Week 10: The Power of Social Media and Audiences

On November 2, 2015 Essena O’Neill made an announcement that went viral on social media, reaching more than her followers on Instagram and YouTube. Those who were not aware of the nineteen years old Australian girl’s relevance on social media, with over half a million subscribers on Instagram, became acquainted with her as the girl who quit social media. O’Neill’s announcement sparked a conversation about the reality that is presented on social media. In her video announcement O’Neill claims, “social media is not real life” and platforms such as Instagram proffer a mediated reality to young minds, allowing subjects to present a “contrived perfection made to get attention.” These statements have initiated a dialogue among online media audiences, revealing what seem to be two opposing opinions on the subject: one against the power of social media and one for the power of social media.

The rapid dissemination of this video and the juxtaposing opinions it has provoked throughout social media raises some interesting questions in regards to the role and agency of the audience in contemporary digital media environments. Therefore, in relation to this case study, we are going to look at different questions such as, what are the different audiences involved in this discussion? What are the dynamics present among producers and their audience? When does being an audience stop and being a producer start? How are audiences performing themselves? And finally, has technology really blurred the line between real and online realities? These questions and case study will be analysed with the help of Shayla Thiel-Stern’s essay “Beyond the Active Audience” and Jack Z. Bratich’s essay “From Audiences to Media Subjectivities.” These texts explore the construction of a new audience and how technological developments have intensified and transformed audiences’ practices. Moreover, it studies the dynamics between audience and institutions, and how the audience’s power has been intervened and activated to then be pacified towards constituted ends (Bratich 2013).

In her essay “Beyond the Active Audience Shayla Thiel-Stern argues that the existence of a traditional audience as the receptor of media is obsolete. Instead she perceives the emergence of a new multilayered audience present in the new media landscape of Web 2.0 proffered by a entrepreneurial attitude among its participants. This new audience is one that is active and aware of its influential power on others. Thiel-Stern calls this new audience the “Audience 2.0”. Beyond its self-awareness this audience can also be a producer, one that is consciously seeking an audience (6, 9). It is an audience that has a “built-in-audience,”  as Thiel-Stern explains (7). This emergence of  an “audience with an audience” is a consequence of the interactivity proffered by technological developments and the features they offer, e.g, writing, publishing, commenting, posting, tagging, liking are some examples of these interactive features (Thiel-Stern 7). We will employ Essena O’Neill as an example of a member of this “Audience 2.0” that demonstrates the oscillation between being an audience and a producer.

Even though the audience is now perceived to have more power with its position as producer, this notion is still very much isolated. Bratich problematizes this in his text by addressing how the collective power of the audience is still very much “a target of knowledge and intervention” (11). This is a notion very much in line with the scholars of the Frankfurt School, who perceived consumers not as passive recipients, but as targets of the culture industry. As targets, consumers were transformed into masses and organised as passive consumers of cultural products (Durham Peters qtd. in Bratich 14).

O’Neill’s critique on the powers of social media are along the lines of Bratich and Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the intervening forces of the industry. In the case of O’Neill, she entered social media when she was just twelve years old, as she explains in her vlog. Immersed in the world of social media for seven years gave her “an insight into the world of social media…in terms to how it works with advertisements (Let’s Be Game Changers).” O’Neill explains how she believes the advertising industry has taken over social media by employing young influential (in terms of the amount of followers) subjects in order to gain revenue by reaching these subject’s audience. By using an audience with an audience, the industry is playing with the relatable-ness of (in this case) the girl next-door, instead of a celebrity. Employing a non-celebrity allows the industry to activate and direct the collective power of the audience by projecting an identifiable image to them.

Another important point in this discussion is identity construction in relation to digital technology and how we perform ourselves online. Thiel-Stern explains how the increased audience’s awareness of their presence online starts to affect the manner in which individuals construct and perform their identity (11). According to O’Neill, her introduction to social media at such a young age made her become obsessed with one day being able to live the spectacular lives that were documented, filtered and uploaded on the photo sharing service: Instagram. O’Neill also accounts how she started to define herself through the amount of likes she gathered by posting perfectly constructed pictures online. O’Neill’s behavior reflects upon Butler’s theory on identity as performativity and how it is a construction that we perform, which is embedded in historical situatedness and discourse (520). Gender and identity performativity on social platforms illustrate how it is a conscious act. These media subjects are consciously and intensively performing their gender, identity and lives, because they are aware of the fact that there is an audience that is constantly watching in return.

According to Bratich, another critique of the autonomous individual in relation to media is that social relations determine identity. Identity cannot be isolated from race, gender, or sexuality. To understand audiences as identities is to refute the notion of a homogenous audience. Instead, audiences as identities seek to find diversity (16). However, the proliferation of images that present mediated fragmentations of life help construct and promote homogeneous ideals that are further mediated and disseminated through the interactive relation between audience and medium. The “online participatory environment,” has transformed the practices of consumption and most importantly production (Thiel-Stern 10). This affects the balance in power, agency, and influence of media producers. In the case of O’Neill, she problematized this shift in balance by illustrating how the media allows users to construct, edit, and filter anything, which results in the creation and promotion of manipulated and false representations of life.

On November 2 O’Neill took down her Instagram, only to later reopen it as an account that would help raise awareness of the ‘fabricated’ nature of social media. O’Neill reopened her account only including a selection of pictures with elaborate descriptions. These descriptions revealed the reasons why these photos were taken and the amount of time and work it required to get one “perfect picture.” This dedication to self-promotion and representation of a perfect life reflects upon Thiel-Stern’s statement of how seems that, “being watched, or the potential of being watched, by one’s peers is in many ways the entire point” (14).

To conclude, we have looked at the audience present on social media from different angles. We have looked at their status and roles as users, producers, and consumers. We have also looked at how these roles have become interrelated and how this has compromised how we perform ourselves online. We believe O’Neill’s radical action and announcement elaborates on one side of a two-sided argument. O’Neill’s critique is on the dangers of social media in relation to how it has become immanent to an industry that appropriates media subjects for marketing purposes. In her opinion, media subjects are passive entities that have become commoditized, thus making the representation of their identity a staged one. However, she dismisses the intricacies of power relations and does not take into account how active these subjects are in this process. We could argue that now more than ever, knowledge and power are tangibly everywhere and individuals are not second-guessing activating it. Ironically, O’Neill is employing social media to spread this warning, thus relying on the power of social media and agency of her audience.

Thesis: “With great power comes great responsibility” Are we, as audience 2.0, being responsible with the modern age communication tool of social media?

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Works Cited

Butler, Judith. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: an Essay in Phenomenology and

Feminist Theory’, in: Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 519 – 531.

JSTOR.

Durham Peters, J. (2002). The subtlety of Horkheimer and Adorno. In E. Katz, J. Durham

Peters, T. Liebes, & A. Orloff (Eds.), Canonic texts in media research (pp. 58–73). New

York, NY: Polity.

O’Neill, Essena. Lets be game changers. Web. 13 Nov 2015.

Jack Z. Bratich (2013), ‘From Audiences to Media Subjectivities: Mutants in the Interregnum’,

in: Kelly Gates (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Volume VI:

Media Studies Futures. Malden & Chichester: Whiley-Blackwell.

Shayla Thiel-Stern (2013), ‘Beyond the active audience: Exploring new media audiences and the

limits of cultural production’, in: Radhika Parameswaran (ed.), The International

Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Volume IV: Audience and Interpretation. Malden &

Chichester: Whiley-Blackwell, pp. 389-405.