Year: 2014
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Introduction-Why Consider Users?I was asked to act as discussant on the chapters by Greg Downey, Tarleton Gillespie, Chris Kelty, and Steven Jackson as if we were all together at a conference.Conference delegates-like most audiences-listen for a purpose, relating what they hear to their prior standpoint.You, too, as my reader, start from somewhere particular, doubtless wondering what I have to say.While all the chapters in this volume are concerned with the shifting relations among communication technologies, social practices, and institutions of power-put simply, with how to imagine what the Internet could and should be (Mansell 2012)-I shall contrast their various conceptions of the ordinary person whose interests are so vitally at stake in the digital era.Should you be used to regarding the producer as more important than the consumer, the text more subtle than its various actualizations by readers, or the technology more fascinating than its uses, then I hope to persuade you that the study of media, communication, and information technologies should always address the activities of users in context.Only thus can we uncover the social shaping and social consequences of the digital (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2006).My degree of linguistic artifice-encoded by the nineteenth-century novelist through a direct address to the "dear reader"-signals that, as a reader of these four chapters, addressing the reader of this text, I hope to illuminate the reader or user of digital technologies more generally.In my own work, I have examined the interpretative agency of television audiences (Livingstone 1998), their contested relations with publics (Livingstone 2005), and the fraught ways they are framed as citizens or consumers in policy discourses (Lunt and Livingstone 2012).Given this horizon of expectations (Jauss 1982), you will not be surprised that I am interested in how these conceptions of the ordinary person (itself no simple idea [Thumim 2012]) resonate or contrast
Author: Sonia Livingstone
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W358309032