s engagement with such media
is, seemingly, unimportant. In the field of political communication, Witschge (2014)
counters by pointing variously to audiences’ diverse interpretations of political media
texts; their agency in acting on their interpretations as voters and citizens in a mediated
world; the social and civic consequences of interactions among audience members; the
difficulty of persuading audiences to think in particular ways; the aggregate effect of
audiences’ choice, search, selection, and commenting strategies; and the activities of
audiences in creating and sharing mainstream, alternative, or resistant content. Related
arguments can and should be developed for other fields, perhaps following Schrøder’s
(2017) call for a theorization of audience logics (or dynamics) to mirror the media log-
ics of mediatization and thereby to recognize the mutual shaping of media and audi-
ences over time.

The Datafication of Audiences

By contrast with debates over the political economy of communication or the theory
of mediatization, the debate over datafication (Lupton and Williamson 2017; Mayer-
Schönberger and Cukier 2013; van Dijck 2013) far exceeds the boundaries of media
studies (notwithstanding the effort to make it ours by dubbing it “deep mediatization”;
Couldry and Hepp 2017). Perhaps its very multidisciplinarity contributes to today’s
heady climate in which cautious calls to gather evidence about people’s lives are easily
missed in the urgent rush to describe our coming predicament. As boyd and Crawford
(2012, 666) wrote at the start of the excitement over “big data,” we must not lose sight
of “why people do things, write things, or make things . . . in the sheer volume of
numbers,” not least because “bigger data are not always better data” (p. 667), being
often partial, biased, or decontextualized. And yet it seems that in accounts of the
datafication of society, attention to empirical audiences is easily displaced by a fasci-
nation with the data traces they leave, deliberately or inadvertently, in the digital
record. Academic attention has turned to the analysis of the algorithmic manipulations
of audience’s digital traces that increasingly allow everything people do to be tracked,
as their data are bought and sold above their heads and below their radar (Qiu 2018;
Ytre-Arne and Das 2018).
In one sense, such data make audiences newly visible—consider the current fashion
for visualizations of the “twittersphere” or aggregate “comments” or other digital
traces, along with lively discussion of the algorithmic insight to be obtained from the
“big data” that fuels digital networks. This also recognizes how people’s actions as
audiences are mixed in with all other actions recorded on digital networks, again dem-
onstrating that audience analysis cannot be sequestered from the rest of people’s lives.
But this enhanced visibility obscures more than it reveals. In data visualizations of
audiences’ (or users’) activities, much of importance is stripped away. Away with the
socio-cultural, displaced by individual “behaviors.” Away with context, meaning,
Livingstone 177

interpretation, for it is the hidden patterns beneath awareness that matter. Away with
audiences’ motivations, commitments, and concerns—for if data reveal what people
“really” do on and through digital media, why talk to them anymore? In response to
some of the rhetoric, Couldry and Kallinikos (2017, 153) caution that “on social
media, users for practical purposes are not real persons but abstract operations enacted
through the aggregation of singular data-points.” At present, the distance between real
and data selves is often great—witness the academic uses of big data that fail even to
distinguish men or women, adults or children.
In short, while “ethnography is not the one methodology to rule them all” (Schrock
2017, 705), no more are data analytics. The data analytics industry may believe that
“by predicting you are able to anticipate what people will want and shape your busi-
ness accordingly, thus protecting its future value” (Beer 2018, 473), but it is our job to
question such claims. Insofar as “audience research has entered the era of ‘big data’”
(Athique 2018, 59), the “whole way of life” (Williams 1958) should not escape our
grasp, and multiple socioeconomic and cultural determinations shape audience agency
and interpretation, of which the digital interface is but one. Or as du Gay et al. (1997,
84) noted two decades ago, the

excessive focus on production and the economic has the effect of shutting down the
analysis of culture . . . One is most unlikely to learn anything from people’s everyday
practices if one approaches them with the view that they are unworthy of serious study
because they are superficial and inauthentic substitutes for a denied alternative existence.

Enough of the critique, for these debates and developments are yet young and both
technology and those who deploy it will only gain in sophistication. Behind the many
fearful predictions about datafication, we might identify (at least) three. One concerns
the creation of value for platforms from the exploitation of audience (human) labor.
One concerns discriminatory judgments by algorithms on behalf of infrastructural
institutions (insurance, employment, education, banks, police, etc.). One concerns the
public and democracy’s vital reliance on the (flawed or biased) judgment and (insuf-
ficient or insufficiently rational) participation of ordinary people.
Of the first, Carah and Angus (2018, 193) worry that “value is created where we
enable algorithmic media to train on the data we continuously stream, enabling them
to make more fine-grained judgments about us.” Athique (2018, 64) calls this alchemy,
since turning audiences’ digital traces from “muck” to “brass” may rest on a flimsy
foundation—after all, the value Facebook gains from selling users’ attention to, say,
Coca Cola for advertising purposes may or may not benefit Coca Cola’s revenues nor,
on the other hand, cost the users more than they would wish to pay. At the same time,
this transaction does not exhaust the meaning of viewing Coca Cola advertisements on
Facebook. In Ang’s (1990) now-classic critique of the ratings industry in Desperately
Seeking the Audience, she argues for the use value of the advertisement not only to
those who go out to buy Coca Cola but also to the audience that enjoys laughing at it
or deconstructing it or deliberately buying Pepsi because of it. More negatively, the
calculation of value accruing to Facebook does not include the cost to society of an
178 Television & New Media 20(2)

audience that learns the world is composed of fun-loving beautiful white people from
which one is personally excluded. Beyond questioning the limits of the claim that
platforms create value by exploiting audiences, I also wonder, when we trace how,
“over the course of ten years, users have negotiated their relationship vis-à-vis plat-
forms through appropriation and protest” (van Dijck 2013, 160), whether the resulting
“cat-and-mouse game” is so different from that which Jenkins (2003) described
between Star Wars fans and Lucas Enterprises. As Artz (2015) argued, it is vital that
the audience-as-commodity (or audience-as-exploited-labor) argument does not
“overreach” itself either by reducing audiences to data (see also Athique 2018; Fisher
2015) or by confusing the activities of platform users with the work of the platform in
collecting and monetizing those activities (i.e., generating exchange value).
Of the second, I can only urge attention to the whole circuit of culture including
regulation. Undoubtedly the audience or user will suffer if algorithms that make dis-
criminatory judgments are deployed by infrastructural institutions. But what matters
here is not only the expressive relation between audience and platform (important
though this is, justifying audience ethnographers’ call for greater attention to audience
voice and audience interests; Lupton and Williamson 2017; Ytre-Arne and Das 2018).
Nor can we rely on the heroic actions of citizens, though one sympathizes with Jack
Qiu’s (2018, 307) urging that “the future of digital labor, including social media labor
and free labor, is up to agentic human actors on both sides of the circuits—to resist
top-down control that reduces us into subhumans and to expand our liberty and human-
ity through networking and innovative interventions.” Rather, it must be for the demo-
cratic state and international civil society and governance bodies to act in the public
interest, intervening not only in relation to the transparency and accountability of plat-
forms (as there are growing calls for them to do; Mansell 2017) but also in relation to
the legitimacy of the decisions taken by society’s infrastructural institutions, which,
after all, cannot escape regulation. In other words, while the social justice implications
of the dominance of platforms are, undoubtedly, both worrying and urgent, one strat-
egy is to fight for regulation that reduces the burden on audiences’ media literacy and
capacity for resilience and resistance by designing a digital environment that treats
ordinary people more fairly and equitably.
Third, while recent investigations into the audiences’ vulnerability to viral misin-
formation (Newman 2018) certainly raise concerns, burdening audiences with the
power—and the responsibility—to underpin or undermine democracy writ large is
disproportionate. Initial anxieties that election hacking on Facebook and other social
media tipped the outcome of recent elections because the voting public was newly
vulnerable to manipulation and mass persuasion have not stood up to critical examina-
tion. More important, it seems, were the deeper forces shaping distrust of elites, disaf-
fection with democratic participation, and processes of economic inequality and
cultural exclusion. As Nick Couldry, Tim Markham, and I found in our “public con-
nection project” (2010), not all public connection is significantly mediated, and nor is
all mediated experience determining of democratic participation. Why? Because of the
layers of societal infrastructure between audiences and the state, just as there are
between audiences and commerce or, indeed, among audiences themselves. So while
Livingstone 179

there is much to fear from datafication (and perhaps something to welcome also), we
will not understand it critically if we “collapse social classes, productive relations and
all of the complex, diverse means of production into one amorphous factory churning
out private profit in every human action” (Artz 2015, 312).

Conclusion
Many of our contemporary debates not only have long roots but also risk repeating old
problems as hopes and fears about the abuses of media power rise again. In arguing
that we should keep firmly in mind what history has taught us about people as audi-
ences, I do not mean to advocate either complacency or a celebration of audience
agency. Rather, I have argued for the recognition that all analyses of media power
include, implicitly if not explicitly, claims about audiences, meaning that research
with audiences to examine these claims must be brought within in the critical project.
Furthermore, audiences are necessarily social, embedded in society and history in
many more ways than through their relation with the media, so the critical analysis of
audiences cannot be satisfied with sporadic inclusion of disembodied, decontextual-
ized observations of behavior or cherry-picked survey percentages but must engage
with audiences meaningfully in and across the contexts of their lives. It is vital that
media studies bring into focus those many dimensions of society—consider the deep
shifts in the global economy and world politics that underpin contemporary problems
of corporate power, malign states, regulatory failure, and, indeed, dispossessed pub-
lics—if we are to avoid technological determinism or dystopian fatalism. Or, to quote
Dallas Smythe (1981, 253),

The mysticism attached to technique (and “technology”) has incorrectly assumed that the
medium basically defines the audience. But as a historical analysis of the rise of the mass
media will show, the opposite has been true . . . By placing the contradiction between
advertisers/media on the one hand and audiences on the other on the level of social
relations we are on solid ground and can repudiate the mysticism of the technological trap
by which audiences are tied to hardware, software, and technique.

Inquiring systematically into the experience of audiences (people) will not always
produce happy answers. But it will help us check and qualify grand claims, and it will
remind us of the many potential levers for change, including but also going beyond the
technological. Some of this work is already underway, finding that—as for every pre-
ceding generation of audience research, people do not always fall obediently into line
with the responses presumed of them. For example, Bucher’s (2017, 42) qualitative
study of social media uses found that “the lived reality of the Facebook algorithm
generates a plethora of ordinary affects which may be distancing as well as enticing,
generating resistance as well as appeal.” For Andrejevic (2014, 1685), similarly, the
primary response from audiences is “frustration over a sense of powerlessness in the
face of increasingly sophisticated and comprehensive forms of data collection and
mining.” These and other accounts of frustrated, distrustful, or resistant audiences do
180 Television & New Media 20(2)

not suggest the effective imposition of power by the big platforms and those who har-
ness them, giving encouragement to those who call for alternative approaches that
respect audiences and publics (Kennedy and Moss 2015).
Roger Silverstone (1999) concluded Why Study the Media, by saying, “It is all
about power, of course. In the end.” Maybe it is, but this claim has always worried me,
seeming to efface so much about people’s lives, including their meanings, values,
cultures, indeed their humanity. I mentioned this to my colleague Robin Mansell, who
recalled how Dallas Smythe, then a member of her PhD committee, asked of her thesis
on the political economy of communication, “but Robin, where are the people?”
Indeed, including the people in a mediated, perhaps mediatized, increasingly datafied
age—that’s the task in front of us.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Niklas Chimirri, Ranjana Das, Knut Lundby, Peter Lunt, Robin Mansell, Giovanna
Mascheroni, Rodrigo Muñoz-González, Kim Schrøder, and Rafal Zaborowski for comments on
earlier versions of this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Author Biography
Sonia Livingstone, professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School
of Economics and Political Science, researches media audiences, children’s and young people’s
risks and opportunities, media literacy, and rights in the digital environment. Her recent book is
The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age (New York University Press, 2016, with
Julian Sefton-Green). She leads the projects “Global Kids Online,” “Preparing for a Digital
Future,” and “Children’s Data and Privacy Online.” For more, see www.sonialivingstone.net