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What do we consider an audience in todays shifting sands of media interaction? Traditional media theory considered audience’s as passive, essentially consuming media in an undiscerning fashion. Today audiences are perceived as active, engaged and even fragmented, we no-longer need to be in physical proximity to share an experience thanks to the mycelial like limbs of the internet. But I still think the best audiences are wildly dressed with bikes for steeds chasing flaming octopuses in the desert.

What unites them is a shared experience of the same mediated content

Turnbull, S. Media Audiences, is anybody watching, pg 27/28.

Come on a journey to a pre-covid world where I was ‘audiencing’ (Fiske, 1992). Many moons ago when face masks were worn as a festival fashion piece or to keep the dust at bay, I journeyed to Black Rock Desert, Nevada to take part in Burning Man, a Bohemian Utopia comprised of music, art, science and wild weather. Nomophobic’s beware, when I went to the Burn cell service and wifi didn’t exist, I stashed my phone deep in the RV to hide it from the ever penertrating dust and immersed myself in the old fashion idea of an audience. This was an experience in the flesh baby, well & maybe with a fancy hat!

The idea of an audience at Burning Man is an ever changing multiverse of possibility. At times I found myself deep in a thrumming crowd at dawn watching Tycho, other times I was alone in the deep Playa, holed up in a phone box talking to god. I ran up and down a giant key board and drove an art car made of mirrors. I was immersed in the most spellbindingly creative place I had ever been, but of course we weren’t there just to drink it all up we were curating the experiences of those around us, my camp offering cocktails, yoga and DJ delights in our offering of gifting.

What we have to do is make progress in the quality of connection between people, not the quantity of consumption

Larry Harvey

Not everyone in my family was thrilled I was going to the Burn, in fact some of them seemed to infer a hypodermic needle approach, musing that I was joining a cult and that I’d end up dancing naked in the desert on Acid, perhaps some of that sentiment was fulfilled… We had unplugged from the default world to embrace ideologies of unity, self expression and radical self reliance and as audience we were cherry picking our experience. Our level of discernment hyper leaps beyond the old understanding of passivity.

The Burn as a microcosm enforces Fiske’s(1992) idea that ‘rejects the notion that assumes the audience as an uncritical mass, the theory that mass audiences consume the products that are offered without thought.’ We had erected an entire vibrant city of seventy thousand, co-created a retaliation master piece to the real world and we were living out in real time, in a nurturing community bursting with inventive expression. This experience for me was my most delightful audience experience where I was empowered to interact with, produce or disregard the media around me. We had each injected meaning into our sphere, enlivening our senses in this show of Art mimicking life or is it the other way around?

What a dusty marathon that was, oh to be in enveloped by an audience of that proportion again, TUTU Tuesdays for life!

References:

Turnbull, S (2020/05/01)’Media Audiences: Is anybody watching.’ Macmillan Education UK