The Places Where Audience Studies and Production Studies Meet

Some Shared Agendas in Audience and Production Studies

The first thing to recognize is the simpatico origins of audience and production studies in seeking to study those populations who had been formally excluded in industrial hierarchies of cultural and economic value. Over the past thirty years, media reception studies, for example, have sought out workers, housewives, and teenagers in part to understand the varied ways diverse groups interpret media texts and also in response to industrial measurement techniques that historically privileged the white, suburban, male “head of the household.” In a similar vein, more recent studies have focused on the activities and interpretative practices of media production workers who not only are largely invisible to the general public, workers below the line so to speak, but who also occupy precarious economic positions in the industry. These similarities thus are grounded in what might be seen as a shared politics toward media industries. Audience and production studies have offered insights into the lives and thoughts of viewers and workers that frequently counter how media industries regard their viewers and workers.

Relatedly, then, both production and audience studies have to continually reassert the boundaries of the cultures they seek to describe. For if individual media consumers surf the web or read a book in isolation, in what way are they part of a collective audience or an interpretative community? Similarly, while the overall production of a film or music recording may be collaborative, the individual worker does not necessarily see or even know of the contributions others make, much less observe a particular production culture. In both cases, the object of study is made through the research process, the methods deployed, and the boundaries of the field. Interpretative communities and production cultures exist only in relation to the time and space of the research, and the place of the researcher. This is perhaps obvious but important because, for all the hand-wringing about representativeness in audience studies and access in production studies, it simply reaffirms that audiences and producers are also and have always been social constructions, represented as unified groupings to serve industrial needs.

This is not the same as saying that the two groups are the same, or were never separate to begin with, as argued recently by Phillipe Ross (2014). Pointing to the ways that the subjects in media production studies frequently say that they draw on their past audience experiences in creating content, Ross wants researchers to consider audiences and producers as roles that every individual plays in a socially defined context. While Ross is right to de-reify the binary of media production and reception as modern human practices, he evacuates the power relations that give those practices symbolic, economic, or forms of capital in social life. Indeed just as not all viewers are worthy of the industry’s attention as “audiences,” so too not everyone who contributes exchange value to television is considered a “producer,” even in the minds of the workers themselves. ¹ For me, Ross’ rhetorical disambiguation of producers and audiences should be a call to look more closely at how people produce or consume media and also how people consider themselves media producers or audience members to begin with.

Historically, both production and audience studies were grounded in a concern for the ways media consumers and makers largely reproduced the hegemony of the most powerful media institutions in society. Early critical studies of production and reception are littered with the disappointment of researchers when they discover that industrial ideology is effective: both audiences and producers recreate the content hierarchies that media industries formalize as part of normative media consumption and production practices. These have been well charted with relation to the media contents and genres which have higher or lower social status, often referenced in relation to “quality” or “production values.” Media industries use these content hierarchies loosely to command more or less economic value, for example, in terms of selling media audiences for quality dramas higher or paying reality TV media workers less, though within these generic categories there are more economic hierarchies.

Beyond this, though, television audience studies have looked deeply into the ways value is expressed through “lay theories” (Seiter 1999), body language and emotional responses that form a “text-in-action” (Wood 2009), or forms of reflexivity about the self, media, or audience research (Sender 2012). These values and the means for expressing them frequently have taken a classed dimension in that viewers often mobilized their feelings into narratives that projected class dispositions. Put more plainly, “There is a substantial rift between feeling and telling [about soap opera reception],” writes Louise Spence (2005, 140). According to Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood (2012), that rift excludes people who do not have access to the normative middle-class interpretative discourses from personhood value, that is, the basic property that citizens may exchange, defend, and adopt in a performance. In their focus groups with working-class women, the authors found that viewers mobilized alternative frameworks to talk about their achievements and identities, although these frameworks too would evoke contradictory feelings of schadenfreude toward the ordinary people on their screens (i.e., Ibid., 160–3).

The idea of normative class discourses that frame the ways to talk not just about the value of media contents but about their audiences’ social value could resonate with production studies. Case analyses of media producers show their adeptness in using the same discourses as middle-class viewers. For example, John Caldwell’s (2008) research into film workers’ lay theories of production showed high degrees of reflexivity toward production practices. The most prominent film directors seemed to share the cultural capital to declare that they know their audiences from “the gut” rather than from research (Zafirau 2010). Producers unable to frame themselves within the normative discourses for their role had difficulty getting recognition and thus had troubles being allowed to move up in the labor hierarchy (Mayer 2011). Borrowing from Spence’s (2005, 151) generalization about watching may also apply to producing: “Watching soap operas may be one of the discursive sites where social classifications and psychological processes intersect, where fantasy and ideology conjoin.”

My hesitancy in making this generalization about the ways television audiences and producers communicate the self and social value has to do with the fact there are so few studies in which both are studied together. Certainly Julie D’Acci’s (1994) pioneering study of the producers and audiences of the television program Cagney and Lacey (1982–1988) showed how letter writers from the audience were well-versed in the same feminist discourses as the program producers. More recently, studies of audience members who are then enrolled into reality and nonfiction entertainment television production demonstrate how viewers may understand perfectly well the low status of these genres and their inability to gain social respectability through becoming a production participant (Grindstaff and Mayer 2015; Ong 2015). At the same time, the recognition by their peers, more than the outside chance for any financial payout, drove most viewers to decide to apply for the program. The poor Filipinos in Jonathan Ong’s (2015) ethnographic study of television audiences performed “strategic suffering” as a way of showing their agency when entering the production process. Like the working-class viewers in Skeggs and Wood’s (2012) sample, this alternative way of boosting one’s personal value in relation to the program was never mistaken for the ability to accrue the forms of capital that would allow them to change their social positions.

The concern with value, articulated through media viewers/workers relative to the presumed status of the media content, is something to consider further in bringing together audience and production studies. In my recent work on the local film and television economy, also known as Hollywood South, both media viewers and production workers shared a discourse around “place” as a source of personhood values that, on the one hand, exceeded social class differences, while also reinforcing those differences, on the other hand. Rather than reproducing the entire research project and its findings, I will focus instead on how researchers might stitch together audience and producer responses as a form of placemaking, or as a shared practice that values the meaning of a place and the people who inhabit it.

Where Audience Studies and Production Studies Meet

Placemaking accords value to what makes a place distinct, recalling both the public memories embedded in a place and preserving its authentic differences, what Delores Hayden (1997) summarizes as the “power of place.” Importantly, the power of place derives from the collective right to live and participate in these meaning-making processes. Amid the other calls for justice heard around the world in the 1960s, the “right to the city” (Lefebvre [1968] 1996) was a rallying cry to recognize not only importance of particular kinds of geographies but, as urban theorist Peter Marcuse (2011) puts it, “the city was seen as a synecdoche for society as a whole, as it could be, an urban and urbane and, if you will, creative society.” Placemaking thus involves cultural consumption and production, media audiences and producers. Media reconfigures the city as a place through these creative processes of representation and their consumption (Georgiou 2010). While media and other creative industries have tried to co-opt placemaking into various market-driven schemes that seek to package and sell place-value (cf. Harvey 2000; Zukin 1993), the power of place escapes its complete capture by the market or subsumption into a commodity.

Although New Orleans has a vibrant history of popular placemaking (cf. Souther 2006), the desire to recall and preserve the city as an authentic place became a rallying cry in the years following a devastating collapse of the urban geographic, political, economic, and social infrastructure. Wrought initially by a hurricane, and followed by combination of governmental neglect and corporate profiteering, the post-Katrina era has been marked by popular efforts to recognize the exile of significant numbers of working-class people whose culture has largely defined the place. In these efforts, media industries have been strategic partners in New Orleans placemaking (cf. Mayer and Schmalbach, under review; Morgan Parmett 2012). Media representations could amplify the differences that made the city and its people unique. Residents scrutinized the production, circulation, and reception of these images as bellwethers, not just for their use value as accurate or authentic portrayals of place but also their exchange value in terms of the marketplaces for disaster recovery. Much has already been made of the absence or lack of empathy for New Orleanians’ material and emotional losses which stemmed from the inadequate and often denigrating representations of the place and its people (cf. Negra 2010; Thomas 2014; Watts and Porter 2013). Furthermore, much of the film and television production in the city was actually set elsewhere, the result of a large tax incentive program for locational shooting passed well before the disaster (Mayer and Goldman 2010). For these reasons, I began researching the viewers of and workers on a major television series that was shot in and about New Orleans post-Katrina.

In canvassing coffeehouses and other public spaces for people who wanted to talk to me about the HBO series Treme (2010-2013), I expected respondents to talk to me about the ways the program represented the city as a unique place. Both television critics and scholars have already pointed to the meticulous way the program documented local culture and championed characters who struggled through three and a half seasons to save it (Fuqua 2012; Gendrin et al. 2012; Moylan 2011; Thomas 2012). What I did not expect was that so many program viewers also had become workers on the program, mostly in the form of unpaid volunteers or minimally paid extras. As such, I began to ask local people, first in one-on-one interviews, to tell me about their personal experiences both of the reception and the production of the program. Then, I continued this line of conversation with small groups of viewers who knew each other and watched the program together, either at my house or at one of theirs. In all, more than fifty research participants spoke to me for more than one hour each. ² Although not everyone was a fan of the program, nor would labor for the production, the discourse that organized people’s thoughts about the show inferred that the value of both watching the program and working on the set transcended economic measurements.

Instead, they measured value by the ways the program engaged in placemaking both on the screen and off. Respondents were well aware of the one-dimensional ways that the city had been portrayed, especially after the storm. One native New Orleanian in her fifties recited a frequent complaint:

It’s painful to me because New Orleans has a lot to offer [filmmakers], but we get passed over and typecast as a regional area. Sometimes we get lumped in with people from Texas or Alabama because the accents are indiscernible to a lot of people in the country. . . . It hurts when people from Hollywood come here and want to do sets of plantation homes and magnolias.

Treme was different. Viewers felt producers understood the city and defended it. With respect, if not reverence, viewers called the local cultural references they recognized in the show “loving,” “diligent,” and “engaged,” thereby calling attention to both the referential content and to the program creators who stitched them into the fabric of the script. This was a form of placemaking that defended the collective right to the city. In the words of an African-American college student who grew up near the university, “The show has the potential to be truthful and realistic to the city.” This appeal to the real and its fundamental truth-telling was a frequent logic for watching and then joining the production, especially after the airing of the first season.

These quotes also invoked a particular way that audiences and producers felt that they should engage with the city as a place. A middle-aged tour guide, also a faithful viewer, said she worked as an extra when the tour season was slow. Even if she got paid, she explained that the work did not seem like labor:

One of the days I did extra work I was down on Frenchman street, which I go to all the time, and I went to the [music club] Spotted Cat and watched the Jazz Vipers . . . Now [in season two] a lot of my buddies have been on the show so chances are if I do it again, I’m going to hang out with them and get paid for it.

The proposition of getting paid to hang out in a particular place with the people there at once seemed to evade exploitation. At the same time, it was where and with whom the extras hung out that imbued them with use value in the first instance. In general, Treme’s managerial staffers did not need the extras to do anything but hang around with others to give credence to the authenticity claims around New Orleans as a particular kind of place, one where people congregate regularly dimly lit clubs animated by the featured local musicians.

Placemaking energized the everyday with the politics of the multitude. Drawing on various meanings of the word “everyday” mapped by John Roberts (2006), respondents who were drawn to extra for Treme characterized their activities in New Orleans as meaningless repetition (i.e., where I go all the time), as ritual consumption (i.e., to hear music in a club), and as an act of collective engagement and intervention (i.e., where we are working together to show home on television to the rest of the world). Being on the set thus transformed extra labor into another kind of cultural work, one that accrued the value of your peer group seeing you doing everyday things on the program, knowing you watch the program all the time, and hearing you promote the program regularly through the viral networks of social media. Placemaking drew attention to the value of New Orleans culture—as in the people, what they do, and where they go—as part of the larger political project of urban recovery and renewal.

In assessing the show, its audiences, and its producers according to this logic of placemaking, I frequently encountered a shifting sense of insiderness–outsiderness as a researcher. At times, the fact that I lived in the city, had also been there before Katrina, and had returned to live and work was enough to include me in the conversation. Yet other times, I listened patiently when interviewees instructed me about the place-based culture. Like many others, one began, “New Orleanians have their own authentic culture.” An older, African-American gentleman, he said with a smirk, “Like when [the local actress] Phyllis Montana tells her husband that he came home that night ‘smelling like cigarettes and pussy,’ that was her line. Nobody outside of New Orleans could have thought of that anyway.” At the time, I think he was trying to catch me off my guard, but what really shocked me was how he could have divined that was her line. A former mailman, this interviewee responded that he knew Montana because he used to deliver her disaster aid checks to her flood-ravaged neighborhood in New Orleans East. This was an acute reminder that the identities constructed from a shared sense of place among audiences and producers were also cut through by racial and class identities.

Meanwhile, I also witnessed how placemaking, while not totally captured by profit motives, certainly dovetailed with media industry needs. Obviously these reception activities had exchange value for executives who could rely on the free and immaterial labor of fans in organizing audiences, promoting the program through social networks, and legitimating the caché of the network brand. Those labors could then easily converted into production practices in terms of recruiting more pliant locals to offer their bodies as extras, their homes and neighborhoods as locations, and their time as volunteerism. All of this production work streamlined the efficient incorporation of metonyms for local authenticity into the program content and kept costs lower than typical schemes for recruiting local labor and resources, including place-based knowledge. In the shooting of large crowd scenes, program producers could appeal to the goodwill of the volunteers who were offered local food or music in return for their appropriately attired and enthusiastic presence. As an overall strategy, placemaking could thus be harnessed at times to not only drive down the day rates normally accorded for production work but also the expectation of any wages for labor.

The Value of Placemaking in Political Economies of Production and Reception

Although placemaking derives value in asserting the right to the city, a creative society, and the collective investment in preserving what is unique about a place, those values circulate in the political economies of cities that partner with private industries to buttress the public sector. Film and television industries, along with other entertainment and tourism industries, have been central to New Orleans’ creative economy strategies (Mt. Auburn Associates 2005). Although incentives produce a net loss in terms of tax revenues at the state level (Mathis 2012), the city hangs its hopes on the revenues generated by visiting film crews and local labor in order to fill the budget holes left by decades of state and federal disinvestment as well as the drastically reduced tax base post-storm. To attract them, cities cater to producers’ needs with a flexible and skilled labor force, a host of standardized services and infrastructure, and a readiness to bid under the competition (Christopherson and Clark 2007). In New Orleans, the Office of Film and Video is funded by the city’s privately incorporated tourism and marketing bureau (New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation [NOTMC]), which ensures the city promotes and gets press attention for local media representations and high-profile productions, driving viewers to be visitors. This public–private partnering governs over placemaking, pushing the city to develop and manage resources and a labor/consumer regime that best serves the itinerant media corporations.

In New Orleans, the aura of Hollywood thus trumps the value of the place, as local land and labor are put in the service of producers’ needs. On the local film office website (http://www.filmneworleans.org), outsiders looking to make their multimillion-dollar opus are encouraged to sit down with city officials directly to make their needs known. For them, there is a one-stop “shopping” application for permits and a catalog of potential crew resources. Meanwhile, the website tabs for residents wishing to join the film economy contain a series of primers on professional behavior and values. Most interestingly, a tab on the site for residents who want to be extras assumes their media fandom, and not economic necessity, in enlisting them for the lowest jobs in the production hierarchy. Written in the paternal tone of a series of prohibitions toward errant children, the page tells potential extras not confuse themselves with the legitimate staff who may bark orders (a list of action calls are spelled out for extras to elicit their proper reactions) but who deserve their privacy. “While it is exciting to be next to a star, say nothing unless you are spoken to,” reminds the website. Unlike producers who are encouraged to present themselves in person, or more likely through an appointed proxy, extras should not send headshots or self-present at the film office. Links to casting offices limit applicants to online submissions. Applicants are cautioned to treat the social media site Craig’s List as a place where employees assume all the risks in exchange for a job. In this way, the city assists in controlling the flow of placemaking power, holding the hands of the few authorities hailing from Hollywood at the top, while disciplining the masses of local viewers and workers at the bottom.

The public–private benefits of chasing the highest income viewers, those thirty million HBO subscribers nationally (Walker 2010), and putting them to work were most evident in the case of Treme. Citywide institutions began promoting the series well before the pilot aired. Those efforts paid off in sycophantic press coverage aimed at “redrawing the tourist map” and boosting local cultural consumption (Morgan Parmett 2012, 201). These privileged viewers could also then be recruited, having the time and money to donate, thus giving program producers ample choices to suit their labor and budget needs. Finally, the NOTMC, working in concert with local businesses, went about promoting the neighborhoods featured in the series to those same targeted tourists, most recently through the “Go Nola” iPhone app in which Treme star Wendell Pierce connects the “Tremé neighborhood, featured in the award-winning series, with authentic street corners seen in the show” (“New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation, NOTMC, Launches GO NOLA” 2012).

What this means in terms of production and audience studies is that the values that viewers and workers might share on any one television program might exceed but do not supercede the political economic arrangements that hierarchize their social positions in the field of cultural production. For all of the free labor dedicated to productions or places, neither of these entities can offer much in return. Regardless of the ways fans and extras might see themselves as co-participants, even experts, in placemaking, they have no access to the same forms of capital as the program creators and executives. Volunteering to be part of the production may win free access to the catered buffet on the set or cheers later in a public screening, but the presence of so many willing people, both unpaid and underpaid, no doubt also produces a race to the bottom for wages. Meanwhile the city itself becomes a force in shaping viewers-cum-workers by mobilizing them in the service of the film and television industry’s needs. Together with the press, local businesses, and public offices, the city ensures that media executives, those at the top of the production chain of command, get the highest quantity and quality of workers and viewers at the lowest cost.

Concluding Provocations

Returning to the initial question as to whether media audiences and media producers are so distant from or so close to each other seems to hinge on both the phenomenology of the object and the critical orientation of the researcher. For any holistic look at media ecosystems would show how media creation involves consumption, and vice versa (as pointed to by Ross 2014). A refusal to draw the hard distinctions that were proscribed in an earlier era of media studies in which production and consumption operate through stages of a circuit (Du Gay et al. 1997) may yield interesting insights into the languages and values that producers and audiences share given a particular identity, a place, or a social location. This effort would bring media studies back to understanding how economic value and personhood values have always been “dialogic, dependent and co-constituting,” as Beverly Skeggs (2014, 1) has argued for within sociological research. Indeed, in my early research, these commonalities of ethnicity, region, class, and generation joined Mexican-American media producers and audiences in ways that blurred the significance of their economic role in the circuit of culture (Mayer 2003).

More recently, as also shown in this case study, placemaking or other articulations of geographically based community offer insights into the ways producers and consumers establish alternative measures of value for what they do with media (Christensen and Jansson 2015; Madianou and Miller 2011; Vargas 2009). The shared discourse of place intersects with those surrounding heritage, ritual, and authenticity to forge a structure of feeling—a sense of common culture—against what its articulators perceive as threats: austerity and neoliberal restructurings, global migration and exile, not to mention climate-induced disasters. Placemaking discourse promises to overcome the problematic bifurcation of a cosmopolitan and provincial citizenry, capturing what viscerally bonds people to a geography despite its internal imbalances and class inequalities (Nava 2007). It is also subject to political and economic co-option. In its most cynical articulation, the grounding of personhood values in a place makes it easily co-opted into a branding strategy for a neoliberal tourism-based economy (Davila 2012). Yet, it is also possible to think of how those values produce feelings and bonds in excess of capital’s capture; to study them involves a specific “methodological proposition” (Skeggs 2014, 16) to look ethnographically at the ways that people constitute values through their own practices. This proposition should bring the study of producers and audiences closer together.

At the same time, media industries do make distinctions between producers and audiences. These are inscribed in the law of contracts, property and privacy, not to mention the divisions of labor within the organizations themselves. In everyday contexts, the distinction between producers and audiences and the hierarchies that organize each of these groups reinforce social relations of status and marginalization. Whereas in the context of much the Americas the ability to associate oneself with television can be a form of symbolic capital for workers, it is also true that these associations are limited by Hollywood’s formal divisions of labor and status hierarchies (see Mayer 2011). Deep ethnographic and historical work on media production and consumption in India has illuminated more extensively a field of power relations cut through by economic, cultural, and social divisions. These separate media audiences and producers not only from each other but in terms of the respectability accorded to consumers of other kinds of goods (Mankekar 1999; Parameswaran 2002) and to laborers in other industries and other industrial centers (Ganti 2012; Govil 2015).

Taken together, these studies illustrate how much media production studies and audience studies share and should continue to share in conversation.