Is It Digital Entrepreneurship? Designing a New Sport through Audience Ethnography

In designing a brand-new sport, do basic tenets of digital entrepreneurship such as ‘solve a user problem’ apply? How is it possible to understand who the potential audience might be for a product and experience that does not yet exist in a Culture Industry such as sports? The paper examines the beginnings of an Australian startup with an early-stage product in the sports and entertainment industry and its use of digital ethnography to investigate key audience segments. The process of audience development occurred alongside the prototyping and testing of a high-tech product that is central to the sport. As the product underwent iterations of development and release, audience interaction with the product was tracked through social media. Discourse analysis of audience engagement with the product on Facebook was conducted to inform a series of user personas that indicated a heavy male bias in the future audience. In exploring the intersection of sports, Cultural Industries and digital entrepreneurship, the paper concludes with observations of how this case challenges each of those notions through the process of ‘starting up’.

Striving for Authenticity: The Foundation and Dynamics of the AlDub Nation Fandom

This paper looks at the AlDub Nation, a fandom birthed from the accidental love team formed in the Philippine noontime show Eat Bulaga in 2015. Convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006a), group dynamics (Forsyth, 2019) particularly Tuckman’s (1965) developmental stages of a group, and mixed methods approach through audience ethnography (Livingstone, 2009) were used to analyze the foundation and dynamics of the said fan community from a six-month fieldwork. I argue that the both online and offline fan activities such as attending fan events and buying fan-related items help prove and assert their identities as fans and identity as a group that continues to thrive even without their idols together in any project, which I call “striving for authenticity.” This paper sheds light on the AlDub Nation fandom through empirical data, contributes to the growing literature on fandoms in the Philippines and Philippine popular culture in general, as well as provides prospects for future studies on other fandoms that are converging in this digital age.

‘Cinema as a common activity’

This paper is concerned with the ways in which mediating spaces like film festivals function as alternative public spheres when social movements escalate, arguing that the Istanbul International Film Festival and Documentarist right before, during and following the Gezi protests turned into politically and socially inclusive spaces for marginalised groups in Turkey. To account for how audiences and organisers aimed to transform these mediating spaces into socially inclusive and heterogeneous outlets during the Gezi protests, the paper relies on an audience ethnography in the sites of these film festivals from 2013 until 2017 including participant observation, go-alongs and in-depth interviews with audiences, film crews and organizers. Although the spaces of these two film festivals functioned differently, the article shows that film festival spaces generally transformed into cosmopolitan outlets in Istanbul in this period, opening room for a dialogue between marginalised and dominant groups, which was fed by social movements

Media anthropology: studying the life of media consumers through audience ethnography

Editorial

Postracial Resistance

Postracial Resistance: Black Women and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity looks at how, in the first Black First Lady era, African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse—the media-propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over, and that race and racism no longer affect the everyday lives of both Whites and people of color—in order to resist its very tenets. Black women’s resistance to disenfranchisement has a long history in the U.S., including struggles for emancipation, suffrage, and de jure and de facto civil rights. In the Michelle Obama era, some minoritized subjects used a different, more individual form of resistance by negotiating through strategic ambiguity. Joseph listens to and watches Black women in three different places in media culture: she uses textual analysis to read the strategies of the Black women celebrities themselves; she uses production analysis to harvest insights from interviews with Black women writers, producers, and studio lawyers; and she uses audience ethnography to engage Black women viewers negotiating through the limited representations available to them. The book arcs from critiquing individual successes that strategic ambiguity enables and the limitations it creates for Black women celebrities, to documenting the way performing strategic ambiguity can (perhaps) unintentionally devolve into playing into racism from the perspective of Black women television professionals and younger viewers.

Fandom and Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More: Audience Ethnography of Immersive Dance

Fan blogs devoted to Punchdrunk’s long-running immersive production of Sleep No More reveal the impact of dance and immersion on spectatorship. Positioned as participant observers within the SNM world — with its own rules, codes of behavior, values, social dynamics, and environments — fans channel their postperformance perceptions into visual ethnographies that include poetry, digital painting, illustration, collage, sculpture, and other forms of fan art.

Watching CSI: A study of British audiences watching Channel 5 and 5 USA

Despite consumption patterns gradually changing, the notion of flow remains a key concept drawn on by scholars to understand television. As a concept, ‘flow’ is connected to an understanding of the difference of television from other media as far as the viewing experience is concerned: rather than a single film, audiences encounter a number of small units that are combined in the process of audiences’ sense making. In this understanding, ephemera become as important as programmes as they interlink to create a meaningful whole. On the other hand, John Ellis argues that the more typical form for television is actually the segment which contains a separate meaning within itself. Using an audience ethnography, this article argues that in the experience of audiences, the concepts of flow and segmentation are both in evidence. Rather than seeing them as opposing, therefore, they must be understood as complementary in order to fully account for audiences’ experiences and sense making of television.