The triple articulation of media technologies and its appropriation in technical discussions

Today’s domestic audio-visual audiences are increasingly dispersed over multiple affording technologies, various delivery channels, situated in a myriad of social and spatial contexts. These consequences of convergence, on the technological, institutional and cultural level, increasingly complicate audience research. In a recent project, dealing with this matter, we built upon the concept of a double articulation, rooted in domestication theory, which views media as both objects and texts. Unfortunately, its empirical application has proven problematic because research tends to concentrate on the contextual, losing sight of specific meanings of objects and texts. That is why we subscribed to the concept of a triple articulation, taking into account the immediate socio-spatial context of consumption as a specific articulation. Drawing upon this conceptual notion, empirical research, which questioned its practical relevance, indicated that audio-visual media technologies are indeed meaningfully articulated as objects, texts and context (Courtois, Verdegem & De Marez, in press). Moreover, we uncovered that the purposefully designed method allows uncovering articulation interactions, pointing out that each articulation is able to contribute independently to consumption meanings. This variation within objects, texts, and contexts incites both academics as well as practitioners to embrace this three-fold distinction in their activities. In this talk, more specifically, we zoom in on two practical cases. Both cases are current multidisciplinary projects involving the media industry, and academics from both engineering as well as the social sciences. The first one concerns the implementation of the model in the development and fine-tuning of recommendation algorithms. Instead of just taking into account prior consumption and user similarity, extra layers are added, taking into account people’s content preferences as well as their locations and social surroundings, next to the affording device. The second project involves improving audience measurement systems. For media industries, knowing audiences is a prerequisite to design programme schemes, to verify whether prospective audiences tune in, and – in a commercial context – to commodify these very audiences. In this case, our model guides the way in showing the relevant dimensions that need to be taken into account in a proper measurement