Valuing Audience Passions: From Smythe to Tarde

Audience research is undergoing substantial transformation. The old ‘eyeballs’ paradigm has been losing adequacy since, at least, the 1980s. At the same time, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide data that allow a far deeper and more intrusive view into the everyday life of media consumers. As a result, many companies are now developing systems based on social media data in order to represent, measure and value audience dynamics in new ways. This transformation of audience research has been paralleled by the rise of concepts like influence, clout or passion as a way of conceiving of audience value. But how are such affective values created? And how can the new semantics of value as passion be critiqued? In this article, we will address that question by thinking through two theoretical models of audience value. Dallas Smythe’s theory of the audience commodity and Gabriel Tarde’s theory of public value. We will suggest that present developments in the media economy make Tarde’s model more relevant for understanding the value of contemporary audience activity. We suggest that this might lead to a redirection of critical theories of audience value toward a focus on constructing the kinds of devices that are able to represent audience value in ways that take a broader range of interests into consideration.