Research & Development White Paper - WHP 396 The Role of the Audience in Media: BBC
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Research & Development
White Paper
WHP 396
May 2022
The Role of the Audience in Media:
how culture, framing and narration give shape
to the way stories are understood
Michael Armstrong & Maxine Glancy
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp for a copy of this document.WHP 396
The Role of the Audience in Media
Michael Armstrong & Maxine Glancy
Abstract
This paper traces the types of audience role from task oriented computer systems,
where the software is designed around the user’s role, to books, theatre, radio, film and
television where the role of the audience is, for the most part, decided by the content
creator and has been changed by social engineering. It explores how the use of both a
distinct narrator to guide the audience and a frame story to set the stage for the main
narrative can introduce audiences to new ideas and package new types of media in the
form of a familiar one. The paper then shows how cultural context can remove the need
for both the frame story and narrator and how audiences co-opt traditional forms of
media along with the way streaming platforms introduce new audience roles.
The paper moves on to computer games where the audience is given a degree of control
as protagonist along with immersive and augmented media where audience roles are
distinct from rectilinear video. It then looks at the challenges faced when creating
interactive content; whilst some are simply the selection of user preferences, others
involve more active audience roles which can be framed by a user dialogue, a quiz or a
personality test, including examples that suffer from a dissonance between a passive
viewing mode and an active intervention in the narrative. The paper then explores
examples of media experiences designed to serve the needs of the audience during the
pandemic, helping guide the audience through important tasks such as mood
management and point to the role of the audience as a product delivered to advertisers.
The paper concludes with an outline ontology of the different types of audience role and
discusses the changing technological and social context.
This white paper includes parts of a paper written for the MIX2021 Conference, Creating
cross boundary roles for the audience: developing new relationships between creators and
audiences and parts of our White Paper, Object-Based Media: An Overview of The User
Experience. It has been greatly expanded to include a broader range of media examples
and roles. This paper has been inspired by our collaborations with Bristol + Bath Creative
R+D1, the Pervasive Media Studio2 and the University of the West of England's Digital
Cultures Research Centre3 and the questions and challenges that have come about from
our discussions.
Additional key words: narrative structures, storytelling, flexible media, virtual reality,
augmented reality
1
https://www.bristolbathcreative.org/
2
https://www.watershed.co.uk/studio/
3
http://www.dcrc.org.uk/Table of Contents
1 Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Stories and Media................................................................................................................. 1
1.2 Background............................................................................................................................ 3
1.3 Approach and scope ............................................................................................................ 5
2 Roles in the Design of a Computer System ............................................................................ 6
2.1 User Experience Design ...................................................................................................... 6
2.1.1 Some common framing techniques ............................................................................ 7
2.2 User Roles in the Twitch Platform ................................................................................... 7
2.3 User Roles Across Computer Systems ........................................................................... 8
3 The Writer’s Audience .................................................................................................................. 9
3.1 The Frame Story ................................................................................................................... 9
3.2 The Evolution of the Modern Novel ................................................................................ 9
3.3 Reframing Writing and Potential Literature ............................................................... 10
4 The Theatre Audience ................................................................................................................ 11
4.1 The Active Audience.......................................................................................................... 11
4.2 The Passive Audience........................................................................................................ 12
4.3 The Pantomime Audience ................................................................................................ 13
4.4 The Awakened Audience .................................................................................................. 13
4.5 The Liberated Audience ................................................................................................... 15
4.6 The Immersed Audience ................................................................................................... 16
5 Radio - The Audience at Home................................................................................................. 17
5.1 Inventing Speech Radio .................................................................................................... 17
5.2 The Proxy Audience ........................................................................................................... 18
5.3 Radio Drama ........................................................................................................................ 19
5.4 The Influence of Television.............................................................................................. 20
6 Moving Pictures – the film and television audience ........................................................... 21
6.1 From Photography to Motion Picture .......................................................................... 21
6.2 From Radio to Television ................................................................................................. 22
6.3 Framing in Factual Television ......................................................................................... 23
6.4 Framing Drama in Television and Film ......................................................................... 25
6.4.1 Television ......................................................................................................................... 25
6.4.2 Cinema .............................................................................................................................. 26
7 Moving Pictures and the active audience .............................................................................. 29
7.1 Audience Participation at Cinema Events ................................................................... 297.2 Television Watch Parties .................................................................................................. 30
7.3 Multi-screen/device Use and Companion Apps ......................................................... 31
7.3.1 Companion Apps for Audience Loyalty and Consumer behaviours. ................ 32
7.3.2 Attention Modelling of Second Screen Use ........................................................... 33
8 Streaming platforms ................................................................................................................... 34
8.1 Audience Roles ................................................................................................................... 35
8.2 Types of Streams ................................................................................................................ 36
9 The Audience as Protagonist .................................................................................................... 37
9.1 Text Adventure Games – second person games ........................................................ 37
9.2 You the Protagonist - as second-person fiction ........................................................ 38
9.3 Frame stories in first-person video games .................................................................. 39
9.3.1 Variations on first-person video games ................................................................... 40
9.4 Frame stories in third-person games ............................................................................ 40
9.5 Storytelling Within Computer Games .......................................................................... 41
10 Immersive Media ..................................................................................................................... 43
10.1 360 Video ............................................................................................................................. 43
10.1.1 CongoVR...................................................................................................................... 44
10.2 Virtual Reality ..................................................................................................................... 45
10.2.1 Virtually Being Lenin ................................................................................................ 45
10.2.2 We Wait........................................................................................................................ 46
11 The Audience Role in Augmented Reality ....................................................................... 47
11.1 Audience as Actor .............................................................................................................. 47
11.2 Audience as Explorer ........................................................................................................ 48
12 Audience Roles in Interactive Content ............................................................................. 49
12.1 Select & Settle .................................................................................................................... 49
12.1.1 Customised Content................................................................................................. 50
12.1.2 Visual layering for events coverage ..................................................................... 51
12.1.3 Variable audio mixes for linear content .............................................................. 52
12.2 Continual Interaction ........................................................................................................ 53
12.2.1 Viewpoint choices in three interactive radio dramas....................................... 53
12.2.2 Questions and feedback set against a linear story........................................... 54
12.2.3 Narrative choices and branching stories in theatre and film ......................... 55
12.2.4 Narrative choices as branching story and personality test ............................ 55
12.2.5 Narrative choices in a branching story - drama or game? .............................. 56
12.2.6 Choices as a simple video quiz ............................................................................... 5612.2.7 Content Choice in a magazine programme ........................................................ 57
12.3 Placing the Audience at the Centre of the Experience ............................................ 58
12.3.1 Cook-Along Kitchen Experience ........................................................................... 58
12.3.2 Make-Along: Origami Jumping Frog.................................................................... 58
12.3.3 Theatre in Schools .................................................................................................... 59
13 Media Designed for Audience Needs ................................................................................ 60
14 Transactions: Audience as Consumer and Product ....................................................... 61
15 A Summary of Audience Roles ............................................................................................ 62
15.1 Non-interactive Roles ....................................................................................................... 62
15.2 Interactive Roles ................................................................................................................. 62
15.3 Participatory Roles ............................................................................................................ 63
16 Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 64
16.1 The Changing Social Context.......................................................................................... 65
16.2 Lessons from BBC Taster ................................................................................................. 66
16.3 New Directions to Explore ............................................................................................... 67
17 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................. 68
18 References. ............................................................................................................................... 691 Introduction
Can the theatre exist without an audience? At least one spectator is needed to make
it a performance. So we are left with the actor and the spectator. We can thus define
the theatre as "what takes place between spectator and actor"4. [1, p32]
This paper attempts to examine the role of the audience across many types of media. We
come at this with the hypothesis that every story takes place between the audience and
creator and that if that audience is not present in the room (or on the end of a live two
way link) then the creator will need to invent a fictional audience to fill the gap and cast
them in a role. The creator then needs to communicate this role to the remote, real
audience, unless they can rely on a pre-existing cultural framing. If the creator does not
convey a clear and consistent view of the role or roles of the audience they will confuse
or even alienate them. This challenge has been solved many times for many different
forms of media and the solutions differ in ways which depend on the form of the media
and both the physical and cultural context in which the media is consumed. However,
except in contexts like theatre and cinema where audience behaviour can be controlled,
the creator does not have the final say in how the audience may interpret and even
subvert their role and the intended narrative. We have collated the different audience
roles we have uncovered into an outline ontology of roles in section 15.
There are many examples where audiences have subverted the role intended for them
and built their own rituals around cult films and TV programmes. Roland Barths
highlights the writer's loss of control over the interpretation of a text in his essay The
Death of the Author [2, p142-148], pointing out that the meaning of a work is
constructed by each reader because of their individual relationship to the language, the
narrative and the characters. This effect is deliberately used in polysemy where multiple
meanings are encoded in the work and works where audiences are encouraged to take an
active role such as immersive theatre, this effect can be amplified. In these productions
there is a strong interaction between audience expectations and previous knowledge of
this type of work along with the level of immersion and interpretation that results for
the individual. As a result the audience response to the work is polyvocal, in other words
each person may have a different interpretation of the work and should be studied as
such since "the interior meaning-making frames of audience members appear to play a
key role in experiences of immersion." [3] We discuss this more in section 4.6.
1.1 Stories and Media
Humans are natural storytellers. Terry Pratchett called us “Pan Narrans, the storytelling
chimpanzee” [4]. Our sense of self as a continuous experience is constructed through the
stories we tell ourselves, in what Daniel Dennett calls our "Centre of Narrative Gravity"
[5, p410]. Oral storytelling, whether one to one, one to many, or many to many is the
form of communication which our brains have evolved to encode and decode [6]
4
This is the question Jerzy Grotowski’s raised in an interview in 1964 which was published as part of the book
Towards a Poor Theatre. Grotowski created the Theatre Laboratory in 1959 which eventually became the
Institute for Research into Acting in Poland. One key part of their productions were detailed investigations
of the actor-audience relationship [1, p15].and while many ancient oral storytellers were both entertainers [7] and keepers of
knowledge [8] we all communicate with each other in the form of stories. They are our
primary means for exchanging knowledge.
Writing is a technology. It first appeared as a form of record keeping, a tool for
administration, keeping accounts. These accounts were read out to the people in charge,
hence we talk about “auditing” accounts, as oral communication was still the most
trusted form of communication, and continues in the teaching of rhetoric in some British
schools [9]. Writing was mistrusted, in part because you could not ask questions of the
text in the way you can of a person [10]. The arrival of writing as a physical media
created new opportunities for storytelling but also created the challenge of
communicating with an audience that was remote in both time and space. In turn
authors had to construct a fictional audience to whom the story was being told. Early
authors also needed to find ways of introducing the audience to their role. A common
approach was to use a frame story which introduces the reader to the context of the
story they are about to read and how they should understand their relationship to it.
Frame stories are less noticeable in modern literature, only because the frame story is
now implicit part of modern culture [9]. A similar process has occurred with moving
images and sound. The first films were a form of moving photography and radio was
originally a means of point to point communication. Only later were they co-opted as
mass-media means of telling stories, both factual and fictional. Again, creators had to
negotiate new ways of conveying narratives, in the case of film it could borrow from
theatre, whilst radio faced significant new challenges. Television as the late arrival
borrowed from both radio and film to create its own forms of framing.
In the more recent example of a computer programme the situation is usually reversed.
Here the software is written to enable the user to carry out tasks which assist with their
existing role, such as booking a holiday or editing a video, so the programmer has the
challenge of fitting the experience to the user's needs. The programmer's task can be
seen as very different from that of the writer or radio producer, but our work on
interactive and immersive media has shown that they share a common set of challenges
and these are most acute when novel elements are introduced. Users and audiences
need to be introduced to new elements in a way that does not harm the experience by
disrupting immersion and/or impede the flow. If this is not done well then novel
elements may create a barrier to the user and result in disengagement [11]. Few people
enjoy the experience of reading instructions and most are frustrated by the barrier of
having to acquire new knowledge in order to perform a task. This is compounded when
instructions need to be understood before enjoying a leisure activity such as a computer
game or other interactive experience. The challenge for the creator is to reduce the
barrier to entry by co-opting cultural references and maintaining narrative flow whilst
drawing them into the experience and conveying a feeling of belonging.
In many cases the role of the user is something they bring to the computer program or
media experience. The user may have specific needs that they have in their role and the
computer program or media experiences has to be designed around their needs. Whilst
this is obvious in the case of an online shopping or workplace leave booking system, it
also comes about to some extent in the case of media consumed in the home or whilst
2travelling. This was the challenge faced first by radio broadcasting in the 1920s, and is
now an issue for any media consumed in combination with other activities. The role of
the media in meeting audience needs is a key part of Lianne Kerlin’s work on human
values at BBC R&D [12] and the recent pandemic has been a driver for new services
specifically designed directly around the audience’s needs, particularly the challenges of
education, mental health and exercise.
1.2 Background
This paper was initially inspired by the work of Walter J. Ong, a Jesuit priest and
professor of English literature, who's main work centred around the change from oral to
literate culture and the way in which it altered human consciousness. Whilst this paper
takes as it's starting point Ong's essay, The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction [9] it is
also worth reading Ong's book Orality and Literacy to gain a better understanding of the
huge impact that writing and then printing had on the way we think and the way we
exchange stories [8]. Ong's book follows on from earlier works like Marshall McLuhan's
Understanding Media which covers a wider range of media but in less depth [13] and
Albert Lord's book The Singer of Tales which recounts research into the techniques of
non-literate oral storytelling, initially with Milman Parry, through fieldwork in Yugoslavia
in the mid 1930s and early 1950s and proved that the Homeric poems are transcriptions
of oral works [7]. Oral storytelling would have taken place in many different contexts
and at different times of day and would have taken many different forms. However, the
term "campfire story", often used to discuss oral storytelling, turns out to be a 19th
century term originating with soldiers and frontiersmen in north America, as a way of
staying awake whilst acting as the camp lookout and persists to this day in contexts like
scout camps [14].
There are many other examples of traditions being invented in the 18th or 19th century
which, like the campfire stories, can overshadow earlier behaviours. This was a period
where theatre audience behaviour was actively policed, the works of Shakespeare were
censored by Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler, stories were rewritten to fit particular
aesthetic tastes and the enthusiasm for the gothic style of architecture even lead to
castles being rebuilt to match. Many traditions we take for granted as ancient history
were created during this time. One striking example is the Scottish kilt which was
invented by a Lancashire factory owner in the first half of the 18th century whilst
another is the Welsh Gorsedd of the Bards ceremonies, now an integral part of the
Eisteddfod [15]. These ceremonies were in fact invented in London in 1792 by a
stonemason from Glamorgan, Iolo Morganwg, real name Edward Williams, who also
happened to be a friend of Thomas Bowdler [16]. The audience roles and behaviours we
see in contexts like theatre and classical concerts today, along with the repression of
public display of emotion [17] are also inventions from this era and do not reflect
behaviours and roles seen in most other contexts such as music festivals and pop
concerts. As Kirsty Sedgeman commented recently in the Observer newspaper, “Some of
the rules that we’ve instigated in the arts around silent reverent reception come from a
particular place and time: 19th-century, anti-working class, colonial campaigns to civilise
the world through culture.” [18]
3In order to develop a deeper understanding we have had to step back and unlearn our
assumptions about audience roles and behaviours. This has enabled us to in order to be
able to recognise other interesting and significant audience phenomena, which we would
otherwise have overlooked. By drawing on the concept of "low theory" which discards
the concepts of high and low culture we have been able to take notice of a number of
interesting examples of audience roles that we might otherwise have disregarded. Jack
Halberstam introduces the idea of "low theory" in their book The Queer Art of Failure.
The book shifts between high and low culture, popular culture and esoteric knowledge
"in order to push through the divisions between life and art" [19]. Halberstam regards
failure, not as a loss, but as a deliberate tactic, refusing to live up to accepted measures
of success in order to discover more creative, cooperative and surprising approaches.
Halberstam characterises low theory one which "tries to locate all the in-between spaces
that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony and speared by the seductions
of the gift shop." Low theory accepts "low culture" as equally worthy of study as what is
deemed "high culture". Through this lens it becomes noticeable that some very popular
TV programmes, demonstrate a high level of narrative sophistication and metalepsis5 in
their form, giving the audience a role in the construction of the narrative. In a similar way
the streaming of video game playing on Twitch might be regarded as low value content
but can also be seen as having high levels of sociability and community involvement.
Another useful concept from queer theory which helps our understanding of the role of
the audience is that of performativity. Philosopher Judith Butler put forward the concept
of performativity of gender as a cultural and ritualistic phenomena, as something that
arises through metalepsis, the anticipation of a person having gender results in the
perception of gender. In the same way, the construction of legal authority comes about
through the performance of that authority and its anticipation by the audience [20,
pXV]. This is a useful way to examine the performativity of audience roles as cultural and
ritualistic phenomena in that people enter into the role of being a member of the
audience as much as the performers and writers. One of the key aspects in this case is
how performativity works by drawing on conventions that have become established
through repetition [21, p172]. Here we can view the phenomena of dressing up for a
night out at the opera in the same light at dressing up for a screening of The Rocky
Horror Picture Show, or simply curling up on the sofa with a warm drink to make time for
your favourite TV programme. The outfits and locations may be very different in each
case, but the underlying ritualistic nature of the audience behaviour is consistent. Butler
also breaks down normative structures and enables alternative viewpoints to be
explored, pointing out how, when something falls outside of normative categorisation, it
is often rejected or ignored [20, p151]. Applying this lens to culture and storytelling
exposes how categorisation of normal story structures and accepted cultural norms can
blind us to the importance of many types of entertainment and audience phenomena
that fall outside of the mainstream. If we only view audience behaviours through the
perspective of a limited number of expected behaviours then we are in danger of missing
the most interesting and emerging trends.
5
Metalepsis is the movement of an actor or narrator between narrative levels, transgressing the boundaries
of the story structure. It draws attention to the fictional nature of the work and/or the artificial structure
of the work and often addresses the audience directly.
41.3 Approach and scope
The writing of this paper became a journey of discovery in itself. Starting with the basic
ideas of the role of the audience from Ong, we found unexpected parallels between
different forms of media and similar ideas and challenges around drawing audiences into
active participation. We set out to throw some light on the challenge of designing and
authoring interactive media but have ended up with a much wider perspective on
interaction and participation than the one we started out with and an appreciation of the
complexities involved in creating successful audience and authorial roles across any new
form of media. However, as a result of the way the paper has evolved, written and
researched at the same time, there are some significant changes in writing style.
We have referred to individual works in this paper to illustrate narrative and technical
innovation and notable audience phenomena that produce insight into the role of the
audience. Of necessity the scale of the media examples referenced in this paper changes
with the type of content. Whilst more established media examples draw on interesting
and innovative content such as the film The Matrix or the radio play The Hitchhiker's
guide to the Galaxy, other sections covering newer forms of content such as augmented
reality (AR) and interactive video draw on lesser known work emanating from places like
the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol and works published through the BBC's Taster
platform. We have also chosen examples created for user studies into virtual reality (VR)
and general research into streaming platforms and social media. Many of the examples
are ones which break convention or otherwise push the boundaries of their medium as
these provide us with the greatest insight into the role of the audience.
This paper for the most part excludes audience roles that enable the audience to feed
back to the content creator. The exception is the case of video streaming platforms
where it is part of the basic functionality. The issue of audience participation is a wider
topic worthy of an in depth treatment which we hope to cover in a separate paper. With
the exception of immersive theatre we have also excluded forms of interactive media
which involve the audience travelling to specific locations to follow the narrative or
experience the media, along with audience roles and behaviour at music events. One of
the most interesting examples of audience role comes about in role play games which we
have referenced in a number of contexts because of their influence on many media
forms. However, because these involve co-creation of narrative between players and the
dungeon master who runs the game these are also out of scope.
This paper uses terms like “reader”, “audience”, “viewer”, listener”, “player”, “person”
and “user” interchangeably, along with "writer", "author", "creator", "producer" and
others, as appropriate for the type of media being described in an attempt to maintain
flow for the reader. We have adopted a referencing convention whereby authors, as far
as we know, have been referenced by their current name. This means in some cases the
name on the reference we give will not completely match the name in the original media
as we regard that as preferable to deadnaming authors. We would also like to
acknowledge that this paper has been written from a white, western, Anglocentric
perspective and does not explore how audience roles and behaviours vary between
different cultures.
52 Roles in the Design of a Computer System
Computer systems are designed for many different user functions and tasks, for
example, functions such as helping the user relax, learn, or carry out a task like online
shopping and behaviours such as watching, listening to or participating in an event. The
roles of the users are divided up by the different activities they wish to carry out and
systems are tailored to fit each of the roles. There will often be little need for
personalization or customization at the individual level, other than to ensure that each
person is linked up to their own account data and system security is maintained [22].
2.1 User Experience Design
User roles and framing can be examined through the lens of the universal principles of
user experience design as applied to immersive and interactive media, which this paper
will generalise across many different forms of media. Our user research, outlined in our
white paper Object-Based Media: An Overview of The User Experience has produced a
framework for such experiences, within which the role of the user is seen to be
dependent on four conditions.
• The utility of the experience has to be clear.
• Users have to feel part of something
• The experience has to be framed within concepts familiar to the user
• The experience has to maintain flow. [11]
The utility of the experience is explored by Hassenzahl & Tractinsky who define the user
experience as:
“a consequence of a user’s internal state, the characteristics of the designed
system and the context within which the interaction occurs, for example an
organizational or social setting, the meaningfulness of the activity and the
voluntariness or otherwise of their participation” [23].
Kankainen describes the user experience evolving over time as a,
“...result of a motivated action in a certain context. User’s previous experiences
and expectations influence the present experience; this present experience leads
to more experiences and modified expectations” [24].
Once the role of the user has been established, flow has to be achieved in order to
maintain immersion in that role. For example, Cheng suggests that, to establish the role
of the user and maintain flow in augmented reality learning experiences depends on the
user's spatial ability, practical skills, and conceptual understanding. The relevance and
reliability of the information content of an experience determines how disruptive or
fluent the interactions are for the user. Relevance impacts on the overall user experience
by influencing the sense of utility of the service, as well as how entertaining or
stimulating the experience. Relevance also depends on the user’s internal state, general
needs and the user's environment [25].
62.1.1 Some common framing techniques
There are a number of established framing techniques, generic across media types which
aid successful user experience design of which the following three are most relevant.
Personas are fictional users, typical or atypical, which are used as a guide for a target
user when designing a new user experience, or presented as part of the framing in the
form of an illustration of how the user should respond to the media experience. For
example:
• Goal-directed personas focus on processes users need to use in order to achieve
objectives;
• Role-based personas focus on behaviour, on the role the users play;
• Engaging personas focus on the emotions of the user, their psychology, their
backgrounds and make them relevant to the activity in hand
• Fictional Personas are not based on real users, instead based on assumptions to
aid future, currently unknown users. These personas can be deeply flawed, but
useful as an initial sketch [26].
Design fiction is a design practice that allows the creator/designer to explore, create
and critique possible solutions/scenarios for their ideas, which may use new or emerging
technologies that are unfamiliar to users/audiences. Design fiction has three aspects:
the use of narrative, the prototype, and the context. The prototype in the context of
design fiction is a piece of design that exists within a fictional world in an attempt to
explain how the reader should understand and relate to these designs [27].
Skeuomorphic design uses attributes, artefacts and/or scenarios that are already
familiar to the user, to aid their transition into and through a new experience. Their use
may mimic their real-world counterparts in how they appear and/or how the user can
interact with them. Either way, in order to be a successful framing device, it should fit
with the user’s natural interpretation.
2.2 User Roles in the Twitch Platform
We have chosen Twitch to illustrate user roles because it bridges the gap between linear
media forms and computer system design. Twitch is a platform which enables to live-
streaming of amateur and professional content from video and gameplay, to cooking,
music, creative content, and ‘in real life’ streams. The audience can watch and comment
in real time and receive feedback from the streamer, creating a close affinity between
streamer and the audience. Twitch, with its emphasis on live streaming, upholds the
engagement, flow, linearity and timeliness of live television coverage such as sports and
major events, but in addition demonstrates new emergent ways of viewing and engaging
with the content creators. The platform’s practices and infrastructures introduce new
dimensions of flexibility, convenience and user-control [28].
7Twitch is designed around a number of activities, with the interactions available to each
being shaped to facilitate that activity along with measures to prevent unauthorized
access to parts of the system not relevant for that person.
• The streamer, who hosts and creates the content and are curators of the Twitch
video stream, for example as a video game player or a chat host. They may also
respond to audience comments. Occasionally, bots or other administrators are
used to filter and respond to comments.
• The audience, who are watching and commenting on the stream are consumers
of the content. However, their role is not static. Audience members may shift
from using the stream as a radio-like background medium, to more focused
viewing associated with film or television, to contributing to a conversation. Their
behaviour spans an active-passive continuum. Twitch audience members often
engage with multiple streams and switch attention between them. The audience
also may direct the streamer by suggesting in-game strategies and participating
in polls.
• The moderators, who take on the job of maintaining civility, greeting viewers and
introducing newcomers. These are often regular audience members who are
promoted to the role [28].
There are three main types of stream prevalent on Twitch:
• The challenge, also referred to as the professional, focuses on competitive play
and ways to optimize play. Interaction with users is usually limited as the focus is
on the performance on display.
• The exhibition, or hedonist, is more focused on the personality of the streamer
and their charismatic abilities than the activity being streamed. The play-sessions
are more free-form and allows for breaks and diversions where interactions with
the audience takes place.
• The exchange, also called the companion, where the stream is built around
audience interaction. There is an explicit aim “to share feelings, memories and
emotions related to the game culture’s articulations” [29, p75-76]
2.3 User Roles Across Computer Systems
User interfaces are designed for the need of the users in carrying out activities and are
clustered according to their role. There is often little need for personalization or
customization at the individual level, other than to ensure that each person is linked up
to the appropriate tools and their own account. The role of the user is defined by the
activity they are trying to fulfil so they only need to carry out the activity they are
engaged in. The challenge for the designer is to fully understand the needs of the system
users, cluster them into different activities and design interfaces that meets the user’s
needs with minimal training. In effect the framing of the role is defined by the task the
user is carrying out and the system designer shapes the user experience to fit, and while
there will be many users of the system they will each be experiencing it as individuals
and need to be treated as such. In this paper we are considering the role of the user, how
that is framed by the curator and the creator of the media. We explore the audience
roles on streaming platforms in more depth in section 8, but now we will move on to
examine the reader's role in relationship to a book.
83 The Writer’s Audience
Writing is a technology, and like all the technologies we will encounter here, it may not
be immediately obvious how it changes the relationship between people and stories and
what conventions were invented to use this technology to tell stories. Writing enabled a
message or idea to be conveyed from one place and time to another, along with the
storage of information with far fewer errors than human memory. The arrival of the
printing press, much later, enabled the error-free transmission of stories and information
to a far wider audience with revolutionary consequences [13].
3.1 The Frame Story
In The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction, Walter J. Ong examines the evolution of the
roles that readers are called on to play [9]. The key message of the essay is that the
audience’s role is a fiction constructed to encapsulate the audience’s relationship with
the storyteller. This is in contrast to oral storytelling where the audience’s role can be
negotiated as a dialogue between audience and performer. Indeed an important thing to
understand about oral storytelling is that the story is not remembered word for word,
but reconstructed each time from formulas and characters, allowing the storyteller to fit
the story to the audience [7].
In early writing the encapsulation of the audience's role was created explicitly in the
form of a frame story. In the Canterbury Tales Chaucer tells the reader that there is a
group of pilgrims travelling to a real place and that the reader is to imagine themselves
as one of the group and that Chaucer himself, the narrator, is also one of the pilgrims.
This reframes the unfamiliar, written narrative as a journey encapsulating a series of oral
stories. Other early frame stories co-opt the narrative device of the letter, journal or
diary, but most writers had difficulty seeing themselves as something other than oral
storytellers [30].
3.2 The Evolution of the Modern Novel
Ong highlights Jane Austen’s role towards the end of the 18th century in overcoming the
problem of the author's relationship to the reader. Unlike most male writers, Austen was
not schooled in the oral tradition of rhetoric [8, p156]. Austen therefore had more
intellectual freedom to explore different relationships with the reader and develop a
form of writing specific to the printed book, with tight plots extended across a lengthy
narrative and new forms of narration [8, p130]. In her thesis, Narrative perspective in the
novels of Jane Austen, Schamber observes that
“…the progression of the mode of narration throughout her novels presents in
miniature the development from the early type of narration which included an
omniscient narrator, many authorial intrusions, and numerous epigrammatic
generalizations, through a stage where the omniscient narrator began to
disappear as characters were viewed through a number of minds, to the dominant
present mode of the unobtrusive, third-person limited narrator.” [31]
9Whilst the frame of letter writing continued with “dear reader” through the nineteenth
century the modern novel begins to take shape with a mixture of first person and third
person narrative. The appearance of second person narrative would have to wait for the
development of computer games in the latter half of the 20th century.
The role of the reader changes again with the introduction of mechanised printing in the
19th century. The book went from being a precious object, only available to a few people
which might be read out loud to an audience, to becoming a mass-market item which
would be read silently. This created a private flow of thoughts ideas between writer and
reader and stories moved from being a shared event to a private and even intimate
experience. The introduction of compulsory education in Britain through Foster’s
Education Act of 1870 meant that reading was taught in schools and the need for the
frame story fell away as education and culture provide a shared establishing framework
for the novel. Furthermore, the education system gave instruction on what you should
read and how you should understand books, imposing its own framing around the whole
of literature. With this external framing in place, the reader knows what to expect and
the writer can dive straight into the story. Incidentally, this also coincides with the onset
of the decline of oral storytelling and traditional singing, particularly in England, where
the new teaching profession imposed a middle class aesthetic on such activities, a
process which was further exacerbated by the introduction of radio and television [32].
This establishment of recognisable cultural frameworks for stories lead some writers to
go so far as to set out rules for their fiction genera. So whilst The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1841, is generally accepted as the
first detective story [8, p146], the form eventually became established to the point
where, in the introduction to The Best Detective Stories of 1928-29, Roman Catholic
priest and crime writer Ronald Knox set out his ten rules for a detective story. These
books were often considered to be games or puzzles and the point of these rules was to
ensure that the reader had a fair chance of unravelling the mystery [33]. Many years
later a similar set of rules, the Bill of Player’s Rights, were drafted by Graham Nelson for
text adventure games, also referred to as interactive fiction [34], see section 9.1.
3.3 Reframing Writing and Potential Literature
With the establishment of a stable relationship between reader and writer, some writers
looked for ways of escaping the established norms, writing stories about stories and
exploring the role of the writer in the age of the computer. The works of Jorge Luis
Borges published in the early 1940s, question the concepts of authorship and originality.
In The Library of Babel he describes a place where every book ever written and every
book that has yet to be written exist, amongst the noise of meaningless volumes, whilst
The Garden of Forking Paths introduces the possibility of a story with many endings, a
labyrinth [35]. Later the writers of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle),
founded in 1960, explored the idea of “potential literature” and set out to find new
patterns and structures for writers, often using constraints as a means of triggering
ideas and inspiration, based on mathematical problems and inspired by computers.
These included the application of algorithmic techniques to narrative and stories which
unfold in response to the reader [36]. We will return to the Oulipo and a work by Italo
Calvino in the context of computer games and second person narrative in section 9.2.
104 The Theatre Audience
Jerzy Grotowski poses the question, can theatre exist “without a text?” and answers:
Yes; the history of the theatre confirms this. In the evolution of the theatrical art
the text was one of the last elements to be added. If we place some people on a
stage with a scenario they themselves have put together and let them improvise
their parts as in the Commedia dell'Arte, the performance will be equally good
even if the words are not articulated but simply muttered. [1]
Enacted drama almost certainly predates any written script, whilst commedia dell’arte is
relatively modern. It originated in Italy and spread across Europe in the Renaissance
through to the eighteenth century. The lack of a written script had the advantage of
avoiding censorship, instead relying on a scenario for each scene with actor improvising
the scene around the predictable behaviours of each of their stock characters. Like oral
storytelling it relied on putting together formulas and stock elements for different parts
of the story and so could respond to the audience [37].
4.1 The Active Audience
The earliest European form of scripted drama arose in ancient Greece. The relationship
between the audience and the actors was very different from that of modern theatre.
Drama was part of a religious festival in which the gods were honoured by athletic
competitions, singing and performing plays, funded by rich patrons. These plays were
performed in daylight to huge audiences, the Dionysian theatre in Athens could hold up
to 14,000 people. The arena shape of Greek theatres meant that actors were almost
surrounded by the audience with no barrier between them. The actors could see the
audience, the audience could see each other. The audience would show their displeasure
and disrupt performances by shouting, banging their feet and throwing food at the
actors. This kind of behaviour shaped the writing, favouring strong openings to grab the
audience’s attention and establish a positive relationship between actors and audience.
The audience played an active role and writers were keen to get the audience on side as
these plays were presented in competition with each other with prizes for the best plays
going to the writer [38].
Medieval theatre audiences also played an active role in the performance. Elizabethan
audiences clapped and booed whenever they felt like it and threw fruit. Audiences would
come from every class and would eat, drink beer and wander out to relieve themselves
mid performance. It was a social occasion and a place to be seen, so the play had to
compete with the audience for attention. The people in front of the stage paid the least
and were standing, whilst the most expensive tickets bought you a seat on the stage
alongside the actors. Shakespeare wrote his plays for this active and distracted audience
[39]. The performance was a non-naturalistic depiction of events, acknowledging the
presence of the audience. The performance was self-conscious and required a similar
self-consciousness from the audience who were integral to the way the drama worked.
The modern recreation of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre has brought about a revival of
11this form of theatre [40]. In them actors address the audience directly, sometimes
assigning the audience a fictional role, such as a group of Roman citizens. A character
speaking in soliloquy in the Globe is addressing the audience as witnesses to their
actions and appealing to them for their sympathy or persuading them of the validity of
their idea [41].
4.2 The Passive Audience
The establishment of private theatres in the seventeenth century began a move towards
a separation between the fictional world on the stage and the real world of the audience,
but the audience were still very noisy. The nineteenth century saw an increasing
enforcement of middle class ideas of politeness in theatres which also became more
exclusive. The availability of cheaper books following the arrival of the steam driven
printing press, along with a rise of middle class evangelicalism and an increase in
literacy, particularly amongst middle class women and children, resulted in a moral panic
about the "corrupting effects of literature". Henrietta Bowdler's The Family Shakespeare,
first published in 1807 and later updated by her brother Thomas in 1818, were
expurgated versions of the plays with all possible reference to sex and expletives
removed, deleting entire scenes in some cases [42]. This bowdlerisation of the
Shakespeare plays and other historical works lasted into the second half of the
twentieth century and expurgated versions of the plays were still being used for
teaching in some UK schools in the 1970s.
Higher admission prices gradually narrowed down the audience demographic and
English theatre audiences became more bourgeois. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century the working class audience in the pits would create noisy disturbances and
occasionally riot. In 1809, audience members at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden were
so furious at high ticket prices that they staged the Old Price Riots, where they protested
so loudly that the performers could not be heard [18]. After 1850 theatre design
changed to ensure a more passive audience, as standing in the pits was replaced by
seated stalls and the footlights created a barrier between the audience and stage. Thus
the quiet, passive, polite theatre audience of today is a Victorian invention [43, p2-4].
The passive audience and technical advances, first gas and then electric lighting led to
the rise of realism and naturalism in theatre. Nineteenth and twentieth century
dramatists began to write plays for this quiet, passive audience, sitting in the dark, facing
the stage with little else to distract them. These plays were able to take the attention of
the audience for granted and the actors were no longer required to interact with them.
This form of drama often depicted contemporary life and the aim was to:
“... represent reality as honestly and as truthfully as possible. This, obviously
entailed a three-dimensional construction of sets resembling as closely as
possible real locations, filled with real objects, and for flesh-and-blood characters
to behave in these re-created spaces as naturally as possible,..." [44]
These three dimensional sets were bounded by three walls with the fourth wall being the
one facing the audience. In turn this approach required the suspension of disbelief that
writers and directors now ask of the audience [45, p178]. This resulted in a voyeuristic
12viewpoint for the audience, silently observing events depicted in a private space, as if
eavesdropping on a neighbour, leading the French dramatist and theatre director,
Antonin Artaud to describe them as "peeping toms" [46, p60]. This voyeuristic
perspective on domestic life is still prevalent in many theatrical productions and is
mirrored in most radio and television drama. It is particularly noticeable in ongoing
dramas, otherwise known as soaps, along with "fly on the wall" documentaries.
4.3 The Pantomime Audience
Exceptions to the naturalistic theatre however, continued in forms of popular
entertainment like music hall and pantomime where the audience still have an active
role in the proceedings, albeit in a series of set piece interactions with the characters
directly addressing the audience and schooling them in how they should respond. This
direct address, calls on the audience to participate in the construction of theatre and this
includes accepting that the person addressing the audience has taken on a persona
different from their normal one. The spectacle involves cross-dressing and role playing,
heightened by pantomime's diegetic world of inversion and magic, where anything is
possible and gender categories and sexual identities are disturbed. The tradition of the
female principle boy has been a part of pantomime since 1819 whilst up till 1660 there
were no women on the stage in England, so female parts had traditionally been played
by cross-dressed boys.
In this world of inversion and magic, pantomime is also polysemic, created with a
multiplicity of meanings, carrying different meanings for children and adults or carrying
a queer charge to queer members of the audience whilst escaping the notice of the
straight audience [47]. Thus in pantomime, each member of the audience brings with
them a cultural and linguistic frame through which they understand the performance.
Whilst they participate in the rituals of pantomime they are also taking part in the active
construction of their own individual understanding of the meaning. This construction of
a polysemic narrative which is open to multiple interpretations and meanings is in
contrast to the Ancient Greek theatre where the stories served the interests of rich
patrons and the city state, what Augusto Boal calls "Aristotle's coercive system of
tragedy" which seeks to eliminate subversive ideas [48, p40-42].
4.4 The Awakened Audience
The seeds of an alternative working class theatre in Britain were sown in the founding of
The Clarion newspaper in Manchester in 1891 by Robert Blatchford [49]. The newspaper
inspired the setting up of many different Clarion Clubs across the country around
various activities, the main ones being cycling, choral singing and rambling. Amongst
other groups were dramatic societies, The Clarion Players. Blatchford himself came from
a theatrical family [50]. By the 1920’s other radical theatre groups were being formed.
Jimmie Miller (later known as Euan MacColl) formed The Manchester Workers’ Theatre
Movement, later The Red Megaphones, and Tom Thomas formed the Hackney People’s
Players and went on to become national organizer for the Workers’ Theatre Movement
[51, p21-25]. Thomas recalls that by the end of the decade:
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