Small acts of engagement: Reconnecting productive audience practices with everyday agency

Abstract

In this article, we develop the concept of small acts of engagement (SAOE) in a networked media environment as a conceptual framework to study specific audience practices and as an agenda for research on these practices. We define SAOE, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, as productive audience practices that require little investment and are intentionally more casual than the structural and laborious practices examined as types of produsage and convergence culture. We further elaborate on the interpretive and productive aspects of SAOE, which allow us to reconnect the notions of a participatory culture and a culture of everyday agency. Our central argument is that audience studies’ perspective allows viewing SAOE as practices of everyday audience agency, which, on an aggregate level, have the potential to become powerful acts of resistance.

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https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819837569
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2019, Vol. 21(9) 2010 –2028
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444819837569
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Small acts of engagement:
Reconnecting productive
audience practices with
everyday agency
Ike Picone
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Jelena Kleut
University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Tereza Pavlíčková
Charles University, Czech Republic
Bojana Romic
Malmö University, Sweden
Jannie Møller Hartley
Roskilde University, Denmark
Sander De Ridder
Ghent University, Belgium
Abstract
In this article, we develop the concept of small acts of engagement (SAOE) in a networked
media environment as a conceptual framework to study specific audience practices and
as an agenda for research on these practices. We define SAOE, such as liking, sharing,
and commenting, as productive audience practices that require little investment and are
Corresponding author:
Ike Picone, Department of Communication Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels,
Belgium.
Email: ike.picone@vub.be
837569NMS0010.1177/1461444819837569new media & societyPicone et al.
research-article2019
Article

Picone et al. 2011
intentionally more casual than the structural and laborious practices examined as types
of produsage and convergence culture. We further elaborate on the interpretive and
productive aspects of SAOE, which allow us to reconnect the notions of a participatory
culture and a culture of everyday agency. Our central argument is that audience studies’
perspective allows viewing SAOE as practices of everyday audience agency, which, on
an aggregate level, have the potential to become powerful acts of resistance.
Keywords
Audience agency, audience studies, convergence, engagement, everyday media use,
participation, productive practices, produsage, resistance
Introduction: the origins of small acts of engagement
The concept of small acts of productive engagement we propose in this article emerged
from a large-scale, collaborative, systematic literature review and foresight analysis per-
formed under the framework of the Consortium of Emerging Directions of Audience
Research (CEDAR) (Das and Ytre-Arne, 2018). At different stages of the work within
CEDAR (Das et al., 2018), the project provided a fruitful framework to engage deeply
with and exchange thoughts on the pasts and futures of audiences, audience agency, and
audience scholarship. Bringing together our different approaches to audiences—in their
sense-making activities, intimate and personal storytelling, news participation, and
engagement with platforms and interfaces—we continue the work sparked by CEDAR
in an attempt to provide theoretical elaboration of productive audience practices that we
label small acts of engagement (SAOE). This dialogue took the shape of a hermeneutic
analysis through which we refined our understanding of SAOE as phenomena, practices,
and acts of resistance.
Our work started from the observation that interest among scholars—and conse-
quently the transformative narratives—centers on audiences’ increased potential to con-
tribute to media production, often discussed as the blurring boundaries between producers
and audiences (Graham, 2018). The extent to which digital media have changed com-
munication patterns and shifted power to citizens has been a central contemporary debate
in communication studies (Karlsson et al., 2015). Especially in journalism studies, citi-
zens have on many occasions been noted to occupy the role of journalists (Bowman and
Willis, 2003; Canter, 2013), informing local communities and global publics. Blogging,
for example, has been amply discussed in media studies as a form of self-publication
(Papacharissi, 2011), user empowerment, and a threat to professional expertise (Domingo
et al., 2008).
While we acknowledge that the media landscape has become more participatory for
media audiences, we are critical of a too linear, celebratory, or fragmentary comprehen-
sion of this shift. A linear conception would lead us to believe that we are on a straight
path toward an ever more participatory media system where every media consumer
eventually becomes a media producer. Here, we share the argument of many authors
(Bird, 2011; Carpentier, 2011; Couldry, 2011b) that the promise of technology to turn

2012 new media & society 21(9)
“readers” into “writers” has not been fulfilled. Regarding participation in the news, for
example, figures of the 2016 Digital news report (Newman et al., 2016: 100) show that
across the 26 countries surveyed worldwide, 46% of respondents qualify as passive con-
sumers, talking online or offline with friends about news or not engaging in any form
whatsoever. While 21% are reactive participants, sharing or commenting on news online,
only 31% are considered proactive participators commenting, sharing pictures, or writ-
ing a news-related blog post. Clearly, even now, well beyond the early days of interactive
technologies, a large number of news users choose not to engage in content production.
These observations not only show the limits of the “everyone is a producer” logic
underlying many views on participatory media, but also nuance their often celebratory
feel. Participation is not recommended over consumption by definition. Media users are
aware of this. For example, research shows that many young people are cautious about
providing personal information or pictures of themselves on social media, being afraid of
misuse of this material (Marwick et al., 2017). Others develop “social media burnout”
through addiction, envy, and anxiety (Liu and Ma, 2018). Even those who built a suc-
cessful enterprise out of their personal meanderings, like so-called influencers or YouTube
stars, can sometimes succumb to the pressure to regularly produce content and other
unwritten rules of professional content production (Parkin, 2018).
Admittedly, while not everyone started blogging, many media users now engage in
more casual practices of content production. With the tremendous uptake of social media
over the past decade, liking, sharing, and commenting have become audiences’ dominant
modes of productive engagement. According to the Reuters Digital News Report 2017
(Newman et al., 2017: 44), sharing news stories, albeit varying greatly by country, is
done weekly by more than 60% of Internet users in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico,
40% in the United States, and 22% in the United Kingdom. But here too, the authors saw
the use of social media for news falter in key markets in 2018 after years of continuous
growth, and attribute it for the most part “to a specific decline in the discovery, posting,
and sharing of news in Facebook” (Newman et al., 2018: 9).
Liking, sharing, and commenting are widely studied but mostly as a form of “affec-
tive rewards” within a consumerist neoliberal discourse of choice (Graham, 2018), only
rarely from audience studies’ perspective, leading to a fragmentary conception of partici-
patory media. On one hand, studies of participatory culture (see, for example, Bruns,
2008; Jenkins, 2006) have broadened their gaze beyond fan productions or collaborative
media to include these forms of “spreadable” content production (Jenkins et al., 2013).
Yet, the conceptual frameworks developed to make sense of these participatory practices
are not necessarily adequate to understand practices such as liking, sharing, and com-
menting, which stay firmly rooted in the sphere of everyday media consumption. On the
other hand, the transformative power of such “small” acts in a connected media environ-
ment makes them increasingly significant, but mainly as data traces to be processed.
When these practices get attention in media studies, they are commonly investigated for
the (big) data on citizens they reveal, assuming a “self-evident relationship between data
and people” (Van Dijck, 2014: 199), rather than for their agentic value as audience
practices.
Hence, in this article, we propose to look at these occurrences through the lens of
everyday agency as conceptualized in audience studies. Media uses have always led to a

Picone et al. 2013
variety of reactive activities—from private casual chats about last night’s TV programs
(Gillespie, 1995; Livingstone and Lunt, 2002) and letters to the editor to the dedicated
creations of fanzines (Gray et al., 2007; Reijnders et al., 2014)—all equally important for
understanding media as texts and objects in everyday life. From this perspective, the
seemingly effortless, casual, random, and SAOE with existing content (e.g. likes, shares,
and comments) and content creation (e.g. witness accounts and spontaneous posts) are
empirically and anthropologically studied (boyd, 2014; Jenkins et al., 2016; Lange,
2014). These acts of engagement that we conceptualized as small are inarguably recog-
nized by researchers as significant and central to online interactions, yet they are not
studied explicitly and lack a theoretical framework accounting for their substantial dif-
ference from other forms of online participation.
We will first consider recent conceptualizations of audience participation to pave the
way for our main question: how can we further conceptualize SAOE and how can such
more advanced conceptualization help us to reconnect audiences’ productive practices
with everyday agency? The boundaries of which practices qualify as SAOE have been
rather blurry in our conceptualization so far (Kleut et al., 2018). In the second part of this
article, therefore, we elaborate our conceptualization through the notions of investment
and intention. Our aim is not to offer a concrete operationalization of the notion, or a
classification of specific emanations of such acts, but we do take a prospective look at
how SAOE could inform possible empirical avenues in audience studies. In doing so, we
pay particular attention to SAOE as both productive and interpretative practices. We
conclude by connecting the notion of SAOE with everyday agency, paying attention to
audience empowerment, resistance, and co-optation.
Identifying SAOE within the emerging terminology on
audiences
The overview of recent literature in audience studies (Kleut et al., 2018) revealed that
increasing user involvement in digital media is most frequently described through con-
cepts such as produsage (Bruns, 2006) and convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006).
Produsage refers to “the collaborative, iterative, and user-led production of content by
participants in a hybrid user-producer, produser role” (Bruns, 2006: 1). Convergence
culture is described as the “flow of content across multiple media platforms, the coopera-
tion between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences”
(Jenkins, 2006: 2). Produsage accentuates a new type of large, heterarchically organized
communities. Convergence culture focuses on collaboration with and among audiences
based on high motivation, dedication, and resources, including time and skills.
Work on both produsage and convergence culture has been criticized for easily jump-
ing to conclusions about the participatory potential of new practices. One line of argu-
ment is that involvement in entertainment is too easily transferred into the political realm
(Carpentier, 2011; Couldry, 2011a), while the second questions the power attributed to
produsers in the context of democratic participation (Bird, 2011). Couldry (2011b: 222)
further draws attention to the need to focus on the audiences and their practices, claiming
that convergence has “potentially altered the dynamics of engagement, too.”

2014 new media & society 21(9)
In response to this criticism and the increasing adoption of social media, Jenkins et al.
(2013) introduced the term spreadable media. The move from convergence culture to
spreadable media can be summarized as the shift from user-generated to user-circulated
content as social media’s affordances and people’s circumstances and motives for shar-
ing have gained attention in the literature. Audience agency and the social embeddedness
of spreading practices, indeed, have been recognized, but the focus largely remains on
the value and meaning attached to these practices by diverse socioeconomic actors and
not the audiences themselves. Thus, this approach does acknowledge the importance of
SAOE, but it views them predominantly from a macro-perspective, mostly with shifting
media economies in mind.
Beyond the strong models of produsage, convergence, and spreadability (here,
strength refers to not only these models’ academic popularity but also the range of phe-
nomena they aim to encompass), audience studies scholars (Papacharissi, 2011;
Pavlíčková and Kleut, 2016; Picone, 2011) have called for including questions about
identities, interpretations, and individual social practices in the discussion. Picone (2011)
identified this gap while studying news users who casually produce content and are still
primarily audience members because their consumption outweighs their production.
Calling this practice “casual produsage” or “personal productive use of information,”
Picone (2011: 105) was interested in the factors that shape personal investment, or con-
necting with content, social context, and personal motives, attitudes, and skills.
Discussing audiences’ practices of productive news use rather than produsage, he argued
that these should be understood as alternative ways of using, not producing,
information.
Presenting a similar argument regarding celebrity gossip bloggers, Meyers (2012)
suggested the term audience/produser. Her study showed that users who blog do not see
themselves as producers but, instead, “act as a public mouthpiece for certain audience
segments” (Meyers, 2012: 1036). This activity stems from pre-existing audiencehood,
which has gained new, more public forms with the possibilities of digital technology.
Laughey (2010) proposed productive consumption, and, researching eBay users, he
described it as “a type of work born and embedded in contexts of consumption” (p. 110).
Such studies on casual audience engagements with content flows are still relatively
rare. Liking, sharing, commenting, and occasional posting are mostly viewed as interrup-
tions of established mass communication models, and empirically studied as content or
as data traces left by the users (Møller Hartley et al., 2018). Reviewing a decade of news
sharing studies, Kümpel et al. (2015) show that the majority of research is using content
analysis and surveys, theoretically informed by diffusion of innovation theory, and con-
cepts such as social influence, interactivity, and political participation. Some studies,
particularly within journalism studies, have looked at sharing and commenting news
from a Uses and Gratifications perspective, for example, focusing on how the use of
news on social media platforms is connected to commenting on news on SNS and beyond
(Kalogeropoulos et al., 2017). Others have been examining the relation between active
use of social media and the links to political participation (Boulianne, 2015), or how
credibility affects what we choose to click on while scrolling Facebook (Sülflow et al.,
2019) and what kinds of news we share on SNS (Kalsnes and Larsson, 2018).

Picone et al. 2015
However, as Kümpel et al. (2015) rightly claim, there is a lack of theory-building and
of understanding of the cultural and situational contexts in which audience members
share information. In sum, while “we are not all produsers” (Bird, 2011), we do not ques-
tion the fact that smaller scale user engagement has been widely adopted. We are, how-
ever, critical of the promise of data mining and metrics to shed light on what people do
in the digital world, as these risk-obscuring individuals in their everyday life (Unwin,
2017: 170). Studies of sharing and commenting have mainly been approached from a
macro level. We argue for a need to examine these practices from a micro-perspective
and suggest that an audience perspective can inform such a microlevel analysis. For this
reason, we are introducing SAOE as a concept that accounts for the personally moti-
vated, socially situated practices of people participating in content flows, appropriating
this content in everyday life, and forming individual and group identities.
Conceptualizing SAOE
In this section, we clarify the concept of SAOE, building on attempts to conceptualize
everyday productive audience practices. Aware that engagement has been used in rela-
tion to audiences to refer to aspects other than productive media use, we first explicate
our understanding of the concept. To that end, we introduce two aforementioned dimen-
sions of engagement—investment and intention—and show how both help define what
we consider to be SAOE.
Acts of engagement
Engagement is defined very differently in various fields of study, and even fluidly in
media studies. Political science, for example, has since long stressed the cognitive pro-
cesses of engagement (e.g. remembering) and the more physical behavior of accessing
and discussing media content with others (Berger, 2011; Pattie et al., 2004). However,
the concept has also become valuable for market researchers and media organizations
that work with customer engagement, often referring to clicks and shares. Engagement
in this perspective can refer to the myriad ways people access and interact with media
products, but reduces engagement to those activities that can be captured and analyzed in
measurable ways and with measurable market value (Ørmen, 2015: 26). Audience
research has a specific interest in the cognitive (i.e. critical reflection) and the affective
dimensions of how relationships with others are enacted through media (Kozel et al.,
2018). The audience research perspective stresses the role of participation in the pro-
cesses of media use, more precisely practices of creating, distributing, and commenting
on content and establishing affinity with brands, content, and other users.
The concept of engagement encompasses all of these different dimensions, and in this
article, we use the concept to refer specifically to a more active way of using media con-
tent that nevertheless does not qualify as participatory (in the strict sense of Carpentier,
2011) nor as a practice outside everyday media use. This understanding of engagement
connects with the description of engagement by Couldry et al. (2010) as a meaningful,
mundane practice in everyday life, which serves as an important way of connecting to
politics and the public world. Following this definition, engagement can thus be seen as

2016 new media & society 21(9)
a practice in itself, engaging with media, and as a possible outcome of various media
practices, what Couldry et al. (2010) define as “public connection.”
In our conceptualization of SAOE, we focus on engagement as productive practices,
and these might be political, cultural, or both, situated in between the sense-making of
content (the focus of many cultural studies) and the public or civic connection (the focus of
much political communication research). Moreover, engagement signifies more active use
of media than consumption or reception, which implies a solitary process of sense-making.
With engagement, we instead want to shed light on the processual and responsive acts,
which are especially prevalent in a digital media environment. Following Berger, acts of
engagement entail a combination of “activity and energy” (Berger, 2011: 3), which in this
article, we describe as investment. Hence, engagement captures how people both pay atten-
tion to how we act (or choose not to act) upon that attention (whether as objects or symbolic
messages) and involve ourselves cognitively and affectively with media content.
As audience studies have demonstrated, cognitive and affective engagement in acts of
reception often occurs in the private sphere of the household (Gillespie, 1995; Livingstone
and Lunt, 2002). In this sense, everyday talk about news and favorite TV series shares
many features with our conceptualization of SAOE. What is different, however, is that
mediation of social life (Livingstone, 2009) leads to mediation of everyday interactions
about media content, happens on social media platforms, and transcends the private
domain. Distinction of engagement in media and engagement via media has been trans-
formed with the proliferation of ready-to-use web affordances (Dahlgren, 2013). As
audience members become increasingly cross-media (Schrøder, 2011), combining dif-
ferent entry points to content, they more frequently act upon content using digital media.
That said, it should be stressed that our conceptualization of SAOE envisages practices
that, in terms of attention, cognitive, and affective response, start from both online and
offline content, but acting upon this content occurs primarily in the digital, hence more
public, environment.
Acts small in investment and intention
Investment. The first dimension we conceive as central to SAOE is investment. The
notion of investment introduces a sense of scalability into “engagement”: both liking a
news article and writing a news story can be considered forms of productive engage-
ment, but they do not require the same level of investment. At the same time, investment
is explicitly considered to be distinct from input. Discussing input can allow us to single
out acts (e.g. liking an Instagram post and sharing live game footage) that require less
input (a click) than, for example, comments (a few sentences), a blog post (a few para-
graphs), or citizen journalism (a few paragraphs based on a form of reporting). From
users’ perspective though, the investment needed for the same act can vary significantly
based on their dispositions (Picone, 2011). While the input required for a comment is
small, a person without much writing experience might find it to be a larger investment
than a person familiar with writing blog posts. Talking about investment, therefore,
allows us to take people’s experiences and dispositions as a starting point of analysis.
Input is the objective category, while investment requires empirical analysis of audi-
ences’ subjective experiences and their dispositions.

Picone et al. 2017
SAOE then are acts that require a small investment relative to one’s capacities.
Conceived as such, the notion does not refer to acts with small input. This means that
comments, for example, are not necessarily SAOE because they could require substantial
investment from some people. Furthermore, people’s interactions with media depend on
the local context. Engagement can be radically different in conflict and war zones, for
example, due to the influence political instability has on local media ecologies. We are
aware that in this article, we are discussing audience engagement in the Western context,
or, as some authors prefer, the perspective of the North (McEwan, 2009) or Global North
(e.g. Brooks, 2017; Scott, 2014). The claims we make should be further examined in the
contexts where an act as effortless as a click can pose risk. Clearly, Western audiences
are not a homogeneous category, but we set this limitation to contend that the ubiquity of
personal media devices contributes to a certain level of media literacy, especially among
younger users (Eurostat, 2016).
What unites acts small in terms of investment is the role they can assume in everyday
life. The limited investment needed makes incorporating them into daily routines more
habitual and intuitive. This everydayness is exactly what we seek to grasp—an aspect
central to our notion of media consumption but, as discussed, less explored in relation to
productive practices. When, though, is an investment small enough to qualify its corre-
sponding act as small? We aim to understand subjective experiences rather than develop
objective categories, so a possible answer is “the right amount of investment to achieve
a state of flow.” SAOE are those digital and non-digital practices that we do not think
about.
The notion of flow was introduced in media studies decades ago, most notably by
Williams (1975: 86) to describe watching television: it is not a matter of watching sepa-
rate shows but more a stream of programs through which stations try to keep viewers on
board for the whole evening. Here, we do not perceive flow as a fragile, momentary state
of “optimal functioning of consciousness” (Elkington, 2010: 327), as is often conceived
from a psychological perspective. Instead, in relation to “investment,” Jensen’s (1994:
291) conceptualization is more interesting and distinguishes between channel flow,
closely linked to Williams’ (1975) idea, and viewer flow, or the way viewers compose
their own personalized flows of content consumption across channels (see also Caldwell,
2003: 133–137). Being absorbed and carried on in a viewing experience, therefore, does
not preclude a more active attitude toward directing that experience.
Discussing interactivity, Rettie (2001) and McMillan (2006) linked the notion of flow
to individuals’ personal skills. These can be conceived broadly, following Abercrombie
and Longhurst (1998: 119–120), as technical, analytical, and interpretative skills. When
people perceive their skills as insufficient to tackle a certain task, they become reluctant
to engage in it. When they perceive a task as too easy or irrelevant, boredom looms. Flow
then is the mental state in which the required effort and the available skills correspond,
and a person’s investment is balanced, resulting in a satisfying experience. The study
shows how lean-forward experiences, such as writing comments, can be straightforward
to the point of becoming routine activities (Burnett and Marshall, 2003: 72).
In sum, the concept of flow helps us conceive of a notion of investment relative to
media users’ engagement rather than the product resulting from that engagement. In line
with flow as conceived by Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2014), an act of productive

2018 new media & society 21(9)
engagement requires a small investment when exactly the right amount of investment
occurs, and the productive activity can be performed frictionless. SAOE, therefore, are
those productive acts that we feel comfortable performing and do not require us stepping
out of the comfort zone of our daily routines. For example, writing a journalistic piece or
a fan fiction story is a demanding task for most people, regardless of how pleasant these
activities might be in their own right.
Intention. The second dimension we see as important in understanding SAOE is inten-
tion. We initially conceived the ends of this dimension as consisting of casual and struc-
tural intentions. We wanted to take into consideration a fundamental difference in the
drivers of productive activities. This reflection emerged from the concern, as discussed,
that more casual acts of productive activity seem to have enjoyed less attention than the
more consistent or high-level acts, such as blogging and citizen journalism. A good
illustration of the differences in intention we seek to grasp is what Lasica (2003: 73)
called “random acts of journalism.” When looking at user-generated news content, he
acknowledged the importance of content generated by people who do not practice ama-
teur journalism but happen to witness an event or have a piece of information they deem
worth sharing. Lasica (2003) pointed out that certain acts of citizen journalism are not
premeditated. They do not come from a sustained interest in engaging in citizen journal-
ism. Even simply sharing a news article might be considered to be a random act of
journalism. In any of these cases, the actor is unlikely to be driven by a desire to pro-
duce journalistic content, which makes the intention behind casual and structural acts
different.
We first devised this dimension not in terms of the quality but the intensity of inten-
tion, suggesting that casual acts of productive engagement are less intentional than more
structural ones (Kleut et al., 2018). This view is problematic. It contradicts a fundamental
idea in audience studies: everyday practices of media consumption can be used in highly
strategic ways, for example, as acts of resistance against mainstream ideologies (Fiske,
1989). We, therefore, suggest it might be more fruitful to conceive the intention dimen-
sion as determined by its kind rather than its intensity. This view invites us to consider
content- and identity-driven intentions as the two ends of the dimension.
Indeed, studies of motivations to share, comment, and blog seem to largely agree that
most of these actions are first and foremost ways to engage in self-presentation
(Papacharissi, 2011). It has been suggested (Pavlíčková and Kleut, 2016; Picone, 2011)
that the blurring of the distinction between content consumption and production has been
too narrowly approached as a shift in the production of media content. In contrast, from
an audience perspective, various studies have suggested that many casual contributors
see their actions as a way of connecting with others or presenting their identity rather
than producing content (Kümpel et al., 2015; Meyers, 2012; Picone, 2011).
When conceiving intention as such, acts of engagement are small when they are
driven by the ambition not to create content but to either present oneself to others, or as
a traceability tool for a digital flâneur—this is particularly true for the strategic use of
“likes” to form a repository of personally significant digital objects (videos, shopping
items, etc.). Through these brief, casual interventions, users negotiate personal media
interactions, including future ones—the example is YouTube’s “Not interested” button

Picone et al. 2019
that removes the unwanted content from recommendations. These simple steering mech-
anisms display users’ awareness of their own digital journey.
These actions can be strategic, intended, for example, to present a specific image of
oneself, forge connections, trace personal trajectories, or help others. They can become
more focused on content production itself, such as keeping up a blog with expert insights
into a specific topic or making daily podcasts or YouTube videos. Especially done with
the intent to earn money or profile oneself as a content producer, these acts leave the
realm of the small. Admittedly, these larger acts can also be motivated by the willingness
to maintain social contact or present oneself, but they explicitly do so through the sys-
tematic production of content, adopting close-to-professional logics and standards.
Thus, SAOE are acts of productive activity that require relatively little investment to
be integrated seamlessly into daily routines and are driven primarily by an intuitive will-
ingness to present oneself and forge one’s identity rather than produce information. But
this does in no way reduce these acts to merely manifestations of audience preferences
through clicks, ready to be aggregated and analyzed by media producers and platforms
for the sake of better conversion rates through content-optimization (Tandoc and Thomas,
2015: 247).
Looking at everyday media use through the lens of SAOE
We developed the notion of SAOE out of a presentiment that a concept delineating eve-
ryday productive practices was missing, yet justifiable and useful when thinking about
audiences’ productive engagement with media. SAOE allow us to move beyond the
“quantified audience” (Tandoc and Thomas, 2015: 247) by drawing attention to those
practices in their own right, and the diversity and nuances hidden behind something
seemingly small, as well as their potential for resistance. Aware that the concept is still in
need of further theoretical elaboration and empirical validation, we neither aim nor pre-
tend to offer a full-fledged operationalization of SAOE at this point. Rather, we invite
media scholars to further scrutinize the variations, interconnectedness, and contextual-
ization of intention and investment. In the final part of this article, we present the ways
in which SAOE have informed both our theoretical and empirical research so far, trusting
that these could offer starting points for researchers to further explore SAOE.
Informing empirical avenues in audience studies
On an abstract-theoretical level we seek first of all to offer high-level audience studies
inspired and thus agentic understanding of acts such as liking, sharing, and commenting.
How should we conceive of these practices? Thinking about SAOE in terms of invest-
ment and intention allows audience researchers to theorize and study the productive
practices as forms of media consumption rather than forms of media production, content,
or data traces. Regarding investment, SAOE are productive acts audiences feel comfort-
able performing. They easily fit in the daily routines of media use and do not require
people to step out of their comfort zone. This approach provides a way of acknowledging
that productive audience practices are not necessarily practices through which people
transcend their role as audience members to become producers (as opposed to the

2020 new media & society 21(9)
argument of Naab and Sehl, 2017). SAOE practices intrinsic to audiencehood.
Considering intention, SAOE are driven by the ambition not to create content but to
present oneself to others and maintain relational and social ties. Contrast a user upload-
ing a skit from a live concert they attended to a celebrity vlogger regularly covering
concerts on a YouTube channel or a single eyewitness photo to a current affairs blog.
While vloggers and bloggers also engage in self-presentation, they have a stronger affin-
ity with content production and perfect their art accordingly.
Looking at practices such as liking, sharing, and commenting through these two
dimensions allows us to envision ‘tipping points’: when is someone willing or able to
invest more into these practices, possibly with the intention to produce more or more
elaborate content that he or she comes to the point of leaving the sphere of media
consumption into the sphere of more high-level practices of professional amateurs
(Leadbeater and Miller, 2004). It gives us a way to scrutinize these practices by ask-
ing what factors can affect these dimensions. Instead of categorizing a like or a com-
ment as an act requiring little investment, we ask for whom this is the case or not, and
why?
This brings forward a second key element: we conceive SAOE as subjective experi-
ences, which implies that they are shaped in articulation with the context in which they
take place (Courtois et al., 2012). What contextual factors affect media users’ investment
and intention to engage with media content, and how does this shape their media experi-
ences. This would allow us to assess who considers certain practices “small” and who
does not? Who are the people for whom commenting online still requires a lot of effort?
What structural inequalities in terms of sociodemographics, media use patterns, levels of
media literacy, or cultural elements could explain these subjective differences among
media users? Surfacing these inequalities can inform policies aimed at strengthening citi-
zens in light of the possible perverse effects of their actions.
But also, the very situational context, the times and spaces in which the acts of engage-
ment take place, become of particular interest for SAOE. Examining how users access
the news on mobile phones, Dimmick et al. (2011) used the term “interstices” to label the
tiny periods between our daily activities where we often glance at our mobile devices for
micro-information or micro-entertainment. Keightley and Downey (2018) wrote about
“the intermediate audience,” relying on cultural approaches to “provide empirical tools
for understanding how the temporalities of news consumption are imaginatively, socially
and culturally produced in everyday encounters with the news” (p. 7). Closely linked to
already existing content, SAOE should be (re)searched in those in-between times and
spaces.”
Third, in applying these perspectives, SAOE can act as a sensitizing concept, shedding
light on the more mundane emanations of productive media use. Likes and shares drive
recommendations and distribution algorithms. On an aggregate level, these “small” acts
can have a disruptive effect on content flows. Especially on the macro-level, this canalizes
a lot of attention not so much on these actual practices, but rather on the traceable and
quantifiable digital data traces they leave behind. Similarly, in stories about user metrics,
echo-chambers, misinformation, and so on, the audience is easily reduced to “a set of
monitored and recorded characteristics” (Carlson, 2018: 411). Once more, the audience is
turned into a passive and uncritical actor in the process, being unknowingly datafied,

Picone et al. 2021
commodified, surveyed, or polarized. We argue that SAOE is useful in providing a micro-
level analytical lens from which these changes on an aggregate level can be studied.
Talking about SAOE in this context is a way of drawing attention to these acts as audi-
ence practices in their own right, with their own dynamics and role within people’s eve-
ryday media use. Next to being neglected, they also risk being dismissed as a purely
negative force seen by the current backlash around these practices at many levels, rang-
ing from the spread of sensational stories or misinformation to the use of online com-
ments to polarize communities (Weeks et al., 2017). We could relapse in cultural
pessimism where audience practices are driven by sensationalism, voyeurism, and mali-
cious pleasure of a thrill-seeking public.
But, as Phillips and Milner (2017) convincingly argue, expressions of Internet culture
can inspire divergent responses in divergent audiences, highlighting one of their funda-
mental characteristics:
they are ambivalent. Simultaneously antagonistic and social, creative and disruptive, humorous
and barbed, the satirization of products, antagonization of celebrities, and creation of
questionable fan art, along with countless other examples that permeate contemporary online
participation, are too unwieldy, too variable across specific cases, to be essentialized as this as
opposed to that. (p. 10)
Attention for the ambivalence of online participatory practices and the “divergent
responses” they engender is exactly that which we seek to draw attention to through the
notion of SAOE.
Finally, by conceiving SAOE as productive acts that are nonetheless firmly rooted in
the sphere of everyday media consumption and by putting forward their identity-driven
intentions, we acknowledge their connection with audiences’ act of interpretation. In
SAOE, the interpretive logic is central; that is to say, the production is a by-product of
interpretation. What comments, eyewitness accounts, and funny videos have in common
is that they are driven more by momentary opportunity and inspiration than sustained or
systematic content creation. They originate in the sphere of everyday media consump-
tion and are not intended to leave that sphere, even though they potentially might because
they are public by default (see Jensen and Helles, 2017, on meta-communication).
Investigating SAOE goes hand in hand with advocating sensitivity toward the every-
day dimension in productive audience practices and acknowledging the importance of
everyday interpretive practices central to most people’s everyday media use. This under-
standing connects the notion of SAOE to a core argument of audience studies: interpreta-
tion engenders the production of meaning. As Martin-Barbero (1993: 214) puts it, “in an
interpretative reading, as in consumption, there is not just reproduction but also produc-
tion, a production which questions the centrality of the dominating text.” In SAOE, there
is not only production but also interpretation, which informs how one relates personal
identity to the dominant text by producing one’s own text.
Reconnecting with everyday agency, resistance, and co-optation
Considering SAOE as forms of interpretation embedded within people’s everyday media
use provides a way to connect these acts to everyday agency and resistance. Theoretically,

2022 new media & society 21(9)
the notion of everyday agency is rooted in the 1980s and 1990s scholarly discussions on
the agency of television audiences (Morley, 1992). These discussions took place in times
when interactivity, user-generated content, and participatory journalism had not yet
entered academic debates. Their focus was on interpretive practices. Drawing on semiot-
ics, cultural studies argued that media texts are open to interpretation, conceptualized as
an interpretive resistance. Resistance has been studied in the context of audiences’ inter-
pretations of (popular) media texts, aiming to understand the broader social and cultural
significance of these resistant audience practices.
Fiske (1989) was a proponent of theorizing the everyday agency of audiences, specifi-
cally related to popular culture. Referring to the work of de Certeau (1984), Fiske (1989:
21) argued that popular culture is not about the commodities mass media produce but,
instead, “the art of making do with what the system provides.” His work showed that
popular culture consists of people’s creative engagements with media commodities, the
“creative, discriminating use of the resources that capitalism provides” (Fiske, 1989: 23).
These arguments have been widely adopted in audience studies and influenced many
recent debates on the democratic affordances of participatory media (see Jenkins, 2006).
It is exactly this dimension of everyday resistance we seek, to give more prominence in
the study of productive audience practices by pointing to SAOE.
In doing this, of course, we have to not only acknowledge but also problematize
aspects of empowerment and resistance, paying attention to co-optation from an audi-
ence perspective. As Morley (1992) discussed in detail, the focus on “resistance” in audi-
ence studies has been criticized for finding and celebrating traces of opposition
everywhere. Morley (1992: 30) bluntly stated that “[t]he power of viewers to reinterpret
meanings is hardly equivalent to the discursive power of centralized media institutions to
construct the texts which the viewer then interprets; to imagine otherwise is simply
foolish.”
The question we then pose is how SAOE connect to the decades of debates on every-
day resistance in audience studies. Several aspects, both hopeful and disturbing, need to
be considered. The first aspect emerges directly from the “net effect” from which tech
titans, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, benefit (Economist, 2018: 11): large
numbers of affected users, combined with social momentum may lead grassroots initia-
tives to become ineluctable and ultimately contribute to larger public discourses. Recent
examples include the #MeToo social-media campaign (which started in 2017 as a collec-
tion of retweets), #TimesUp (2017), and #BlackLivesMatter (2014). They all illustrate
the possible aggregate force of many SAOE.
Although this “aggregate power” might incite claims of a more empowered media
audience, ‘“liberated’ from both expert intermediaries and costs” (Athique, 2018: 60), a
more critical reading acknowledges how these corporations co-opt this power. Athique
(2018: 60) noted that “YouTube (as with other instances of YouMedia) is an exemplar of
the digital economy precisely because it is a medium without any content of its own” and
exploits the digital labor (Scholz, 2012) of its content-generating users for commercial
benefit (Poell and van Dijck, 2014). As Scholz (2012) showed, users’ free digital labor
provides these companies with content to fill their platforms. Moreover, engagement
with content—especially through SAOE—are used to track, analyze, and predict peo-
ple’s interests and habits—information highly valued by advertisers. Consequently, the

Picone et al. 2023
aggregate force for common good can all too easily be subverted into aggregate submis-
sion to commercial imperatives.
For example, the quantification of likes on social media contributes to higher visibil-
ity of content in users’ news feeds, producing social and even economic capital. These
social media dynamics can lead to perverse, disempowering effects, such as algorithmic-
driven (Poell and van Dijck, 2014) and metrics-driven (Tandoc and Thomas, 2015) news
curation and optimization of news stories for clickability (Blom and Hansen, 2015) and
shareability (Harcup and O’Neill, 2017). These dynamics culminate in fake news discus-
sions, where audience members are seen as ignorant spreaders or gullible believers of
false information.
It is precisely by considering SAOE as a set of quantifiable user metrics that we lose
the connection with everyday resistance. Audience members are becoming increasingly
aware of the symbolic and strategic value of their engagement. They develop strategies
to cope with the subversion of their data; take, for example, the idea of digital detox and
the #LeaveFacebook campaign in response to the Cambridge Analytica revelations. On
the other hand, industry actors continue adapting their communication practices to lure
users to buy into their services. We cannot assume we know the ways in which users use
their knowledge of old and new media to mitigate such perverse effects without empiri-
cally studying them.
This is even more so as every act of engagement (including small ones) is accompa-
nied by the algorithmic “black box” of data. The thrill over the use of algorithms to
comprehend if not to control people’s use of media has been increasingly criticized (e.g.
Hintz et al., 2018; Van Dijck, 2014) as reductive and decontextualized. This needs to be
accompanied by questions of how people understand and respond to algorithms—the old
audience question of what people do with media (e.g. Mathieu and Pavlíčková, 2017).
What SAOE can add to the debate on user empowerment through digital media is a way
of overcoming the binary approach opposing resistance to co-optation: reconnecting pro-
ductive audience practices to everyday agency rather than reducing them to their big data
aggregate, as well as calling upon audience researchers to empirically document, contex-
tualize and nuance these practices.
Concluding remarks
Connecting SAOE with the discussion on resistance and co-optation gives rise to an
agenda for addressing user empowerment in relation to participatory media. SAOE, at
their core, are about balancing a “processual model of hegemony” (Morley, 1992: 18)
between people’s agency and centralized media power, asking who gets to design and
continuously adapt digital media affordances and thus determine the structures through
which people can engage by using digital media. Today’s participatory affordances allow
people to “produce and circulate their own commodities” (Fiske, 1989: 23), which
demands theoretical reconsideration of interpretive resistance. Theorizing and empirically
understanding SAOE might mean understanding how the outcomes of resistant micro-
processes may lead to rapidly changing macrostructures, for better or for worse. Such
transformations are facilitated by the material infrastructures from which digital media are
built; interpretive resistance is not limited to the symbolical level but is situated within the

2024 new media & society 21(9)
close relationships between technological and human actors. Altogether, this evolution
requires that we redefine people’s agency for everyday resistance.
In conclusion, SAOE, by nature, do not connect with big ideologies (e.g. journalism
might not fulfill its role as watchdog, or television series might not invest enough in
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender [LGBT] characters) but can nonetheless become
a field of agency and resistance. Talking about SAOE thus reconnects theories on pro-
ductive audiences with the concerns of the everyday and forces us to consider the
empowerment of audiences in terms not only of content production but also identity
building and personal resistance—practices, indeed, much more connected with the
ways audiences deal with interpreting messages than the ways producers make content.
At the same time, the conceptualization acknowledges that, to a certain degree, new
practices need to be as frictionless as possible to be incorporated in daily routines,
explaining why SAOE might be adopted so broadly. Audience studies have long paid
great attention to even the smallest forms of everyday engagement, resistance, and
empowerment. Let us extend that concern well into the mediated future.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Ike Picone https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0423-3456
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Author biographies
Ike Picone is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences, Vrije
Universiteit Brussel, and senior researcher at imec-SMIT, working on media & journalism
studies.
Jelena Kleut is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad,
Serbia, where she is coordinator of the Media Centre.
Tereza Pavlíčková is a doctoral candidate at Charles University in Prague. Her research interests
are (new) media audiences and their interpretative practices, in particular questions of audiences’
understanding of authors and productive practices.
Bojana Romic is a senior lecturer at Malmö University, Sweden. She is also Marie Skłodowska
Curie ‘Seal of Excellence’ fellow, working on a project ‘Robot as a Cultural Icon’ at School of
Arts and Communication, K3, Malmö University.
Jannie Møller Hartley is associate professor at Roskilde University, director of the Digital Media
Lab and Co-leader of RUC Big Data Center. Her research interest include audiences of news jour-
nalism and digitalisation of newsrooms.
Sander de Ridder is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders in the Department
of Communication Sciences, Ghent University Belgium. His research interests include digital
media culture, sexuality, and media audiences.