The individualised audiences of everything and nothing: In search of the collective in teaching and researching audiences

This article began as a conversation between a PhD supervisor (Das) and doctoral researcher (Wicaksono), reflecting on the changing conditions of audience research in datafied, algorithmically- curated media environments. Revisiting earlier debates on the ‘end of the audience’, the authors draw on empirical insights from doctoral fieldwork in Indonesia alongside a decade of theoretical engagement with audience studies. Through this dialogic exchange, the article explores how hyper-personalised, ephemeral media flows – particularly on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube – undermine the shared texts, rhythms and interpretive contexts that once anchored the idea of ‘the audience’. Families’ struggles to make sense of children’s media use point to a broader condition in which ‘media’ is experienced as both everything and nothing: ubiquitous yet intangible, individualised yet collectively consequential. Weaving together conversations at different moments and with different participants, this contribution ultimately argues not for abandoning the concept of the audience, but for reasserting the collective stakes of audience research – agency, inequality and normative questions – even as ‘audiences’ become less stable as a category in both research and teaching. 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.