著者

池上 賢

出版者

日本マス・コミュニケーション学会

雑誌

マス・コミュニケーション研究 (ISSN:13411306)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.84, pp.109-127, 2014

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This paper examines perspectives for studying audiences in the complex media environment in contemporary society. First, I point out the following three changes in the media environment: transition to a ubiquitous society, diversification of information, and the use of two-way communication in the media. Next, based on the review of past audience studies, I point out the importance of audience identity. In past audience studies, audience identities were studied as identities of specific social groups. In this paper, however, I argue that such a perspective is inadequate for understanding the relationship between the media and audience identity in contemporary society; in order to analyze multi-faceted identities in contemporary society, it is necessary to adopt an alternative perspective. For this reason, I propose a perspective that focuses on narratives about audiences' media experience and studies how identities are constructed in such narratives. Then, based on the proposal, I review the following two analysis perspectives: First, I present a spectacle/performance paradigm. This paradigm assumes that individuals present their identities through their media experience. Identities are analyzed as narratives that are created for other individuals. Secondly, I present the perspective of ethnomethodology as an approach for analyzing narrations that cannot function as narratives. This perspective analyzes methods used by individuals to achieve actions. In this perspective, identities are resources presented by narrators to achieve interaction. These two perspectives study identities not as characteristics assigned by researchers to audiences, but as characteristics constructed by audiences themselves. In conclusion, I argue that the use of these two perspectives makes it possible to study complex and diversified audience identities in the media environment in contemporary society.