Beyond voice: Audience-making and the work and
‘architecture of listening’ as new media literacies
Jim Macnamara
University of Technology Sydney
Considerable attention in communication, media, and social science scholarship is focused on
voice which is considered an important form of social capital and necessary for social equity.
Studies have extensively examined access to communication technologies and various forums
such as the public sphere, as well as media literacy required to have a voice. Despite
continuing concern over a ‘digital divide’, the emergence of Web 2.0-based ‘new media’, also
referred to as ‘social media’, is seen as an empowering development contributing to a
democratisation of voice. However, based on two studies of online public consultation and
critical analysis of the literature on voice and listening, this article argues that two important
corollaries of voice, as it is commonly conceptualised, are overlooked. To matter, as Nick
Couldry says it should, voice needs to have an audience and, second, audiences must listen.
While considerable attention is paid by mass media to creating, maintaining, and engaging
audiences, comparatively little attention is paid to audiences and listening in discussions of
new media and social media. In an environment of proliferating channels for speaking
coinciding with demassification and ‘fragmentation’ of audiences, engaging audiences and the
work of listening have become problematic and are important media literacies required to
make voice matter.
Keywords: Voice; listening; audience-making; media literacy; citizen media; social media
Introduction – The value and limits of voice
Considerable attention has been paid to public speaking and human voice since the early
Western civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome where rhetoric – the art of speaking
persuasively – became recognised as one of the foundational liberal arts based on the writings
and oratory of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian (Atwill 1998; Kennedy 1994). Rhetoric
was also studied and developed as early as 500 BC in Islamic societies of North Africa
(Bernal 1987) and in China (Lu 1998).
In contemporary societies, rhetoric remains one of the major traditions of human
communication scholarship and practice identified by Robert Craig (1999) and discussed in a
number of communication texts (e.g. Craig and Muller 2007; Griffin 2009; Littlejohn and
Foss 2008). In liberal political theory, voice is identified as a fundamental element of
democratic society. As well as the rhetorical voice of political leaders, expression of vox
populi – the ‘voice of the people’ – is recognised as essential for the effective functioning of
democracy. Despite criticisms that the focus of politics is predominantly speaking (Bickford
1996; Dobson 2010), democratic governments today routinely use the internet to invite
citizens to ‘voice’ their concerns and questions – such as the UK’s Number 10 Web site
which invites citizens to submit videos or sign e-petitions
(http://www.number10.gov.uk/take-part) and the Australian federal government’s open
invitation to citizens to ‘Have your say’ (http://australia.gov.au/have-your-say). A Google
Web search of the phrase ‘have your say’ brought up 348 million references and a search on
‘giving a voice’ yielded 163 million references as at late-2011. As ‘Listening Project’
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researcher Tanja Dreher notes: ‘in much research and advocacy, there is a strong emphasis on
the democratic potential of voice, representation, speaking up and talking back’ (2009, 446)
[italics added].
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When citizens experience a lack or loss of voice, a number of scholars point to significant
social, cultural and political problems. For instance, Charles Husband (2000) and others have
drawn attention to the lack of voice in any meaningful sense afforded to ethnic minorities and
argued that this constitutes oppression and injustice. Feminism similarly has identified lack of
voice available to women as a social inequity negatively impacting the status and identity of
women in many societies, and fostered a tradition of debate focussed on speaking, voice and
representation (Butler 1999; Kristeva 1980; Spender 1980; Tuchman 1978; Weatherall 2002).
Rhetorical theory pays some attention to the related concept of audience. Beyond its recent
pejorative meaning which implies manipulation of people by the persuasive oratory of
speakers, rhetoric in its original Platonic and Aristolean conceptualisation, as well as its
subsequent use in classical Greece and Rome, requires consideration of the audience. In
contemporary times, Donald Bryant has emphasised that rhetoric is not simply oratory
expressing the views of the speaker, but is adapted and tailored to the audience (1953, 123).
However, this could be described as audiencing as discussed by John Fiske (1994) and
Yvonna Lincoln (1997, 2001) which is principally a technique of tailoring voice to be most
persuasive for particular audiences and is a far cry from focussing on the construction of
audience and listening in an open engaged way.
Notwithstanding some recognition of voice as ‘the implicitly linked practices of speaking and
listening’ (Couldry 2009a, 580), there is overwhelming advocacy and what could be
described as valorisation of voice in the narrow sense of speaking in much scholarly and
popular literature and significantly less discussion of how the important corollaries of
audiences and listening are operationalised in order to make voice matter. Susan Bickford
(1996) pointed this out in the context of politics in her landmark text, The Dissonance of
Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenzhip in which she noted the lack of attention to
listening in democratic politics and argued that political interactions take place in a context of
conflict and inequality that affects not only who gets to speak, but particularly who gets
attention and who gets listened to.
For the most part, audiences are assumed to listen. Even more presumptuously, in mediated
public communication, audiences are largely assumed to exist. They are ‘imagined
communities’ as discussed by Benedict Anderson (1991). Unlike public speaking to
physically assembled groups of people, media audiences cannot be seen or heard by speakers.
Therefore they are doubly assumed and imagined – assumed and imagined to exist and
assumed and imagined to listen. These assumptions may have some justification in relation to
mass media in which circulation, marketing, and research departments devote considerable
resources to assembling, engaging, measuring and maintaining audiences. However, these
twin assumptions are problematic and require reconsideration in a ‘new media’ environment
characterised by ‘demassification’, ‘audience fragmentation’ and ‘atomisation’ (Anderson, C.
2006; Deuze 2005; Jenkins 2006; Rosen 2009) occurring at the same time as rapidly
increasing use of citizen and social media allegedly affording voice.
This article seeks to build on the notable work of pioneering scholars such as Susan Bickford
and recent critiques by identifying and examining two further important issues for voice to
matter in contemporary societies – the need to create and maintain audiences and the ‘work
of listening’ which become all the more challenging in an environment of simultaneous
‘audience fragmentation’ and proliferating media channels and speakers. As well as critically
reviewing literature in the field, this analysis is informed by two studies of online public
communication – one conducted by the author (Macnamara 2010a), and one undertaken at
the MIT Deliberatorium (Iandoli, Klein, and Zolla 2009; Klein 2007; Klein, Malone,
Sterman, and Quadir 2006). The findings indicate that skills and resources not currently
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identified as part of media literacy are required to engage audiences and accomplish listening
in new media environments and the conclusions present some examples of how notions of
media literacy need to be expanded.
The literature on voice and listening
The growing body of literature on voice and listening will not be extensively summarised
here, as it has been ably reviewed in the recent themed edition of Continuum on listening in
2009 (vol. 23, no. 4) and in texts such as Nick Couldry’s (2010) Why Voice Matters and
Leslie Baxter’s (2011) Voicing Relationships: A Dialogic Perspective. However, some key
terms need to be defined in order to proceed in this analysis with a common language and key
concepts require explanation, particularly those related to online communication or in which
online communication involves particular practices that affect listening and voice.
Voice is conceptualised in this discussion as not only the human verbal act of speaking, but
also human communication through other actions such as writing and online participation,
voting, protesting, and various other forms of polemic such as political artworks, graffiti, and
so on. Furthermore, this discussion notes the problematic nature of the concept of audience
when it is used to denote passive receivers of information, and recoils from this view,
employing instead a contemporary cultural studies notion of audiences as active participants
in communication (Hall 1973; Lievrouw and Livingstone 2002, 10; Silverstone 2007, 107) –
albeit existing within ‘interpretative communities’ (Fish 1980) and influenced by context. In
Oscar Gandy’s typology of four types of audiences – audience as victims, audience as
commodity, audience as consumers, and audience as citizens (Gandy 2002, 448) – this study
is particularly concerned with the latter. It is also important to recognise that audiences are
discursive constructs, largely conjured into existence by authors, media institutions and
marketers (Ang 1996) and that they can be over-imagined and over-assumed. However,
notwithstanding these limitations and necessary clarifications of the term ‘audience’
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, in this
analysis it is argued that the term does important work serving as a corollary of speaking and
voice and representing potential listeners and sites of listening.
Listening is used here not in a loose general way, but in a specific sense. In the International
Journal of Listening, Ethel Glenn (1989) has identified 50 different definitions of listening.
However, drawing on Glenn and other scholars who have studied listening such as Sara
Lundsteen (1979), the International Listening Association has adopted a definition that
emphasises ‘receiving and constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or non-
verbal messages’ (cited in Purdy and Borisoff 1997, 6) [italics added]. Discussing listening in
the context of media and public communication, Charles Husband says that listening requires
paying attention to another’s voice expressed in a text
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of some type (2009, 441). Drawing on
Barthes, Axel Honneth (2007) goes further and argues that listening requires recognition of
what another or others have to say, whether verbally or in some other form. Charles Husband
further proposes that people have a right to be understood as a ‘qualifying complementary
right’ to the right to communicate (1996), although he has noted that this ‘third-generation
human right’
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is a utopian goal (2000, 208).
In recent examinations of listening, Kate Crawford (2009) and Nick Couldry (2009a) argue
that listening is a useful metaphor for online engagement, although Crawford notes that
‘listening is not a common metaphor for online activity ... “speaking up” has become the
dominant metaphor for participation in online spaces’ (2009, 526) – an issue that this
research explored.
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Based on listening literature in relation to both interpersonal and public communication,
listening can be seen to involve a substantive level of human cognitive engagement with the
expressed views of another or others involving attention, recognition, interpretation to try to
discover meaning, ideally leading to understanding, as well as responding in some way – not
simply being present at or observing some communicative activity. Thus, listening is an
active rather than passive activity involving considerable effort and responsibility.
Nick Couldry reflects widespread concern over voice in saying that there is a ‘crisis of voice’
in modern societies and in neoliberal societies in particular (2008a, 389; 2009a, 581). In
several journal articles and in his text Why Voice Matters (Couldry 2010), he argues that
neoliberalism denies voice to many citizens. Conversely, affording voice is widely discussed
in scholarly and professional literature as empowering. However, drawing on the work of
Philip Bobbit (2003), Couldry says that even when citizens have an ability to speak,
neoliberalism’s privileging of the market economy means that the voices of most people
become an ‘externality’ to discussion and discourse in which economic values prevail.
Commenting on initiatives to give citizens increased opportunities to have a voice in
democratic politics, Bobbit argues that unless governments listen and there are mechanisms
to process and act on citizens’ inputs, ‘there will be more public participation in government
but it will count for less’ (2003, 234). Couldry agrees and advocates that ‘we do not just need
a participatory democracy; we need a participatory democracy where participation matters’
(2009b, n.p.). To matter, voice must as a corollary have someone (an audience) who listens –
that is, really listens as defined in the literature.
Citing German social theorist Axel Honneth (1995) and studies of UK citizen engagement in
politics (Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham 2007), Couldry reported that ‘the real issue
about the ... long-term decline in engagement in formal electoral politics in the UK and
elsewhere ... was not so much a “motivation crisis” on the part of citizens ... the real issue
was a “recognition crisis”’ (2008b, 16). Nancy Fraser also has discussed recognition as an
important element in terms of social justice. She notes that some social actors are less than
full members of society and less able to participate as peers because of an inequitable
distribution of resources, with one of those resources being recognition (2000, 113).
Research and public debate by members of ‘The Listening Project’
(http://www.thelisteningproject.net) have sought to foreground the role of listening in
communication and draw attention to the ‘labour of listening’ and what that might entail, as
well as the ‘politics of voice’ (Bickford 1996; Couldry 2009a) and the ‘politics of
recognition’ (The Listening Project 2009). Drawing on political theory and postcolonial
feminism, Listening Project researcher Tanja Dreher says that societies need to learn
‘listening across difference’. This concept draws attention to the social, cultural, political and
ideological barriers to attention, recognition, understanding, and response, and shifts focus
and responsibility from the marginalised and voiceless ‘on to institutions and conventions
which enable and constrain receptivity and response’ (2009, 456). As well as moving
discussion beyond the simplistic and sometimes tokenistic strategy of affording voice to
addressing how voice can be made to matter, this line of research opens up an a fertile and
under-explored terrain in which of array of institutional, political, structural, and ideological
features loom large and invite examination.
There are also important ethical aspects of listening, as recently discussed in a special issue
of the International Journal of Listening in which Pat Gehrke (2009) called for a broader
methodological approach in studying listening, drawing on phenomenology, dialogism and
relational dialectics as well as democratic political theory as a way to incorporate ethics. The
ethics of listening is not specifically discussed here, but this analysis does employ a
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multidisciplinary perspective and its recommendations address ethical as well as practical
concerns.
Of particular relevance to this analysis, Couldry extends discussion of voice and listening to
new forms of digital media. He says that digital media provide ‘the capacity to tell important
stories about oneself – to represent oneself as a social, and therefore potentially political
agent – in a way that is registered in the public domain’ (2008a, 386). He argues that, in
contrast with the ‘hidden injuries of media power’ that are caused by institutionalised mass
media which offer limited access to citizens (Couldry 2001), ‘digital storytelling in principle
represents a correction of those latter hidden injuries since it provides the means to distribute
more widely the capacity to tell important stories’ (Couldry 2008a, 386). Many texts such as
Dan Gillmor’s We The Media (2006) and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008)
celebrate this alleged democratising potential of digital media. But is the claimed
democratisation of voice really affording voice that matters?
The missing audience
Mass society and mass media theory which evolved from the 1920s led to the concepts of mass
audiences and mass markets which have been pre-eminent paradigms in media research and the
public sphere throughout much of the twentieth century (Curran and Gurevitch 2000; Hoggart
2004). Because of expensive and often patented technologies of production and distribution, and
strict regulatory environments including licensing, media became increasingly controlled by
monopolies and oligopolies in the period referred to by Mark Poster (1995) as the First Media
Age.
This concentration of media production and distribution, combined with large-scale marketing
and promotion undertaken by major movie studios, broadcast networks, and newspaper
publishers, resulted in citizens being coerced and even forced into mass viewing, listening and
reading of content. For instance, Chris Anderson reported that, in 1954, 74 per cent of Americans
clustered around TV sets to watch I Love Lucy every Sunday night (2006, 29). By the end of the
twentieth century, as Ben Bagdikian (2004) reported, five corporations – Time Warner, Disney,
News Corporation, Viacom and Bertelsmann – dominated the output of daily newspapers and
magazines, broadcasting, books and movies worldwide, reaching ‘audiences’ totalling billions.
Commercial deals still wrap up exclusive media rights to Formula One Grand Prix, the summer
and winter Olympics, the American Super Bowl, and other major events creating, for short
moments, large numbers of viewers, listeners, and readers.
However, as far back as 1927, John Dewey argued that thinking of people as a mass or
aggregate is not useful in understanding how communication or society works (Grossberg et
al., 2006, 390). In 1958, noted British sociologist Raymond Williams wrote in Culture and
Society: ‘There are in fact no masses; only ways of seeing people as masses’ (1958, 289).
Even when people are forced to become part of a large ‘viewing public’, they remain agentic
individuals each interpreting and sometimes resisting content and messages. Furthermore,
when given a choice, they are disinclined to engage in communication en masse and become
what Jay Rosen (2006) calls ‘the people formerly known as the audience’, a shift that will be
examined in detail in a moment. Theories of mass communication to mass audiences
conceptualised as stable, passive groups of receivers are now rejected by most scholars as
satisfactory explanations of how public communication takes place (Abercrombie &
Longhurst 1998; Ruddock 2007; Sparks 2006).
Despite the problematic nature of audiences and mass audiences in particular, traditional
media succeeded in assembling audiences through (1) limited choice brought about by
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