Audience Engagement with Media and ICT.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the complex and diverse ways in which audiences engage with media in the context of domestic social change and globalisation. Theoretically it is to develop a diversified rather than polarised or reductionist conception of the active audience, thereby showing a possibility for a convergence of a variety of active audience studies, in terms of the concept of ‘audience engagement’. Empirically, it looks at the various ways in which Japanese audiences engage with the media and ICT in the global rich media environment. It makes use of previously identified dimensions of audience activities from several traditions of audience research and adds to these new dimensions revealed from my ethnography of so-called ‘modern’ Japanese families living in the media-rich Tokyo Metropolitan Area. The seven modes of engagement I will consider are: information-seeking activity, connectivity, ‘world-creation’, parasocial interaction, utility, interpretation and, finally, participation. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]