Adrian Athique. Transnational audiences: Media reception on a global scale. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016, hardcover $69.95 (ISBN 978-0745670218), $24.95 paperback (ISBN 978-0745670225), $19.99 e-book (ASIN B01GTYJ4GG) (224p).
1. Introduction
[1.1] While perceiving media audiences as transnational is in fashion, actually defining transnational audiences is a difficult task. There are many types of audiences whose media consumption practices might be labelled transnational; for example, a national audience that consumes foreign media content or diasporic audiences that routinely enjoy both mainstream media in their domicile and culture from their homeland. A transnational audience could also be a collection of nonrelated people across national and linguistic borders who consume the same media content, or members of an online fan community for a globally popular film star or pop idol. Another example might be YouTube and Facebook users who contribute self-made content to these global platforms, as well as their viewers.
[1.2] All of these audiences, users, viewers, and fans, situated in dissimilar socioeconomic, political, geographical, and technological contexts, might be identified as transnational. Given this, how can we develop a coherent conceptual framework for understanding the factors that drive their transnational media consumption and the social meanings that such consumption generates? In searching for answers to this question, Adrian Athique takes the ongoing developments in media businesses and technologies as important contexts for our inquiry into transnational audiences. He argues that we need to examine multiple configurations of transnational audiences by contemplating their identity, location, mobility, belonging, standpoint, access to media and communication infrastructure, and relations to others at different scales from local to global.
2. Key themes
[2.1] Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale consists of three parts. The first part, "Imagined worlds: National, international and transnational," looks into national, imperial, and networked audiences. Thoroughly canvassing key theories on cultural nationalism, media imperialism, decolonization, and globalization, Athique explains the overall shift in our understanding of media audiences from national to global, that is, from "technologically passive, nationally defined, but culturally homogeneous, mass audiences" to "technologically interactive, physically transnational, but culturally ethnic, niche audiences" (2016, 72). Seemingly, social imaginations of globally networked media audiences are broadened by transnational references and awareness. However, they are also in constant negotiation with commercial imperatives of global media industries and with gatekeeping by state authorities. At the same time, the inequality between nation states in terms of cultural power and infrastructure means that the configurations of audience experiences of being transnational vary significantly from one nation to another.
[2.2] The second portion of the book, "Media flows: Diasporas, crossovers, proximities," focuses on the locality, mobility, belonging, and motivation of transnational audiences, who are broadly seen as culturally ethnic communities. The first chapter in this section discusses ways by which migrant and diasporic audiences stay connected to their homeland through a mix of personal communications and media consumption. Discussing their transnational cultural experiences, Athique reframes their identity as "hybridities" (91)—rather than minorities—whose inhabiting and interpreting of multiple cultures can engender cultural fusion and dialogue. Transnational audiences can also be niche audiences who access media content from the periphery through specific institutions such as art house cinemas or festivals. Or they can be more mainstream, crossover audiences who adopt nonresident viewpoints, enjoy the exotic and the unfamiliar, aspire to accumulate cultural capital, and seek "parallel modernity" alternative to the Western modernity. The final theme of this section is media consumption within and across cultural civilizations. Athique argues that transnational media consumption is affected by "cultural proximity" and happens in the "zone of consumption" where media audiences are located locally, nationally, regionally, and transregionally.
[2.3] Part three of Transnational Audiences, "New formations: Clouds, trends, fields," attends to interactive online audiences—fans and users who are dispersed, invisible, and culturally and ethnically heterogeneous. Their emergence is embedded in the development of media infrastructure, technology, and business models. In this section, Athique provides an important conceptual discussion regarding transnational audiences, their online sharing and participation, digitalization, big data, and datafication of audiences, which determine today's media ecology. He notes the double roles played by audiences as prosumers and commodities, calling for a more critical understanding of "user-led transnationalism" and pointing out that "the active audience concept was dovetailed neatly with the functional interactivity of digital media platforms" (145). The author argues that audience itself has become "an intrinsic package of commodities that make up the media economy" (64). Although part three does not discuss them in detail, its key points are salient for our understanding of the transnationalization of hate culture and racist politics online that heavily rely on (inter)active audiences. The author continues to theorize the meaning and value of the concept of audience in the context of the big-datafication of audiences—their past selections, current engagements, and future preferences—while also pinpointing serious gaps in currently available audience data. Finally, Athique synthesizes the key arguments of the book and proposes a "transnational spectrum" that captures "the subjective inter-relationship between the personal, communal, political and civilizational positionings of various viewers, users, readers or fans" (172–73). He closes by proposing that "transnational" be understood as "a full spectrum of communicative relationships, where exchanges are taking place simultaneously at a number of scales" (173).
3. Assessment
[3.1] This book has many merits, and the biggest is that it guides us to freshly explore the terrain of media studies and review key theories regarding national culture, globalization, media flow, media reception, fandom, and big data from the dynamic perspectives of transnationalism. Athique's theoretical examination of the transnational is conscious of practical methodological issues. Transnational Audiences routinely questions how certain understandings of transnational audiences prefer and benefit from different research approaches and methods. It also draws our attention to the methodological difficulties facing researchers who investigate globally dispersed transnational audiences and the problems of exclusive access to big data by global media companies. Athique's reflections on the links between theory and methodology will be particularly beneficial for PhD students in this field. Additionally, the book introduces and explains a number of useful concepts: digital sovereignty, digital diasporas, polymedia, (non)resident mode, crossover audiences, parallel modernity, zone of consumption, relative proximity, proximate audiences, datafication, and so on. Many of these can be used to trigger more focused discussion and future research.
[3.2] Transnational Audiences elaborates upon the complexity and multiplicity in transnational media reception by exploring different scales of the transnational, from individual, local, national, and regional to global. While seeing the interdependency between these concepts, readers might wonder about the analytical efficacy of the transnational if its articulation depends so heavily on them. The vagueness in the concluding chapter, especially its attempt to situate individual members of transnational audiences in the cultural field, can also be pointed out. It is not very clear how this field is constituted and where it is located—for example, at the local, national, or global level (or even across the transnational spectrum). Athique's comments on the cultural field seem to be an unnecessary addition to the book, which is already quite packed with dense conceptual discussions. Meanwhile, the issue of agency and positionality of individual audience members looks important to explore from the perspective of their active involvement in creating and responding to multiple, competing voices and ideas that travel transnationally.
[3.3] Overall, Transnational Audiences is lucidly written, coherently structured, and convincingly argued. It makes important contributions to the research of media audiences, cultural globalization, communications, and media industries. Each of its chapters will be able to serve as an excellent point of reference for further research and classroom discussion.