This is the final portion of the essay written for Audience 2.0. The first four can be found here (1, 2, 3, 4).

A New Audience?

And so we come to audience 2.0. 2.0 is generally a tag attached to differentiate software versions, like 'Firefox 1.5.0.6'—except there is no 1.0 as reference nor a 3.0 as destination. The pairing of {word} and 2.0 derives from Web 2.0—to state what must be obvious to anyone reading this. It's a formula that has become all-too-popular in recent months. We can guess at what audience 2.0 means through the immediate association. Where Web 2.0 implies everything from an aesthetic, to a business model, to a philosophy, audience 2.0 implies the other half of that equation. It is the people who use, experience, and interact with one another through whatever it is we may call “Web 2.0.” Audience 2.0 is an internet neologism, and as such its lifespan as a functional term is less important than its cause for existence.

What we're calling “audience 2.0” could perhaps represent a new power relationship, different from those of audience and the audience. Where within the audience, the person on the hearing end of the exchange becomes a subject to the control of the hyper-individual, defined purely in relation to him; and where within audience, the one giving audience holds the privileged position; I propose that we read audience 2.0 as a hybrid exchange within a wider emergent system, holding often contradictory aspects from both earlier readings of (the) audience. If audience implies active consumption on the part of a singular entity privileged with subjectivity, and the audience implies passive consumption on the part of a mass, devoid of identity or autonomy, then audience 2.0 implies a multiplicity that is at once singular and multiple, autonomous and fluid, solid and shattered, local and global, outward-facing and inward-looking: audience 2.0 is a networked subjectivity, it is a swarm.

Imagine hovering in a helicopter, hundreds of feet above a swarm of locusts devouring a field of crops. The locusts seem to move singularly, shifting from one section of the field to another, systematically and efficiently destroying livelihoods. They appear to be a monolithic entity from above. There is a purpose; there is a will. Nothing is anarchic about the locusts from this vantage.

Now imagine the farmer whose crops are being devastated. Naturally, he runs out of his house and tries to kill all the locusts he could manage. Soon he finds himself in the midst of the swarm – locusts going every which way, left, right, up, down, under, over, colliding with and eating everything in sight. How could this be the same phenomenon as was seen from the helicopter? Interior madness, exterior grace; global effect contrasts local action. The swarm is able to both hold anarchy and exude singular purpose—it is an edgeless, centerless multiplicity.

The concept of the swarm does not simply apply to the many users collecting around a system like del.icio.us, it extends to these users’ interiorities. Our interactions through these media have made us swarm-like as a population and as individuals. Audience 2.0, as I propose we conceive it, harbors contradictions and networks of subjectivity on both the level of multiplicity and that of the individual-as-multiple. The distinction has collapsed, the audience has learned to give audience, the tension between hyper- and hypo-individuality has given way to distributed control, and we project ourselves onto the larger cultural archive in ever more nuanced ways.

Audience 2.0: while the term may be short-lived and derivative, the cultural roots from which it has sprung represent a fundamental shift in they way we must think about interaction and subjectivity.