"This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the 'effects' of film, linked to calls for censorship and moral panics rather than to understanding the mental and behavioral world of the spectator. Early cinema history has revealed the diversity of film-viewing habits, while traditional 'box office' studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations. Latterly, there has been a marked turn towards more sophisticated economic and sociological analysis of attendance data. And as the film experience fragments across multiple formats, the perceptual and cognitive experience of the individual viewer (who is also an auditor) has become increasingly accessible. With contributions from Gregory Waller, John Sedgwick and Martin Barker, this work spans the spectrum of contemporary audience studies, revealing work being done on local, non-theatrical and live digital transmission audiences, and on the relative attraction of large-scale, domestic and mobile platforms."--Publisher's website.

Ever since the exposure of the Kitten Killer of Hangshou captured the imagination of online communities world-wide, vigilantism and digilantism has come to the fore as an emerging and poignant issue. In their book Introducing Vigilant Audiences Daniel Trottier and colleagues (and contributors) have produced an excellent and throughtful ‘must read’ for all who are studying vigilantism, or just interested in it. Prof. David Wall, University of Leeds This is a collection of cutting edge and thoughtful case studies of global digital vigilantism that advances this emerging and increasingly important field in useful and intriguing ways. Prof. Michael Pfeifer, City University of New York This ground-breaking collection of essays examines the scope and consequences of digital vigilantism – a phenomenon emerging on a global scale, which sees digital audiences using social platforms to shape social and political life. Longstanding forms of moral scrutiny and justice seeking are disseminated through our contemporary media landscape, and researchers are increasingly recognising the significance of societal impacts effected by digital media. The authors engage with a range of cross-disciplinary perspectives in order to explore the actions of a vigilant digital audience – denunciation, shaming, doxing – and to consider the role of the press and other public figures in supporting or contesting these activities. In turn, the volume illuminates several tensions underlying these justice seeking activities – from their capacity to reproduce categorical forms of discrimination, to the diverse motivations of the wider audiences who participate in vigilant denunciations. This timely volume presents thoughtful case studies drawn both from high-profile Anglo-American contexts, and from developments in regions that have received less coverage in English-language scholarship. It is distinctive in its focus on the contested boundary between policing and entertainment, and on the various contexts in which the desire to seek retribution converges with the desire to consume entertainment. Introducing Vigilant Audiences will be of great value to researchers and students of sociology, politics, criminology, critical security studies, and media and communication. It will be of further interest to those who wish to understand recent cases of citizen-led justice seeking in their global context.

Lies and inaccurate information are as old as humanity, but never before have they been so easy to spread. Each moment of every day, the Internet and broadcast media purvey misinformation, either deliberately or accidentally, to a mass audience on subjects ranging from politics to consumer goods to science and medicine, among many others. Because misinformation now has the potential to affect behavior on a massive scale, it is urgently important to understand how it works and what can be done to mitigate its harmful effects. Misinformation and Mass Audiences brings together evidence and ideas from communication research, public health, psychology, political science, environmental studies, and information science to investigate what constitutes misinformation, how it spreads, and how best to counter it. The expert contributors cover such topics as whether and to what extent audiences consciously notice misinformation, the possibilities for audience deception, the ethics of satire in journalism and public affairs programming, the diffusion of rumors, the role of Internet search behavior, and the evolving efforts to counteract misinformation, such as fact-checking programs. The first comprehensive social science volume exploring the prevalence and consequences of, and remedies for, misinformation as a mass communication phenomenon, Misinformation and Mass Audiences will be a crucial resource for students and faculty researching misinformation, policymakers grappling with questions of regulation and prevention, and anyone concerned about this troubling, yet perhaps unavoidable, dimension of current media systems.

Whether we are watching TV, surfing the Internet, listening to our iPods, or reading a novel, we are all engaged with media as a member of an audience. Despite the widespread use of this term in our popular culture, the meaning of the "audience" is complex, and it has undergone significant historical shifts as new forms of mediated communication have developed from print, telegraphy, and radio to film, television, and the Internet. Media Audiences explores the concept of media audiences from four broad perspectives: as "victims" of mass media, as market constructions & commodities, as users of media, and as producers & subcultures of mass media. The goal of the text is for students to be able to think critically about the role and status of media audiences in contemporary society, reflecting on their relative power in relation to institutional media producers.

In today’s thoroughly mediated societies people spend many hours in the role of audiences, while powerful organizations, including governments, corporations and schools, reach people via the media. Consequently, how people think about, and organizations treat, audiences has considerable significance. This ground-breaking collection offers original, empirical studies of discourses about audiences by bringing together a genuinely international range of work. With essays on audiences in ancient Greece, early modern Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Zimbabwe, contemporary Egypt, Bengali India, China, Taiwan, and immigrant diaspora in Belgium, each chapter examines the ways in which audiences are embedded in discourses of power, representation, and regulation in different yet overlapping ways according to specific socio-historical contexts. Suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, this book is a valuable and original contribution to media and communication studies. It will be particularly useful to those studying audiences and international media.

Audiences are problematic and the study of audiences has represented a key site of activity in the social sciences and humanities. Offering a timely review of the past 50 years of theoretical and methodological debate Audiences argues the case for a paradigmatic shift in audience research. This shift, argue the authors, is necessitated by the emergence of the `diffused audience'. Audience experience can no longer be simply classified as `simple' or `mass', for in modern advanced capitalist societies, people are members of an audience all the time. Being a member of an audience is no longer an exceptional event, nor even an everyday event, rather it is constitutive of everyday life. This book offers an invaluable rev

The Journalist-Audience Relationship -- The Promise of Audience Engagement -- Journalism's Imagined Audiences -- When Data and Intuition Converge -- First Imagined, Then Pursued -- The Obstacles to Audience Engagement -- Understanding News Audience Behavior -- Conclusion.