Working Watching: The Creative and Cultural Labor of the Media Audience

This article examines the audience for the products of the culture industries in the context of creative and cultural labor. It traces the history, multiple contemporary examples, and theorizations of the audience as a site of labor. It further interrogates the tension between this labor and the audience's hegemonic construction as an analytic category and object of knowledge. Finally, it argues for the political implications of explicitly foregrounding labor as a constituent condition of being an audience.