ECREA16-Abstract

Thursday, November 10

1 6 : 3 0 – 1 8 : 0 0

ARS07

Children as Audiences 2: Challenges and Opportunities

PP 218

Making Sense of Digital Media Rights: The Perspective of Young People With Cancer in Portugal

L. Marôpo

1,2

, A. Jorge

Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Department of communication and language sciences, Setúbal, Portugal

CICS.NOVA - Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences, Lisbon, Portugal

Research Centre for Communication and Culture/Catholic University of Lisbon, School of Human Sciences, Lisbon, Portugal

This paper proposes a discussion of children’s digital rights based on accounts of digital media’s experiences by young people under particular circumstances

of vulnerability. It draws on a qualitative research on young people with or survivors of cancer, their use of the media and perspectives on their media

representation (including news and entertainment in traditional and new media). We conducted focus groups with 13 participants aged 12 to 22, who are

still in treatment or had cancer (before the age of 18), recruited through a non-profit association in the field - Acreditar -, in Lisbon and Oporto, Portugal,

in 2015. While the topic of children with cancer is mostly approached by Psychology, we propose a sociocultural approach, which includes contributions

from childhood studies (Corsaro, 1997; James and Prout, 1997; Mayall, 2002; Prout, 2005; Almeida, 2009), to investigate the opportunities and constraints

posed by digital media to these young people’s rights. This means taking young people as active participants in their socialization process and, therefore,

capable of elaborating, interpreting and reconstructing the social logics and their experiences, including with the media. In this sense, we were interested

in analysing how they make sense of their rights to privacy and participation under the context of the disease, especially when related to social media use.

On the one hand, the participants unanimously reject victimizing representations and several also refuted heroifying portrayals. On the other, different

strategies to deal with their image or memory of having had cancer reveal marked singularities and tensions between privacy and self-affirmation: while

some teenagers do not share any image of themselves when ill, others consciously manage the use of their image and information about their illness to

feel reassured.The participants expressed concern about how to deal with constraints generated by people posting contents about them, even if well inten‑

tioned. Some of the young people claim the right to remove content mentioning them and the right to be forgotten. Others are more acceptive of different

digital media visibility (among their social media circles or even public campaigns), provided they have a voice in defining the terms and tone. They see

this as opportunity to contribute to a non-stigmatizing representation of the disease. However, particular tensions between adults’ and young people’s

perspectives arose, for example, in families using social networking sites to raise funds, allegedly for treatment, sometimes using the images of very young

(sick) children.Young participants also reported using the internet to search for health information on their condition, which reclaims attention both to their

rights to accessible and specialised information and to media and health literacy. The majority of the participants reported an increase in use of different

types of media during treatment. Digital media were pointed as an alternative for traditional media, because, in their perspectives, they provide more di‑

verse, quality or age-appropriate content. All this poses both questions of provision of quality content and literacy for children and young people, especially

under special vulnerability.

PP 219

Who Framed the Audience? Video On-Demand Streaming Platforms, Customer Analytics and the Uses of Early Adopters

V. Theodoropoulou

, S. Stylianou

Cyprus University of Technology, Communication and Internet Studies, Limassol, Cyprus

Technological advances and the innovative ways of delivering television programmes through the Internet, online VoD or streaming media, are said to

have a major impact on the media distribution model and on television formats, content production and audiences alike. This paper centres on Netflix,

the top subscription-based video-streaming platform with a penetration of 74 million subscribers worldwide (Forbes, 2015). Netflix is gradually changing

consumption patterns and viewing habits, further contributing to the displacing of traditional broadcasting, and strengthening the shift towards a paid-

for content on-demand model. The targeted uninterrupted viewing allowed is appealing to audiences; its on-demand capacity, genre variety and release

of all episodes of a series simultaneously give users command of their TV schedule and more freedom in structuring time. Concurrently, algorithms and

customer analytics are used to detect and store users’ preferences and online behaviour, and recommend to them programmes of their taste. Likewise,

and given its increasing penetration pointing to the creation of a global audience, such big data are deployed by Netflix to create content and commission

programmes users might like -and as the popularity of‘Netflix originals’shows, do like. Netflix’s innovative technology and success raise a series of questions

such as: will the future of content creation/production continue to be a creative process, or be based on a ‘recipe’ ordered by the platform and generated

by customer analytics? Are we moving towards further audience fragmentation or experiencing the beginning of the end of fragmentation and moving

towards a global audience created around entertainment genres?What about information programmes and the news? Could our control over the schedule

lead to all our viewing being set and pre-planned, and thus to the end of spontaneity and of the element of surprise in our viewing (of traditional channel

viewing/flicking)? Could the algorithms used, eventually lead to homogenized viewing? Arguably it is too early to answer such questions, but given Netflix’s

14% global penetration (Forbes, 2016) perhaps now is time to begin to think about and tackle them. The paper touches upon such questions, discussing

the Netflix phenomenon from an audience perspective. It specifically focuses on its early users in the UK, a country at an early adoption stage (E.Rogers,

1995) with a household penetration of 16% (Ofcom, 2015). It draws on qualitative semi-structured and structured interviews of early adopters, conducted

in late 2014–early 2015, and on domestication theory and diffusion of innovations, to discuss how Netflix fits in everyday life routines, and the emerging

use patterns, tastes, preferences and audience habits created around it. It examines users’attitudes towards the available content, targeted viewing, the al‑

gorithmic-based recommendation system and consumers’ response to it, binge-watching and the ‘guilty pleasure’ of continuous viewing, the social and

spatial viewing context and the interfaces used for it. By considering such practices, the paper intends to highlight potential changes in audience prefer‑

ences and behaviour triggered by this new technology. It further deliberates on the future of the audience of content produced and consumed on-demand

in a globalized TV network.