When we interrogated audience studies in the context of reimagining communication, we noted a backward moving trend where previous critical and constructivist understanding of audiences has increasingly been reduced to the (post)positivist views of audiences as data in the media industry (Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt & Meyer zu Hörste, 2020). The datafication trend has reduced audiences to clicks, likes, comments. It has thus removed the diversity and complexity of the lived experiences that have characterised audience research in the constructivist epistemologies. This presentation introduces an analytical framework of Data Loop (Mathieu & Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, 2020), which shows how audience data circulates between the audiences and media institutions, showing that there are formatting and transformative moments in which engagement with data is translated into action. This presentation will unpack how the formation and transformation of actions are influenced by the individual, technological, social and contextual assemblages. Inspired by Derek Layder’s work on entangled social domains: psychobiography, situated activity, social networks and contextual resources (1997, 2021), we will discuss how the positivist, numerical representation of the audience data is handled in the media industry. We argue that audience data is negotiated within the framework of multiple influences. For instance, individual and collective skills, data encounters, organisational and professional culture, technological platforms, competitors practices form a complex network of factors that frame the process of translating positivist data into actions. As such, the pragmatist approach (Creswell & Creswell, 2018) taken to the audience data in the media industry ignores the positivist assumptions ingrained in the audience data and instead is concerned with the application. We will use the data loop model and the social domains to pinpoint some of the translation moments and open the discussion of the potential consequences of such translations. 

References:

Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (5th edition). SAGE Publications, Inc.

Layder, D. (1997). Modern social theory: Key debates and new directions. UCL Press.

Layder, D. (2021). Social sciences, social reality and the false division between theory and method: Some implications for social research. SN Social Sciences, 1(2), 47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-020-00052-y

Mathieu, D., & Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, P. (2020). The Data loop of media and audience. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, 36(69), 116–138. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v36i69.121178

Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, P., & Meyer zu Hörste, H. (2020). Reimagining audiences in the age of datafication. In M. Filimowicz & V. Tzankova (Eds.), Reimagning Communication: Experience (Vol. 2, pp. 179–195). ROUTLEDGE. http://hdl.handle.net/2043/30973