Were Producers and Audiences Ever Separate? Conceptualizing Media Production as Social Situation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emergence of “prosumers” and “produsers” suggests that production and reception are more conflated now than ever before. But is their mediation through the performance of hybrid roles new? And were the two ever separate? This article criticizes social theories of the media and “production studies” for overstating the distinction between producers and audiences and the instrumental means whereby the former engage the latter. It rejects this postulate of a “structured break” between production and reception by discussing the producers’ tacit knowledge of the audience, their reflexivity and socialization, and their use of “audience images.” The article then draws on Goffman (1959) and Meyrowitz (1985) to propose a new model for understanding production: as a social situation sustained by participants but explicitly oriented to an absent third party: the audience. It concludes by discussing the implications of the model for the study of production and producers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.037 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".