Rethinking watching: A viewer-centred approach to understanding the changing audience experience

Audience research is widely regarded as a crucial area of media scholarship and needed to understand the role of media in society. Significant changes in how and what we watch in recent decades have heightened the need for a reinvigorated and systematic investigation of watching across television and the many screens and sources now common. This conceptual article draws from separate studies of contemporary watching in the US, UK, and Australia to reframe screen audience studies with approaches that manage the now extensive, coexisting behaviours, modes, and motives of watching that transcend television, streaming, YouTube, TikTok, and video in social media. The article particularly focuses on the value of centring motive and illustrates how narrowing to deeply explore particular motives better captures the diverse experiences that are part of contemporary watching. Such a heuristic also reveals longstanding gaps in the types of watching that have been central to investigations.