Why So Serious?: Participatory Media Forms and a New Agenda for Audience Research

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Defining audiencehood has always been a precarious task. The development of participatory media forms has further complicated the way in which we understand audiences. This paper looks to examine how these participatory media forms are creating new agendas for audience research. Existing agendas view the audience as active meaning makers, rational citizens and publics, consumers, and masses. However, these agendas no longer offer a complete, helpful framework to structure our understanding of audiences. This paper uses the primary example of an augmented reality game (ARG) Why So Serious?. Why So Serious? was created by 42 Entertainment for Warner Bros. Pictures to precede the release of The Dark Knight (2008). Using this case study, it shows how (1) audiences are mobilised and their behaviour exceeds that which is encapsulated by theories of meaning making; (2) audiences are connected, and the activity of online audience communities poses a direct challenge to the view of isolated engagement as well as the hypodermic needle model of media effects; and (3) audiences complete the circuit of communication by providing a continual stream of feedback from the site of reception to the site of production.

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