About the Author

Sonia Livingstone is Professor of Social Psychology at the London

School of Economics and Political Science.

Biography

Sonia Livingstone (BSc Psychology, UCL; DPhil Social Psychology, Oxford) joined the LSE in 1990 and is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Media and Communications. She is author of eleven books, and has published widely on the subject of media audiences, focusing on audience reception of diverse television genres. Her recent work concerns children, young people and the internet, as part of a broader interest in the domestic, familial and educational contexts of new media access and use

Books include Making Sense of Television (2nd edition, Routledge, 1998), Mass Consumption and Personal Identity (with Peter Lunt; Open University Press, 1992), Talk on Television (with Peter Lunt; Routledge, 1994), Children and Their Changing Media Environment (edited with Moira Bovill, Erlbaum, 2001), The Handbook of New Media (edited with Leah Lievrouw; Sage, 2002, updated edition 2006), Young People and New Media (Sage, 2002), Audiences and Publics (edited; Intellect, 2005), Harm and Offence in Media Content (with Andrea Millwood Hargrave; Intellect, 2006), Media Consumption and Public Engagement (with Nick Couldry; Palgrave, 2007), and The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (edited with Kirsten Drotner; Sage, 2008).

Sonia Livingstone was President of the International Communication Association (2007/08) and was Conference Chair for the ICA conference held in San Francisco in May 2007. She continues to serve as a member of the Executive Committee of ICA.

Sonia Livingstone has been awarded research funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, the European Science Foundation, the European Commission, the European Parliament, British Telecom, the BBC, Ofcom, the Independent Television Commission, the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the Advertising Association, the ITVA, the Leverhulme Trust, and Yorkshire/Tyne-Tees Television.

She has held visiting professor positions at the Universities of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Bergen, Illinois and Milan, and is on the editorial board of several leading journals in the field, including New Media and Society, The Communication Review, Journal of Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, European Journal of Communication and Journal of Children and Media.

She is a member of the new UK Council for Child Internet Safety and serves on the Board of the Voice of the Listner and Viewer. In recent years she was Vice Chair and Board Member of the Internet Watch Foundation, a member of the Home Secretary’s Task Force for Child Protection on the Internet, and a member of the Ministerial Taskforce for Home Access to Technology for Children, DfES. She has advised the Office of Communications, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Home Office, the Economic and Social Research Council, the BBC, and the Higher Education Funding Council, among others.

Her research expertise includes: social contexts and uses of ICT, especially domestic/family uses of the internet; children, young people and the internet; media literacy and critical media audiences/users; mediated publics, media for citizenship and the public sphere; television audiences, especially history, media uses, audience reception, media effects; internet use and policy, including the public understanding of communications regulation; research methods in media and communications.

Product Description

In today's thoroughly mass-mediated world, audiences and publics are, of course, composed of the same people. Yet social science traditionally treats them quite differently. Indeed, it is commonplace to define audiences in opposition to the public: in both popular and elite discourses, audiences are denigrated as trivial, passive, individualised, while publics are valued as active, critically engaged and politically significant. This volume rejects this view and asks instead when and how the activities of audiences overlap with, or contribute to those of publics, and vice versa. It locates the analysis in relation to as fast-changing media environment, which in turn poses theoretical, empirical and policy questions, which are explored in a European context. The chapters each examine one of a series of intriguing empirical cases to explore these intersections - the television talk show, the minority ethnic news audience, children's use of the internet at home, audiences for live and public events - both high and popular culture, the rapid adoption of the mobile phone, and so forth. It argues not only that publics are increasingly mediated, moving ever closer to audiences, but also that audiences are increasingly diffused and diverse, not to be contained within the private sphere: hence they must be examined together.