This is an article that was originally written as an introductory article the web-magazine Audience 2.0. As a result of circumstances out of anyone's hands, this publication has not yet come into being. In order for this piece not to grow too stale in my My Documents folder, what follows is the complete version of the piece dated retroactively for the originally intended date of publication. I do hope that Audience 2.0 eventually comes into being, but until then, this will have to do.
Like many, I am skeptical of internet neologisms. I've always given cyberspace a sidelong glance and blogosphere the hairy eyeball. This is not to say that these words are not important—they most certainly are—but rather to stress that their importance lies, not in the terms themselves, but in the cultural contexts that produce a need for them
We pulled cyberspace from the world of science fiction in order to conceptualize a medium that defied any previous notions of communication. We felt more at home in a space—something we can touch, explore, or “surf”—than in a disembodied interconnected network spewing packets of data in all directions. Blogosphere, in turn, has allowed us to envision a topography and politics for a field of social and textual interaction.
Now I have the opportunity to dissect audience 2.0. This is an internet neologism if there ever was one. Any discussion of audience 2.0 must begin, however, by putting the word audience under the microscope.
The Value of Audience
Adopted directly from the French, audience came into English around 1374 meaning “the action of hearing,” as in “to give audience”(Oxford English Dictionary). Originally derived from the Latin verb audire, audience implied the effort of paying aural attention. Notice that this first English usage pairs give with audience. The act of giving requires consent and control by the one committing the action and a relatively passive receiver. When I gave my friend a cupcake on his birthday, he was more or less a non-actor in the process, having only to be present when the interaction became, for him, reception. The one giving owns this process of transference. Back in 1374 then, it was the person using his aural capacities that was in control; he gave his audience. The capacity to hear is a bit like the cupcake: a commodity, an object that has some value to be transferred.
Yet hearing abilities are not entirely like a cupcake. For one, the ability to hear is generally not decreased in the act of giving audience, whereas when I gave my roommate the cupcake, I was one cupcake poorer (fortunately, I saw this coming and had purchased one for myself). In economic terms, audience is non-rival. Secondly, my sweet, frosted gift was a one-way exchange. I received nothing for it except a smile, a thank you, and feelings of friendship. When one gives audience, however, the qualities of the exchange are distinct: aural capacities in exchange for sound. Audience, on a very basic level, implicitly delineates an economic relationship between the one hearing and the one speaking. Value is exchanged in the form of hearing abilities and sound—and it depends on both the speaker and listener to actively participate, while the listener holds the upper hand.
The value of aural capacity was perhaps at a high when the Church of England's Arches Court—an ecclesiastical court—was originally called the Court of Audience. The participant giving audience in this court held disproportionately greater power and control in the transaction than the speaker. Members of the Church come to court so they can be heard by the Dean of Arches. Even in our civil and criminal courts, judges “hear” cases, yet maintain control and power over the encounter. To look at this, again, as an economic exchange, audience holds a far higher value than that of speaking. Another example of this uneven power relationship is the psychotherapist and his patient. Here, the value of audience is valued so far above the value of speaking that the gap must be made up through a cash exchange.
The value of the aural commodity—audience—however, has competed with a slightly later definition over the years. Within this competition, ever-changing power relations are at play; the exchange between speaker and listener shifts its balance from one participant in the exchange to the other. The competing meaning that has become the counter-weight to audience in this continual modulation of power arrived around 1407, and meant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “The persons within hearing; an assembly of listeners, an auditory.” Quite different from the 1347 meaning: a decrease in the value of aural capacity. Instead of the listener “giving” his senses, he is passively “within hearing,” merely able to sense the speaker. The value of giving is greatly diminished under this usage. Here, it is the speaker that disproportionately controls the exchange, so much so that one's audience can be taken without consent—it becomes a non-excludable commodity provided one is physically able to hear a sound. In this relation, the one who was once “giving” audience is now “the” audience, the singular multiple—he is disenfranchised.
In the pre-internet era, the value of audience was tied to the number of participants in the exchange. In situations where audience has a high value, there are few hearers and many speakers (Court of Audience, psychotherapist). Scarcity is the determinant for control and power, just as it is when there are few speakers and many providing aural capacity (the loud concert in the park across the street from me, an ice cream truck). In both cases we see an imbalance between the raw number of participants on either end—few to many.
It's clear then, that the terms audience and the audience are quite different. Words with the suffix -ence denote the raw ability to perform an action; for example sapience (derived from the Latin verb meaning “to know”) implies “knowingness,” the pure ability to retain knowledge—therefore we could read audience as “hearingness.” Hearingness is a commodity; it has value; it is a part of an inherent exchange. The audience differs in modern usage by referring to the mass of disenfranchised participants where one's audience has a very low value.
Audience and the audience: same root, essentially the same word, opposite implications when speaking of interaction.
The Audience and Celebrity Culture
The audience is large, the audience is faceless and undifferentiated. It is held together solely through its relationship to the speaker. It is anarchic—it must-be-controlled though outside forces. We need only to look so far as 20th-century celebrity culture to see this at work. Take, for example, Nathanael West's novella The Day of the Locust. At the very climax of the piece, we find protagonist Tod Hackett lost within, and washed about by a mob of regular folks in LA. Before they morph into an amoral, apolitical mass, these people are neighbors, friends, and the tritely individualized people he encounters on a daily basis. They had all gathered to watch what we would now call a red-carpet procession at a movie premier. Before the stars arrive, people retain a certain amount of individual selfness: they have names and they have faces. Yet at the point when the celebrities arrive, a madness takes over the crowd and their thin shells of identity break—those who once were weak and calm are strong and violent, those who once were neighborly are lecherous, those who were singular have become indistinct.
This shift happens partly in reaction to the perceived concentrated individuality of celebrity. The star is the “speaker” in this case, and LA is the audience. The constituents are powerless in front of the hyper-individual, the faced-one. The crowd of formerly autonomous entities are transformed into an undifferentiated, heaving, yet entirely anticipated multiplicity of violence and amorality—and while their force is great, it is undirected and necessarily the subject of control. As police swoop in to tame the mass, Tod has already lost all autonomous singularity in relation to his surroundings; his interior and exterior are enmeshed. He has difficulty differentiating himself and the siren he hears and his consciousness from his imagined painting.
What West highlights so well is the relationship between the perception of the celebrity hyper-individual and the hypo-individuals who constitute the audience. Celebrity culture represents a low point of the value of audience. The speaker's over-concentrated subjectivity leads to disproportionate power and control over the entities-made-faceless that make up the audience.
There was a time when I would commute into Boston every day through North Station, housed beneath the venue that was then called the Fleet Center. One evening on my way home, I ran into the arrival of several hundred attendants of a Shakira concert. Walking toward my track was particularly difficult, and I missed the train.
While waiting for the next departure, I noticed that a vast majority of the Shakira-attendees were dressed almost identically. They wore puffy hats with brims slightly angled to one side; tight, ornately patterned shirts exposing their midriffs; and mellow-toned skirts and jeans. Their style was not necessarily a common one—not one that I had specifically noticed before—but a mass of young women surrounded me, who had all apparently followed a dress code for the event.
I am hardly in a position to critique another's fashion decisions, but that evening revealed to me the power that the construct of celebrity has over the audience. Shakira's mere presence indicated to the young women that they must wear this set of clothing. The audience was subject to her implicit control. In most cases the outfit might demonstrate a prescribed uniqueness, but when placed next to such concentrated subjectivity as the singer, it stripped them of a faced individuality and transformed them into “the audience.” Celebrity culture breeds this stark gap between those who are allowed an autonomous self and those who are denied one. Even if the celebrity identity is created through a non-autonomous process, the end result, as seen publicly, is this purity of self.
The audience exists only in a relationship with the hyper-individual. On the one side are delicate egg-shell identities waiting to break, and on the other is the solid, impenetrable identity of celebrity. The audience may harbor a potential for action, but demands a measure of exterior control—the police in The Day of the Locust, ushers at the Shakira concert. And when this potential action is unleashed, it is anarchic.
The audience has a sad lot.
Audience and Spectacle
One who gives audience is on the opposite side of the dynamic than West's mob or the Shakira fans; he is not only endowed with an autonomous identity but, more importantly, he remains in control of the interaction. To examine this it might be helpful to take a look at a few key points from a classic text of psychoanalytic, feminist film theory: Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey describes the relationship between the viewer and the figures on screen from a Freudian/Lacanian perspective. Sparing the details of the entire essay—and no doubt over-simplifying it in the process—one particular passage illustrates the relationship between the film audience and the actors (speakers) on screen:
“Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. ... As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.”
Here we can see that the spectator's gaze—his visual audience—becomes a tool of power and control. The act of looking becomes the signifier of the solid, autonomous identity of the male protagonist. The spectator's audience is merged with that of the protagonist's through a process of misrecognition. Audience, in this sense, is symbolic and subjective control.
An example that I'm anxious to bring up is Dirty Harry, the 1971, Clint Eastwood, hard-boiled cop movie. In it, Eastwood's character Harry Calahan hunts down a dangerously deranged, racist, counterculture sniper. Overt and unsubtle political and racial discussions aside, the film rests on the very idea that audience is control. The sniper attempts to control the San Francisco populace by watching (and killing) them with the aid of his scope; in parallel, Harry attempts to control the sniper by getting into a series of predicaments that require him to see the sniper without being seen. In fact, superior vision seems to be what makes Harry such a good cop in the first place. He manages to foil a bank robbery thanks to his keen observation of a suspicious (read: black and smoking) man waiting in a car. With his back turned to this scene, he asks the diner-counter cook if he can see what's going on. He doesn't—while Harry, facing the other direction, does. Eastwood has the omnipotence of universal vision, the perfect example of audience-as-control.
When Harry first manages to subdue the sniper, it is in the middle of a football field just as his partner turns on the flood lights. The sniper falls to the ground in the middle of the expanse, blinded by the light as Eastwood walks slowly toward him armed with full visual capacity. The sniper is defeated, ultimately, by being unable to avoid or return Harry’s gaze. The power construct favors the one able to give audience and belittles the one unable to return it. As the sniper's concept of self fully breaks down under the oppressive weight of Eastwood's visioned subject, he speaks madly and incoherently, while Harry is imbued with a calm and deliberate assurance of self and justice.
Audience has a deadly power.
Multiplicities Of and Within Identity
Recent developments on the web have changed the way people interact with each other and themselves. We are transferring more and more of ourselves into web-based media, effectively creating a distributed cultural archive of identity. In the most explicit ways, we do this through social networking sites, in less explicit ways through stored search queries, tagging, and attention logs. One way to describe our current mode of web-based interaction is to call it self- and social-classification. The root of interaction among these new media has been to classify ourselves and others. Our interactions leave marks on the participants, and these marks are stored and become the basis for future interaction and perception. Web-based media has literalized this to the point where these marks—and their archivization—are the oft-unspoken goal of interaction. As a result, we continually develop our grand and subtle, yet all-encompassing and controlling, cultural archive of identity.
One of the best examples of social classification is a service that many readers probably use every day: del.icio.us. I choose del.icio.us as an example because of its simplicity and its ability to incorporate diverse aspects of a user's web experience. Users interact with one another and data within the same system, often blurring the distinction between the two. For those unfamiliar, del.icio.us, now owned by Yahoo!, is a social bookmarking tool. A user can bookmark a web page, “tag” it with terms so he can find it later, and share these tags and pages with other people.
The other day after coming home from work, I looked at my del.icio.us network. One's “network” aggregates the tagged pages of designated users and displays them chronologically along with their tags. I found that my friend had tagged an article in The Economist about economists blogging (http://economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7258939) using the tags “academia” and “blogs.” It seemed interesting so I read it and bookmarked it in my own del.icio.us account. I tagged it with “academic,” “blogs,” and “economics.” I then saw that it had been saved by a few others, looked at who they were, how they described it, and what they tagged it with. Afterward, I navigated to the del.icio.us front page to see what everyone else who uses the service, when aggregated, found bookmark-worthy.
This simple activity of bookmarking and browsing bookmarks demonstrates one of the ways in which we begin to exist on the web and interact through self- and social-classification. First let's look at the ways in which I classified myself. It begins when I chose the user name “swarming.” I chose it to correspond with my blog, Swarming Media. It became a top-level signifier for my presence within the system. I have chained a piece of my identity to the textual production of that blog and its own array of associations. I could have chosen “nlovejoy” or “johnny_cash” just as easily. This choice is an assertive act of self classification, a performance.
Next, there is the choice of the people in my network. Who I add is as assertive as the choice of my name. It creates the content I will be exposed to and associates me with a variety of other interests. By putting someone in my network I am actively tying myself not only to their identity, but to their bookmarks and tags as well. This group of users could be read as a partial surrogate for my own identity. Thirdly, I classify myself through the tags I choose to use. For The Economist's article I chose “academic” over “academia,” “academics,” or even “bullshit.” After applying many tags, they are aggregated into a hierarchy according to frequency. This tag cloud, as a direct result of the terms I chose, also marks me with a particular identity. Finally, and most obviously, there is the choice of pages that I bookmark. The content of my page is filled with this material. Whatever I bookmark is sent out directly to my network and indirectly to the entire del.icio.us system. I am what I see. I mark myself through the pages I find to be worthy of public, associative display.
These items are—to use reflexive terminology—tags of identity. When I bookmark a page, I am tagging myself through my choice of object and tag terms. Other people tag me when they add me to their network, when they bookmark an entry from my blog, or whenever a member of my network uses del.icio.us. My identity here is created collectively and socially. The basic unit of interaction is classification. As I modulate my own identity, I also modulate those of the people whose pages I mark and those who have added me to their network. Identity is no longer fully autonomous nor entirely fluid; I have a great deal of control over the boundaries through self-classification, but other users play a major role in defining my surrogate, online self. Interaction through self- and social-classification leads to porous subjectivities.
While an individual's identity is defined by multiple sources, there exists an emergent identity of the system. As data from every user within del.icio.us is aggregated, categories like popular tags or hot items rise to the top. This begins to influence the tagging activities of users within the system itself. This upper-layer view not only represents the collective tagging actions of the users, but it also starts a process of systemic feedback. Users read the “hot items” and decide to tag it themselves or read a popular tag and work that into their personal taxonomy. Thus the aggregate, emergent entity begins to influence the individual identity just as much as the individual influences the aggregate.
The distinctions between individuals and groups of individuals are at once both more distinct—through increased classification—and less autonomous—through systemic feedback and social-classification. The member of the crowd no longer loses his identity under the weight of the mass, but at the same time he loses the ability to define this reinstated selfness on his own. We have each come to harbor internal multiplicities, just as we are a unit within an external multiplicity. Put in another way, it is no longer clear whether we’re the audience or giving audience. The unidirectional flow of power between individual and mass that has fueled the two previous conceptions of audience has broken down and shifted to a tension between, and within masses of individuals. These new media have not only enabled a greater connectivity, but questioned the very concept of “the individual.”
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.
