About CMCA-2015

The role of media in the life of audiences has experienced a noticeable transformation during recent decades due to rapid technological transformation and the integration of media into social and institutional practices. As the emerging technology age begins its re-organization of everyday life, the study of media audiences has taken on renewed importance. This is not just because more information is mediated; it’s also because people are integrating both old and new media technologies into their lives in more complex ways. Consequently, the concept of ‘audience’ itself has shifted to embrace new perspectives and approaches. Starting from the era of mass communication in which audiences were either conceived of in terms of motivations and effects or as an aggregated audience as public, we increasingly recognize the new potential of audiences as members of mediated social networks, as consumers of diverse media contents on complex combinations of modes of deliver and as content-producers.

Today being ‘audience’ is even more complicated and media environment is much more cluttered because of more sets of media, new forms of reception or media layering. All of which challenges traditional flows of communication in which audience research placed television as its core medium in a domestic context of reception. The tensions inherent in the study of audiences of linear media often focused on a debate over the power of the media and of the audience –between the passive and the active audience. In contrast, the new media environment engages audiences in a variety of contexts, for a range of purposes and with varying forms of being and audience. With the rise of new media the line between producers and audiences has become blurred resulting in prosumers, produsers and prosumerism. we invite papers that deal with the ways people are getting involved in contemporary communication configurations, reflecting on how individuals, broader social groups and institutions and media producers frame the variety of forms of audiencehood..