Looking forward/looking back: The production of television and the television audience at MTV Canada

This ethnographic study of production at MTV Canada in Toronto problematizes what we mean by the audience from the perspective of events of media production and the ideologies of the audience that mediate these events. It explores how accounts of the audience get mobilized as a resource in interaction and shift depending on interactants\u27 institutional roles. It investigates not only how the audience is imagined and projected in production activities, but the institutional dynamics and semiotic technologies through which the audience—a term whose referent is always ultimately unknowable—is made palpable. Critiques of the culture industries have pointed out that mass culture is overdetermined by profit-centered treatments of audiences as primarily consumers. This dissertation argues that the analytics that enable these market calculations, such as ratings systems, demographics, and marketing strategies, are themselves unstable and contested by employees who are engaged in numerous projects and have diverse and highly fraught relationships to their multi-tiered company