Towards the construction of new audiences: ‘Fictions’ in contemporary media

Abstract

In this paper I aim to work with a concept that I defined as “fictions” or better, “Hegemonic fictions”. The concept of fiction is based not on a “lie”, but on a hegemonic representation that media produce and reproduce in every show, game, interaction or presentation. That is why I chose to call them fictions: the ways through which media build hegemonic representations about everything that should matter in a specific moment of time and history. I identified four different fictions and, through them, I propose to analyze different aspects of both the contemporary media and their audiences. The first one is the fiction of choice. The analysis that I made of this fiction is based on the diversity of available electronic devices and the real possibilities that audiences have to choose. The second one is the fiction of participation. The emphasis in the so called “decision of the audience” is built upon a new fiction: we do not get to choose who participates on a show, a survey or a contest but we are summoned to “vote” or answer questions in order to construct a feeling that we are participating. The third fiction is the one of the objectivity. The aim of this fiction is to analyze the operations through which media present their sayings, images, news and opinions as “objective”. In the same line, the fourth fiction is about the reception stage. I do not sustain that reception is a fiction but I will analyze the variables and the mediations that exist between media messages and the audiences who receive, read, write and listen to those messages. New audiences and new media seem to be changing and developing at the same time in the same space. We aim to question the naturalization of the different and varied relationships between media and audiences in order to present possible new approaches that might lead to new questions and researches.