Media audiences imagining themselves in relation to future living

Audience studies have a history of studying people reading, listening and watching mass media at home. Domestication, as Silverstone and Haddon (1996) describe it, is an understanding of the design/domestication interface, implying a process of mutually shaping. This study contributes to an understanding of the future of audiences as still taking place in a home where connected media becomes integrated. By using a survey of students (n=1287) on what media selection is considered to be important to have access to in future student accommodation, a study is made of the implications of a youthful audience and a connected audience. The results show that students use and highly value access to both old and new media content and services and want to gain access to general as well as particular content and services (like sports or TV series). Hence, youthful audiences self-perceived attitudes towards being and becoming connected audiences imply a domestic access resembling the value of public access. Understandings of connected media in relation the interplay of youthful audiences and accommodation illustrate the socio-political challenge of the domestic sphere as configuring and offering a universal service. The socio-political challenge of structuring future connected audiences is what connections are actually made possible by access. By studying attitudes to access as well as actual inventories of access in the domestic sphere, media usage patterns and perceptions can be understood as taking place within set frames. These frames are set by various actors, like owners of apartment buildings, as more or less in a dialogue with and agency of potential audiences