The individualised audiences of everything and nothing: In search of the collective in teaching and researching audiences

This contribution is a snapshot of ongoing conversations between Das and Wicaksono, allowing us to bring into dialogue different moments, other conversations and collaborations that have shaped our thinking about audiences. In 2013, Ranjana Das was in conversation with her own mentor and then PhD supervisor (cf. Livingstone and Das, 2013) about how the ‘end’ of the audience in media and communications was not quite here yet. Amid social media, in that earlier work, we (Livingstone and Das) reflected on how, despite radical technological shifts, the conceptual toolkit developed in the age of mass media – particularly television – remained deeply valuable. While the language around media users was changing, with talk of ‘producers’ and ‘former audiences’, we argued that people’s meaning-making practices, contextual experiences, and what the social embeddedness of all that ‘audiencing’ (Fiske, 1992) meant – had not disappeared. We argued for the enduring relevance of concepts like encoding/decoding, interpretive communities and literacy as adaptable frameworks for understanding how people navigated newer media environments.

A decade on, and in a new configuration of PhD supervisor (Das) and PhD student (Wicaksono), we are now perplexed by another set of questions that do not go away. Different conversations, projects and points in our careers over the past years and decades have led the authors of this short piece to confront our own confusion. Filipus Gilang Wicaksono, returned from recent doctoral fieldwork in Indonesia, came bearing questions from participants who struggled to make sense of what their children consume in the midst of ephemeral algorithmically-driven media. Wicaksono’s participants appear to be audiences of all sorts of things, but without any unifying text in particular. Das’s early career commitment to ‘I am an audience researcher –that is who I am!’ appears to have dissipated somewhat, in her move away from attempting to teach about audiences and from using the language of audiences much at all.

In this contribution, we grapple with this shared perplexity over research (and teaching about) the audiences of this whatever-the-algorithms-decides moment in datafied societies. What troubles us is not simply the changing language of usership, but the erosion of the collective conditions – shared texts, shared rhythms, shared reference points – on which the very idea of ‘the audience’ once depended.

This perplexity was illustrated when Wicaksono set out to find ‘audiences of Disney films’ in Indonesia and encountered participants in his project who want to talk about something less tangible than Disney movies: hyper-personalised, ephemeral, and disappearing texts – snippets of Disney – and their parallel (but perhaps related) inability to speak with their children about such things as ‘media literacy’. The ‘media’ they refer to seems to be both everything and nothing – fleeting, overwhelming and ephemeral to the core. What is at stake here is not merely parental anxiety or platform opacity, but the disappearance of a shared object around which talk, mediation or collective sense-making might occur. The families in his study often have young children, some as young as five, who already have access to their own screens through smartphones. Because legal streaming services can be expensive, many households turn to free platforms like YouTube and TikTok. When asked where they had seen a particular character or heard a familiar song, the children often named YouTube Shorts or TikTok as the source. People describe how most of their children’s encounters with Disney and other children’s media now take place on these algorithm-driven platforms. They express the growing challenge of keeping up with their children’s viewing practices. They speak of the rapid, relentless pace of content and the way it is delivered through hyper-personalised ‘For You Pages’ – making it difficult to monitor or mediate media use. As one parent put it, ‘Monitoring YouTube history is easier, but with these Shorts and TikTok scrolling, it’s really hard because it’s just nonstop’. Once a video is scrolled past, it becomes almost impossible to find again, further highlighting the incessantly individualised nature of such viewing – after all, what cannot be found again, cannot quite be shared. These interactions reveal that what the families speak of as ‘media’ is no longer easily pinned down – it is at once everything and nothing, ever-present yet intangible, constantly consumed yet quickly forgotten. This is further complicated by the highly individualised experience offered by smartphones, which are often the main devices through which children view content. The small screen, combined with the personalised nature of the platforms, further distances parents from their children’s media practices. Many of the children use devices that are logged into their parents’ accounts – not only as a strategy parents intended to help mediate and monitor their viewing, but also, in many instances, these are the only devices available at home. However, some parents express frustration with this setup, as they feel they must constantly remain in ‘child-safe mode’ themselves, worried their own viewing behaviour will shape what the platform recommends to their children. It seems the algorithmic insistence on personalising media experiences consistently manufactures family members as simultaneous data points fuelling algorithmic systems, thus influencing audiencing for others in the household, adding layer upon layer of individualisation.

This sense of dissolution, where the ‘audience’ appears to be replaced by streams of datafied practices, rituals and habits, is not an empirical anomaly but mirrors broader theoretical displacements in audience research. Here, another conversation intersects with our considerations in this contribution. About a decade on from the 2013 Livingstone & Das ‘end of audiences’ paper with which we began this piece, Das, along with Brita Ytre-Arne, directed a consortium on emerging directions in audience research. With a noticeable shift of interest towards datafication (Bucher, 2018; Gillespie, 2014), we (Ytre-Arne and Das) developed a five-point agenda (2019) out of that consortium for future audience research in response to the rise of intrusive media technologies, datafication and the proliferation of algorithmic systems. We noted that audience research needed to evolve to address the societal implications of emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things and platform-driven data collection. We argued that new critical literacies were necessary for audiences to navigate complex and often opaque media environments, and that researchers should pay close attention to how people experience, resist or cope with these conditions. We called for a renewed commitment to representing audience voices in the face of increasing datafication, surveillance and structural inequality, and stressed the importance of embedding audience research within broader political, cultural and policy conversations. Yet even this agenda – grounded as it was in critical concern – perhaps still assumed audiences as identifiable subjects who could recognise themselves as such?

Shortly after this task, one of us (Das) decided to stop teaching her long-beloved Audiences module, right after she coordinated this 14-country exercise on the future of audiences, and teach a module on datafication instead: Her students rarely thought of themselves as ‘audiences’, and speak of being users, of everything and nothing in particular. This was not simply a curricular decision, but an acknowledgement that the category of ‘audience’ no longer appeared to organise students’ lived media experience in any meaningful way.

As we (Das and Wicaksono) write this short piece, we continue to engage with audiences (as users, families, parents, citizens – our own slippage between ‘audiences’, ‘users’ and ‘people’ in this piece is deliberate) in our variety of projects, and also engage with audience research every time we think about the media and identity, the media and agency, and so on. Importantly, as researchers from the Global South who work in the Global North, we are especially mindful that these discussions themselves are often prey to bias and assumptions (Harindranath, 2005) – as Banaji (2010) deftly outlines, not every child is leading a digital childhood, and ‘old’ media and audiences are alive and well.

Continuously re-conceptualising audiences is intellectually costly – but abandoning the question altogether risks overlooking the collective stakes that originally animated the field. Of course, it takes up energy, intellectual and emotional, to, periodically, it seems, reflect on what audience research means, or who audiences are, for those of us who consider ourselves ‘audience researchers’. We suggest, in 2026, that instead of spending energy on whether the term ‘audiences’ works for an entire field or not, we must reflect on what audience research has taught us so far about matters of collective significance – for families, communities, societies – and carry these teachings firmly forward, whether or not ‘audiences’ act as apt labels from this project to the next, and from this context to the other. Speaking of the collective, we have learnt things from audience research about agency (and its limits and possibilities), and whether such agency endures, or matters (Das, 2024) amid platform power. Audience research has also often reminded us to think about normative questions – what good should look like in datafied societies and how audiences’/users’/people’s best interests must be protected (Ytre-Arne and Das, 2019). We must, even when, or especially when not, operating in intellectual contexts where ‘audiences’ or the legacy of audience research are visible, remind ourselves ultimately about the collective, ensuring that our research and teaching centre the human experiences that exist beyond the algorithm, as we find ways in which to do and teach audience research, or indeed, speak about ‘audiences’ in a datafied age.