Toward an alternative approach to study New media Audiences

By Ali Kessaissia

The Sociology of Communication, as human and social science, is being to be redefined on the light of the deep transformations caused by the intensive uses of the new information and communication technologies in the individual and social life. The frontiers between the communicator and the receiver of messages transmitted by the media have been moved away, and consequently, the sociological branch to study the source systems has joined the one to study the reception systems, that is the audience.

On the other hand, the global character of the modern communication especially through the web sites and satellites, has given a global dimension to the audiences with different cultural values, that is different interpretations of the same messages received in different cultural contexts. The traditional methods of the classic sociology of communication seem to unable to grasp the different aspects the new phenomena related the reception and behavior of the audience. The phenomena is to be thoroughly studied in the traditional and transitional societies where necessary demographical and statistical data are unavailable. Thus, New methods are to be adapted following the developments of the phenomena in the developed societies.

Based on theoretical and methodological developments, the different approaches to study the media audiences have included the most recent technological and political events in an attempt to understand and explain behaviours of different individuals and groups toward, for instance, the use of the Internet as a domestic technology besides the use of TV;  and the "war on terror", started in late 2001, after the famous attacks on the Twin Towers of the TWC in New York and the Pentagon Quarters in Washington.

Technically speaking, The Globalization process is, strongly, taking place through the generalization of TV and Radio Direct Broadcasting via Satellites (DBS) and the use of the Internet, that is not, contrary to the first generation of new technologies literature, a monolithic or placeless ‘cyberspace’; rather, it is numerous new technologies, used by diverse people, in diverse real-world locations with different ways of interpretation and understanding.

The old methodology used study new socio-cultural phenomena without or with insufficient previous data, could  help researchers to analyze, understand, interpret and useful conclusions, that is the ethnomethodology in use since the 80’s in reception studies.   

   The suitability of the Ethnographic Approach to study the social and technical interactions in this “Cyberspace” comes from the promise that one cannot understand the one without the other.

       The most suitable approach  available  to study the media global audience behaviours starting from local communities, may then have many things to do with the Ethnographical approach used by David Morley and all when focussing on TV viewing, on Domestic technologies, on family dynamism and on social micro-analysis.

       In inviting the global audience studies literature through the natural history of media researches and the nature of the audience researches, we advocate a comparative ethnographic approach and we suggest that there are lines of enquiry, linked to dimensions of new media use, that can be usefully pursued across a wide range of settings; and that there are issues about social transformations in new media contexts that generally concern social science and other communities.