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  Volume 15 Numbers 1 & 2, 2005 THE POWER OF THE AUDIENCE INTERCULTURALITY, INTERACTVITY AND
TRUST IN INTERNET COMMUNICATION: THEORY, RESEARCH DESIGN AND
EMPIRICAL RESULTS Abstract. The question of the power of the Internet is
investigated in this paper from the perspective of the audience. One cannot
fully understand Internet communication without taking into account the role of
an interactive audience. To clarify the relationship between Internet
communication and culture, therefore, this paper proceeds in three steps.
First, I argue for a paradigm shift from the power of the communicator to the
power of the audience. Second, I characterize Internet communication with
respect to three basic concepts: the concepts of interactivity, intercultural
communication, and trust. And third, I present a research design and some
empirical results on how the power of the audience could be verified. 1. Paradigm Shift: From Power
of Communicators to Power of the Audience
Power in communication normally means power of the communicator. The one
who sends the message seems to be the one who has the power to select topics,
to decide what is relevant for the addressee and what is not, to determine who
is addressed and to determine time, duration and location of the speech or
communicative event. The outcomes of this communicator-centred paradigm are
different communication models; for example, the “propaganda model” of Herman
and Chomsky (1988),
the “ideology model” of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s, Weaver’s (1949)
mathematical “sender-receiver-model”, or Hovland’s
(1949) “stimulus-response-model”. Despite some striking differences, all these
models have in common that they picture the mass audience as a more or less
passive and helpless victim of media influence from the side of the
communicator. Of course there are communicative events which legitimise this
kind of perspective; for example, manipulating forms of media communication in
totalitarian societies, or different strategies of information politics in the
communication of war and crisis. Take, for example, the propaganda via
newspaper and radio by the Nazis, the press control by the NATO in the
Kosovo-conflict, or the press politics of the However, despite these counter-examples, it still makes sense for
different reasons to focus on the role of the audience. One group of reasons
can be traced back to the nature of media communication as a special form of
intercultural communication, the other group of reasons grounds in the specific
character of Internet communication. To refer to the audience as an instance of power is not meant
metaphorical. The audience, for example, the Internet user, decides what
websites to visit, how to interact with a website, how deeply it is understood,
or whom to trust as a partner or interactor. These
“what”, “how”, “how deep” and “whom” are deeply rooted
in the cultural knowledge and competence of the user. But it is not determined
by culture in a causal sense or in a sense of culture as a kind of super power;
nor has the communicator the power to command the addressee to believe, to
understand, or to trust the communicator. Understanding, believing,
attentiveness and trust are strictly individual and therefore under the power
of the audience. Of course, we could see culture as an instance of power by
itself, for example, as structural power (Castells, 1997) or symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1993), which limits the wiggle room of the
respective audience. But from an action theoretical point of view, we have to
focus on the user and acquisition activities to find out how the interplay of
culture and interaction in Internet communication works. The relevant instance
for what happens is the individual user or, as we can learn from Manuel Castells, the people’s mind: The new power [of
the information age] lies in the codes of information and in the images of
representation around which societies organize their institutions,
and people build their lives, and decide their behaviour. The sites of this
power are people’s mind. (Castells, 1997, p.359). This shift of focus from the communicator and the message to the
audience has wide ranging consequences for the theoretical approach of
communication analysis and for the design of empirical research. One of the
most famous models in this user-centred approach is the so-called
use-and-gratification approach. The main factors of media use are the
gratifications, for example, information or entertainment values, that
websites, radio or television programs offer in the eyes of the audience. That
means the power to decide what and how media are used is clearly seen on the
side of the audience, not on the side of the communicator. Another model within
an audience-centred paradigm is the so-called interactional
or transactional model, which is much older than sometimes supposed: My proposal that we look at
communications as a transactional relationship (..) encourages us to look at
the initiative of the audience as it goes about its own business of getting the
information it wants and avoiding what it does not want, at how the audience
affects what will be said, and at the changes which take place in the
communicator in the process of communication (Bauer,
1963, p.7). From this point of view the audience has not only the power to select
information but the power to influence the communicator and the message as
well. It is quite clear that a model which focuses on the perceptions of the
audience as constructions of meanings and sense, and of a mutual influencing
relationship between audience and communicator, is more open to questions of
cultural and intercultural understanding than causal theories of media
influence. So it is logical that Dennis McQuail
labelled this family of theories as “cultural tradition”. He states: “The
clearest line of development in audience theory has been a move away from the
perspective of the media communicator and toward that of the receiver” (McQuail, 1997, p.16). 2. The Internet and
Intercultural Communication: The Interactive Audience
In traditional media, like
newspaper, radio or television, we normally have a defined audience, be it a
local, regional or national one. Things for the first time chanced with global
television programs like, for example, CNN or Sky News. In the case of the
Internet, the global reach of communication has become the standard feature of
the media. The question arises: does this strengthen or weaken the power of the
audience? One can find reasons for both answers. On the one side, one could
suggest that the more programs or websites we have for selection, the more
cultural differences we get presented, the more alternatives the audience has.
We are not limited, for example, to read only our daily regional or national
newspaper, but we can compare different newspapers world wide to get a better
understanding of international affairs. On the other side, one could argue, the
more alternatives a single user has to deal with, the more the user is
dependant on help from the communicators to make a rational choice. Without
deciding which of the two alternatives is the right one,
one can state that the communicative and intercultural competence of the
audience is a decisive feature for its power or its weakness. If we follow a
communicative interpretation of globalization, as for example Anthony Giddens defines this concept, one can say that global
communication is always intercultural: “Globalisation
can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which
link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by
events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Giddens, 1990, p.64). To emphasize this function of
global communication, some authors are using the concept of “glocalization” (Beck, 2000), which should indicate that the
main effect of global communication is not (yet) the evolution of a global
public sphere but the connections between distant local cultures. With reference to intercultural communication, the power of the audience
has become visible in the actions of the anti-globalisation movement at the
different economic summits in Another example of the power of the audience is the emancipation from
traditional media in the case of international news coverage. For the first
time, during the Kosovo war in 1999, there was a constant coverage of the
conflict besides the classical media of newspaper, radio and television, and
without references to the official sources of the NATO or the different
national governments. This new power of the audience could be observed on two
levels: on the level of information seeking, and on the level of information
distributing: For the first time [during the
Kosovo war] anyone on the Internet can receive a flow of combatant news,
comments and pictures (…) But the real point is that anyone with such an
equipment could also transmit their news, comments and pictures to a global
audience, by passing the traditional mass media (Taylor,
2000, pp. 194-195). Although this is not “the end of journalism”, as Elihu
Katz (1992)
stated in respect to the Gulf war coverage, the multiplicity of sources of
information leads indeed to a change in the role of journalism. Journalism is
in the act of losing its power of information and interpretation to the
Internet audience. Media is about to change from push communication to pull
communication. The crisis of the September 11 attack on the More than news, what people all
over the world craved in the wake of yesterday's terrorist attacks was
connection to each other, and many of them found that most easily achieved by
going online. Data from log file analysis and polls show that Internet traffic
increased heavily after the terror attacks. Traffic to Traffic to the website for the Centre for Disease Control surged by more
than 118 per cent during the week of October 7, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a Web audience measurement company. The website
drew about a half million visitors, and more than 250,000 looked up pages
containing information on the symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of anthrax. The
data not only show the increase of Internet traffic but also that Internet
traffic had become more international and more intercultural. And that is maybe
the most interesting aspect of the whole issue. Normally, as is stated in empirical research on linking patterns of the
Internet from the year 2000, “national cultures continue to exert a substantial
influence on how transnational connections are made”
(Halavais, 2000, p.22). So normally 90 per cent of links
on Data from Hitwise, which tracks traffic to the
most popular news sites, show that traffic to sites such as Islamic Gateway,
Dawn.com (Pakistan’s national newspaper), ExpressIndia.com, HindustanTimes.com,
and Haaretz.co.il (Isreali
newspaper) grew noticeably in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The
biggest increase in traffic was that of Afghanistan Online (afghan-web.com),
which jumped more than 11,000 places in the Hitwise
rankings. Traffic to Al Jazeera.net, the site of the independent The patterns of Internet usage, as one could detect after September 11,
were recapitulated by the audience during the war against Iraq in 2003:
increasing web communications supplementing the usage of traditional media,
online information gathering via Internet during the course of the day,
searching activities for international and intercultural sources of
information, and a significant shift in audience attentiveness (Rainie et al., 2003). “War ousted Sex and Britney” was
the headline of a news article by the agency Reuters in a survey of the mostly
used searching term in the Internet. Normally the rankings of the terms used in
search engines are headed by entertainment oriented terms. With the beginning
of the war on Iraq, terms like “US Army”, “Al-Jazeera”,
“MOAB-Bomb”, “Saddam
Hussein” and “George W. Bush” were among the Top-Twenty of the Lycos searching
terms. Besides these increasing
activities of the audience in searching for serious information, the war on For
the almost uninterrupted glut of war coverage flowing from the media, none of
it has captured the humanity and the practical reality of the Iraqi citizenry
like the ‘Where is Raed?’ Weblog. Of course it is assumed that the activities of the audience in Internet
communication are interrelated with the respective cultural background. This
becomes rather evident if we compare, for example, Internet user profiles and
patterns of use in What became rather clear from the presented data is that a full
understanding of the power of the Net is only available if audience research
does not take a back seat but becomes an independent part of an overall
research design. How to perform such a research I will describe in section 4. 3. The Problem of Trust in
Internet-Communication
Trust is a powerful means of
the audience in every form of communication – no communicator can force the addressee
to trust him or her. Trust is a voluntary gift of the addressee to the
communicator. If we summarize the different approaches to the problem of trust
in communication we can find three functional explanations. Trust is a
constitutive feature of successful communication because of complexity, risk
and time-space-distance. Niklas Luhmann
(2000) defines trust as a “mechanism to reduce
complexity”. Ulrich Beck sees trust as a means to communicate under the
conditions of social risk and for Anthony Giddens “trust
is related to the absence in time and in space” (Giddens, 1990, p.33). All these types of definitions and
explanations fit exactly on human-computer-interaction and on Internet
communication. Therefore we can use these concepts to get a better
understanding of these specific forms of communication and of the role of the
audience. Risk and trust are subjective, not objective, categories. They are
subjective in a deep sense: you can neither command a person to trust in you or
someone or something nor can you command a person not to feel uncertain or
risky. Risk and trust are built up in communication. They are, to say it in
words of constructivism, “constructs of the observer”. Media communication has a
double connection with risk and trust. First, media communication should
transfer the knowledge which helps us to minimize uncertainty and build up
trust. Second, media communication has itself become a risk, a risk of
information, and therefore minimizes trust. As Anthony Giddens
said in an interview: An alarming phenomenon is that the old Enlightenment
assumption that uncertainties were dissolved by the acquisition of knowledge is
increasingly giving way to the realization that the present production of
knowledge produces uncertainty. A lot of the uncertainties of the world come
not from ignorance, but from knowledge. If you consider the new risk environments,
they come from scientific breakthroughs as much as from a lack of them. (Giddens, 1996, p.2) And one can add: they come from media coverage and information outlets
as much as from the lack of them. One of the main reasons for that is the
time-space difference, especially in global forms of communication. Giddens describes this feature of communication under the
aspect of “disembedding”: “By disembedding
I mean the lifting out of social relations from local contexts of interaction
and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (Giddens, 1990, p. 21). From this point of view all media
communication is disembedded, as it leaves behind the
direct face-to-face-communication. Media communication is a clear example of
what Giddens called “faceless commitments” in
“abstract systems” (Giddens, 1990, p. 80). But the Internet is the most disembedded media and the most abstract system as it has
moved most far away from face-to-face-communication. First, in Internet communication we do not have limitations
of space: there are no borders for circulation and there is unlimited memory
space for content. This dimension of disembedding
constitutes the globalization of the medium. Second, we have no limitations of time, which means
messages can be posted at every time, communicators do not have to wait for
datelines of publishing, coverage can happen in real time without any delay of
production and distribution and, as one should add, without any quality control
(real-time character of the media). Third, we have no limitations of
communicators and participant roles: whoever has the technical capacities to
receive messages with a computer is able to send them. And he or she can do
that without restrictions on his or her role, be it as a commentator, a
reporter, a businessman, citizen, or a politician (interactivity). And fourth, in the
Internet there are no limitations of content. “All the news that is fit to
print” is no longer the limitation of Internet content. Whether are we limited
to content that is fit to print, we can also present content that is fit to be
videotaped, audiotaped or visualized in other ways.
Nor are we restricted to “news”. E-business offers, games, stock brokerage are
also parts of Internet communication (multimediality
and multimodality). This high degree of disembeddedness makes Internet communication a highly risky
one, because disembedding always means loss of
control: control over sources and their reliability, control over selection, or
control over verification. The audience has to cope with the problem of
informational risk and of communication collapse. Trust is normally a means to compensate for our lack of knowledge
in handling complex systems. Trust reduces uncertainty. Trust does not make up
for lack of knowledge, but it allows us to believe and act as if we were in a
state of full and certain knowledge. But trust is at the disposal of the
audience, not at the disposal of the communicator. To understand the role of
trust in Internet communication we need a user-centered approach which I will
describe in the last section. 4. Interactivity in Internet
Communication: Research Design and Empirical Results
4.1. How interactive is
human-computer-interaction?
The concept of interactivity
has become a buzzword in human-computer-communication. Its use is so
inflationary that sometimes even a cigarette machine seems to be interactive.
The different approaches to disambiguate the concept of interactivity, roughly
speaking, can be divided into two groups: members of the first group try to
define interactivity technically, which leads to a
rather wide concept; and members of the second group define interactivity on
the basis of sociological or psychological theories. Crucial for these
definitions is the idea of reciprocity. If it is the case that A interacts with
B then that implies that B interacts with A. As this definition does not fit
human-computer interaction, representatives of the latter group normally argue against
using the term “interactivity” for this kind of communication and try to
restrict it to human-human interaction. To escape this dilemma I will try to
define interactivity and usability based on action theory and a theory of
problem solving in a hypertext environment (Bucher,
2002). Within this perspective, interactivity in human-computer
communication is defined as a kind of “as-if activity”. A user who is
communicating, for example, on an Internet platform – be it a learning system,
an e-business-platform or an online-newspaper – implies that he or she acts
with the online program as if it were a real partner in a
face-to-face-interaction. The thinking aloud procedure, in particular, provides
a lot of evidence for this kind of as-if interaction. The utterances and the
behavior of the user show that interaction in human-computer communication is
not virtual, but that it is a natural implication with
real consequences for the acquirement of websites. We can get a better
understanding of interactivity in human-computer communication if we look at
that process as a kind of problem solving in a hypertext environment. The
common feature of all Internet content is the nonlinear hypertext or hypermedia
structure. Browsing in hypertext means that the user has to solve the following
typical problems: §
The problem of
entrance: is the page relevant, interesting for me, and what can I select? §
The problem of
navigation: where can I go to and how to manage? §
The problem of
orientation: where did I come from and where am I? §
The problem of
coherence: what has this page to do with the preceding ones? §
The problem of
framing: which parts of a page form a functional unity and which parts serve
different functions on different levels of structure? These types of problems of
online communication form a good basis for systematic research, on the one
hand, and for defining aspects of usability on the other hand: The more a
website enables a user to solve the named types of problems, the higher the
usability of that website. From that we can deduce the most central dimensions
of quality for evaluating a nonlinear hypertextual
program: coherence – on the macro and the micro level, clarity, orientation
quality, navigation quality and open-up quality. The typology of problems is
not only of theoretical interest but is used as a starting point for empirical
usability research. It provides an orientation of what features of a website
are relevant for usability research and it provides standards as to what degree
a website fulfill criteria of usability. So the data of the empirical research
can be analyzed in two ways: they can be analyzed for building a theory of
media reception, including a better understanding of usability and
interactivity; and the data can be analyzed in respect to an evaluation of a
website – that is, to what degree does it fulfill the criteria of usability. 4.2.
Methods and testing design
An adequate strategy for
empirical research, which tries to generate user-centered data, is to follow
qualitative methods. Data from quantitative methods, like counting click rate
or page views, log file analysis, standardized questionnaires for users or
experts, only generate secondary data from which one has to deduce hypotheses
about the how and why of using an online program. The following approach
combines different qualitative methods and could therefore generate primary
data on how, why and to which result website is used. The empirical results
which are presented are based on tests with about 150 users, each one tested
between 60 and 90 minutes. The websites for audience
research were different kinds of online newspapers, e-business sites,
information sites of television and radio stations. The procedure for the test
persons was a mixture of free surfing and solving some retrieval tasks so that
a quite natural situation of online communication was modeled. The
methodological design of the test combines the following methods: §
a pre-analysis of the site to
specify the most relevant or most problematic parts §
a moderated
testing session of 60 to 90 minutes during which the test person could explore
the site in a free surfing style and has to solve some specific tasks §
the thinking aloud procedure §
video and audio documentation of
the test person §
the digital documentation of
the visited sites and navigation actions of the test person §
a questionnaire or interview
at the beginning and at the end of the session The starting point for the
analysis is a videotape which combines the digital documentation of the web
navigation, the video documentation and the audio documentation of the thinking
aloud utterances. This kind of research design guarantees primary data and
direct access to human-computer interaction. The findings in the process of interactivity
can be deduced from a wide range of different indicators: action indicators
(curser moves, navigation actions
like scrolling or clicking), utterance indicators (comments from the
thinking aloud method), behavioral indicators (mimic and gesture,
signals of surprise and of being asked too much of), and problem solving
indicator (scrolling, back navigation, repeated reading). The interplay of
these different indicators allows highly reliable assumptions on the reception
of online programs and, of course, guarantees highly user-centered results for
questions of usability and interactivity. 4.3. Empirical results
First, the empirical data show that using online programs
is indeed a case of “as-if interaction”. Utterances of the test person, their
actions, their difficulties and the corresponding strategies to solve them show
clearly that acting on an Internet platform is indeed interacting with an
implied partner on the assumption that he or she re-acts on what the test
person is doing. Second, the results of the empirical research prove a
tight interrelation between knowledge or competence on the side of the user and
their navigation strategy. In particular, knowledge of the structure of a
website (on a micro and a macro level), knowledge of rules and patterns of
online communication, and knowledge of the communicator, prove to be central
factors of the chosen problem solving strategies. Third, on the level of exploring a single website (e.g.
the entering page), as well as on the level of navigating from page to page,
one can observe patterns and rules that guide the actions of the test person.
Although the Internet is a new media, we already can find standardization and
prototyping in a high degree. Users try to build up special “scripts” to have standard
solutions for the abovementioned typical problems of browsing in nonlinear, hypertextual and multimodal communications. A script, in
the words of Schank and Abelson
(1977,
p. 41) “is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions, that defines a
well-known situation”. Fourth, the consequences of the results may not be the
most joyous for creative web designers. Under the aspect of usability and user
orientation and in the light of the empirical results, the basic principle of
web design should not be innovation but standardization. For most users the new
media is full of surprise so that it is more economical to meet their “scripts”
than to present them another surprise. The more similar a website is to this
prototype the higher the usability rating by the audience in the reported
tests. That must not be the end of creativity in web design, but each deviation
from the standard form must be reasonable and understandable from the point of
view of the audience. Fifth, there is a strong correlation between usability
and trust. The higher the usability of a website and the acquaintance with it,
the more trustworthy a website is. We can see online communication as highly disembedded in the sense of Anthony Giddens
which means “the lifting out of social relations from local contexts of
interaction and their restructuring across indefinite span of time-space” (Giddens, 1990, p. 21). Especially for these forms of
communication, trust is a crucial feature to compensate the risk of
communicative failure. 5. Conclusions
One way to study culture is
to study communication. From an ethnomethodological
point of view, one could say culture in the sense of knowledge, patterns and
structures of actions, principles and norms is both the result (“construction”)
and the basis of communication at the same time. I tried to show that, to
understand this process of culture building and of cultural reference, we
cannot neglect the actions of the audience. And to understand the notion of power
we have to take into account the complete process of communication, including
the part of the audience. And therefore we have to understand the specific form
of communication (in our case Internet communication) in which the communicator
and audience are engaged. I tried to explain Internet communication on the
basis of the notions interactivity, disembededness,
trust and nonlinearity. The features of interactivity – trust and interculturality – are fully understandable only in the
light of an audience-centered approach. The results of the empirical research
show that interactivity and the problem of trust are good starting points to
get a better understanding of intercultural aspects of Internet communication.
Audience research on how users of different cultures acquire
websites are necessary to understand which principles of Internet
communication are universal and which are specific for different cultures.
Culturally-oriented audience research is still a blank space in media studies. References
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