Audience frictions

Against a backdrop of new ways of engaging and configuring audiences across technologies, platforms, regions and modes, there is a revitalisation of audience studies, offering fresh theoretical and empirical territories that follow the frictions of social tensions and resistance in challenging modes of being an audience. As audiences engage with media, including artificial intelligence and related technologies, they are encountering and dealing with expanded resources for viewing, listening and interpreting their thoughts and actions, feelings and emotions. These various modes of audiencehood generate frictions, sources of both productive and negative energies to encounter and contest different conditions for a digital commons. This contribution is part of the Cultural Commons special issue on ‘Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique’, edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood.