Mikko Hautakangas: The "Activated Audience" of Big Brother Finland

Mikko Hautakangas tells us about his doctoral study project related to the Big Brother Finland. The television show Big Brother could be seen as an example of "media product of the new millenium" in terms of multimodality, addressing the ordinary people and participating etc. So are the active audience of media studies changing, Mikko asks. He discusses on the relationships between the producers and the audience of the Big Brother, and applies Henry Jenkins´s concept of participatory culture in order to understand these relationships between audiences, production and "texts".

Mikko´s term "activated audience" refers both to the active role of the audience, and the active role of the production in inviting and governing the audience. Being activated audience involves for instance interactivity and critical relationships towards the production, tuning into the same discourse with the text, and thirdly, playing the media game. The focus of this kind of media consumption or reception is on the relationships with the media, not on the media text itself.