Analysing Audience Studies

Audience studies is without a doubt one of the most lively subfields within media and communication research. This has been the case for more than a decade. An interesting aspect of the field is that it is relatively communicative. Within the field, researchers from the social sciences and the humanities actually tend to speak to, and learn from, each other, even though research objectives and methodologies may differ. The meetings are not always productive, and obviously not everyone is as communicative, but all in all, the dynamic character of the field makes it one of the most exciting ones within media and communication research presently. However, even though the field has evolved, and continues to do so, it is to a certain extent caught up in what Stuart Hall (1989) has termed a crisis within the dominant paradigm in communication studies; a crisis with both internal and external dimensions. I will in this paper discuss the ways in which this crisis affects audience studies. I will argue that we at this stage either know less about audiences than we think we do, or less than we care to admit. In the discussion I will focus not only upon the dominant paradigm but also upon its main critical alternative, and I will argue for an increasing attention to the question of contextualization as well as for a move towards modernity theory.1