[csaa-forum] cfp: Beyond the Audience: Rethinking Participation and Power in the Age of Data Capitalism

[Nico CARPENTIER]

((apologies for cross-posting))

Beyond the Audience: Rethinking Participation and Power in the Age of 
Data Capitalism


January 15-16, Rome, 2026 IULM, University

Keynote speakers
-Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’
-TBC


Description

The audience regards a “large number of unidentifiable people, usually 
united by their participation in media use” (Hartley 2002, p. 11), yet 
it is always already plural, diverse, fragmented, fluid and in many ways 
“ungraspable”, both everywhere and nowhere (Carpentier & Wimmer, 2023, 
p. 38). In the age of data capitalism, audiences become users and 
creators, seemingly blurring the division between the official and the 
vernacular, the elite and popular. Yet the vast majority of audiences 
remain in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the owners of the platform or 
elite audience members (e.g., influencers) insofar as platforms control 
their creativity, interaction, and usage. In this regard, although 
analytically helpful, terms such as “creators” and “users” may be 
romanticizing the division between the few and the many.
The discussion above echoes tensions between two critical yet seemingly 
opposing, if not contradictory, audience roles discussed in critical 
media studies. The political economy approach, argues that by exploiting 
audience time, attention, data and sociality, digital media treat 
audiences as commodities (Smythe, 1977), labourers (Terranova, 2001) and 
subjectify them in the lifeworld of surveillance and platform capitalism 
(Zuboff, 2019; Andrejevich, 2020; Srnicek, 2017; Fuchs, 2015). Developed 
in the 1970s by Dallas Smythe and later guided critical political 
economy approaches in media and communication (e.g., Mosco, 2009), the 
audience-commodity thesis became again relevant after 2010s with the 
blatant commodification of media and the rise of smartphones and digital 
platforms; it has been reflected in critical works, including that of 
Evgeny Morozov (2020), Mark Andrejevic (2013), Jodi Dean (2010), 
Christian Fuchs (2015; 2020) and has been popularized beyond academic 
with the theses of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2017) and platform 
capitalism (Sadowski, 2020). On the other hand, there is the “active 
audience”, a figure clustered around cultural studies and ethnography, 
where audiences casually and routinely do things with social media, 
exercising their voice, agency and empowerment. The active audience 
prioritizes the uses of media over the structures determining usage 
(Ambercombie, 1998), partaking of the enthusiasm that characterized the 
early days of internet research in media and communication studies, 
including the idea of a new and booming participatory culture (Jenkins, 
2006). There have been attempts to bridge these approaches, such as in 
Nick Couldry’s concept of the “media manifold” (2016), Ytre-Arne’s and 
Das’ unpacking of “communicative agency” in datafication (2021) or the 
“duality of media” by James G. Webster (2011). The spread of deepfakes 
complicates this media landscape, contributing to a wider movement of 
communicative polarization and geopolitical deglobalization (D’ Eramo, 
2022).

The shift from singular to plural, from top-down to bottom-up processes 
as well as the high customization of contents is then not necessarily a 
“positive” or emancipating aspect. As a consequence of the postfordist 
organization, it represents a problematic transformation of power 
through a democratizing narrative.

The concept of the “audience” is then useful for critical scholarship 
insofar as it intertwines concerns around participation and engagement 
with commodification and exploitation — yet to what extent are we also 
“beyond” it? How can we think of concepts like participation and power 
in the context of data capitalism through and beyond the figure of the 
audience? How can in turn figures like users, participants and 
communities be thought within the critical tradition of both political 
economy and cultural studies in a landscape dominated by algorithmic 
data extraction?

This conference invites contributions studying audiences through the 
lens of critical media research. The latter questions positivistic 
paradigms of social research, highlighting issues from commodification 
and exploitation to resistance and alternative forms of world- building. 
We look for abstracts thinking through agency, everyday contexts and 
socializations together with political economy, commodification and 
value creation.

We welcome both theoretical and case studies driven papers and seek 
contributions in the following indicative topics:
–	The audience commodity and its contemporary applications
–	The audience as worker in the digital age
–	Questioning the term ‘audience’
–	Content creators, bloggers and influencers
–	Algorithmic audiences
–	Datafied audiences
–	Generative AI and audience replacement
–	Clickification of news and information
–	The effectiveness of media literacy in the context of data societies
–	Activism, hashtags and platforms
–	Audience exploitation
–	Mobile audiences
–	Media lifeworlds and everydayness
–	Film and music audiences
–	Data journalism and news audiences
–	Social listening and feedback
–	Cybernetic audiences
–	Audience polarization
–	Fans in data-driven contexts
–	Streaming audiences
–	Audiences in Video on Demand (VOD), Streaming Video on Demand (SVOD) 
and Over the Top (OTT) Platforms
–	Audiences and piracy
–	Audiences as publics and communities
–	Deepfakes and Gen-Z



Please send an abstract of max 500 words and a short bio at the 
following address: conference at medemap.eu

Deadline: September 30, 2025

Organizing board
Giulia Ferri, Andrea Miconi, and Elisabetta Risi (IULM University)

Scientific board
Nello Barile (IULM University), Nico Carpentier (Charles University in 
Prague), Panos Kompatsiaris (HSE), Andrea Miconi (IULM University), 
Elisabetta Risi (IULM University), Josef Seethaler (Austrian Academy of 
Sciences), Tiziana Terranova (Orientale University, Naples).

This conference is organized in the framework of MEDEMAP, a Horizon 
Europe research project (www.medemap.eu).

References

Abercrombie, N., & Longhurst, B. (1998). Audiences: A Sociological 
Theory of Performance and Imagination. Sage Publications.
Andrevich, M. (2013). The Digital Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is 
Changing the Way We Think and Know. Routledge.
Carpentier, Nico and Wimmer, Jeffrey (2023) Democracy and Media: A 
Discursive-Material Approach. MEDEMAP, Deliverable 2.1.
Castells, M. (1999). The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 
Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell Publishing.
Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power. Oxford University Press.
Couldry, N., 2016. Life with the media manifold: Between freedom and 
subjection. In Kramp, Leif, Nico Carpentier, Andreas Hepp, Richard 
Kilborn, Risto Kunelius, Hannu Nieminen, Tobias Olsson, Pille 
Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Ilija Tomanic Trivundža, and Simone Tosoni, R. 
Kilborn, (eds.) Politics, Civil Society and Participation: Media and 
Communications in a Transforming Environment. Bremen: Edition Lumière, 
25-39.
D’Eramo M. (2022), Deglobalization, Newleftreview, 3/29.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media 
Collide. New York: NYU Press.
Livingstone, S. (2005). Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement 
Matters for the Public Sphere. Intellect Books.
Livingstone, S. (2019). Audiences in an age of datafication: Critical 
questions for media research. Television & New Media, 20(2), 170-183.
Livingstone, S., & Das, R. (2013). The end of audiences? Theoretical 
echoes of reception amid the uncertainties of use. A companion to new 
media dynamics, 104-121.
McGuigan, L. (2023). Selling the American people: Advertising, 
optimization, and the origins of adtech. MIT Press.
Smythe, D. W. (1977). Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism. 
Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1(3), 1-27.
Terranova, T. (2000). Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital 
Economy. Social Text, 63(18), 33-58.
Webster, J. G. (2011). Duality of Media: A Structurational Theory of 
Public Attention. Communication Theory, 21(1), 44–474.
Ytre-Arne, B. and Das, R., 2021. Audiences’ communicative agency in a 
datafied age: Interpretative, relational and increasingly prospective. 
Communication Theory, 31(4), pp. 779-797.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a 
Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs.




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