Academic Approaches to Engagement

2. Academic Approaches to Engagement

Having thus considered the range of industrial definitions and approaches to conceptualizing engagement, the remainder of this chapter shifts focus to draw upon existing academic literature and research relevant to the task of understanding of how, and why, viewers engage with media texts.

2.1. Three Propositions About Television

Over the past thirty years, Hartley and Fiske have developed three claims about the practice of watching television that prove particularly relevant to this discussion.

(1) “Watching television describes many different possible practices.” The increasing industrial emphasis on measuring viewer attentiveness, rather than viewer exposure, results from the growing awareness that “television watching” can describe a wide range of behaviors — a fact that has interested television scholars for more than twenty years.

In 1984, John Hartley proposed that television’s appeal was due in no small part to the fact that television content allowed for what he described as “regimes of watching,” or varying levels of viewer

THE ELUSIVE CONCEPT OF ENGAGEMENT 41

attention. 34 And in fact, while the notion of “multitasking” is a relatively recent one, the truth is that television has never required — or guaranteed — a viewer’s complete attention. Writing on television’s

various “modes of reception” in 1987, John Fiske suggested that, in order to be popular as a medium,

television must be capable of being watched with different modes of attention. Viewers may watch television as a primary activity when they are “glued to the screen”; they may… reluctantly give it second place in their attention while they do something else; or they may have it on as background while they read the paper, converse, or do homework; it gains their full attention only when an item makes a strong and

successful bid for their interest. 35

This assessment, which was true twenty years ago, provides an even more accurate description of television watching today, where a viewer’s attention will often be divided not only between multiple tasks,

such as cooking and cleaning, but between multiple media sources, such as newspapers, websites, and online conversations. The practice of television watching can encompass passive monitoring, rapt immersion, and

everything in between.

(2) “Television audiences have never been passive.” The present discussion about engagement is linked with the long-standing argument within television studies that television, despite its popular reputation as a “vast wasteland,” has never been a purely “passive” or “mindless” medium.

John Fiske challenged the assumption that television audiences are passive consumers with his articulation of the “active audience,” arguing that while television audiences might be incapable of altering or influencing the content of a television program, the practice of television viewing requires at least two significant forms of audience participation. In particular, Fiske suggests that audiences are required to take an active role both as (1) individual viewers, reading and interpreting television texts to “construct meanings,” rather than simply receiving a single predefined meaning, and (2) social viewers, discussing television texts with friends and colleagues to find shared meanings and cultural significance. As Fiske observes, this means that, “audiences participate in the meanings of the program in a way that the Hollywood