French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences

Edited by Céline Ségur French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences Céline Ségur Editor French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences Editor Céline Ségur Centre de recherche sur les mediations (CREM) Université de Lorraine Metz, France

ISBN 978-3-030-33345-4 ISBN 978-3-030-33346-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33346-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland About the Book and Acknowledgments

The idea of a book on media, participation and audiences came about following the publication of a series of seminars, studies and discussions between the members of the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM, Université de Lorraine, France) as part of its 2013–2017 scientific programme “Faire public”. As there is still not enough scientific dialogue between French-speaking and English-speaking researchers with regard to these internationally relevant issues, the Centre de recherche sur les média- tions (CREM) decided to support and fund our editorial project to translate French-speaking research. I am grateful to the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM) for its encouragement, help and support. The chapters presented here have already undergone peer review for publication in French (except for Chap. 1): they are excerpted from three collective works and one journal published between 2015 and 2018:

Dakhlia J., dir. 2015, À la recherche des publics populaires (1). Faire peuple, Nancy, Éditions universitaires de Lorraine, série «Actes», 26, 250 p. Dakhlia J., Le Nozach D., Ségur C., dirs, 2016, À la recherche des publics populaires (2). Être peuple, Nancy, Éditions universitaires de Lorraine, série «Actes», 33, 218 p. Ballarini L., Ségur C., 2018, Devenir public. Modalités et enjeux, Éd. Mare & Martin, collection «MediaCritic», 191 p. Journal Études de communication, 47, published in 2016, Université Lille 3.

I would like to thank the publishers for their agreements: Stéphane Chaudiron (co-director of the Journal Études de communication), Gaël

v vi About the Book and Acknowledgments

Martin (Mare & Martin), and Maurice Rausch (Presses universitaires de Lorraine—Éditions universitaires de Lorraine). And many thanks to the authors for their enthusiasm and help to contribute to this project. At times, they had to update certain elements of their work due to political and/or media changes with regard to the analysed situations. We asked the company Coup de Puce to work on the translation of the texts. Most often, a productive dialogue ensued between the translators and the authors, which helped refine their stances. In particular, we had to question ourselves about the translation of terms and concepts (public, audience, people, becoming public) and their variety of meanings in each language. As the book forwards empirical study cases about various contexts sometimes unfamiliar to English readers, we tried to explain to our best. I want to thank all of them (translators and authors) for the quality of the exchanges. Finally I would like to thank Lucy Batrouney for considering this project and supporting the publication. Contents

1 French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences: Introduction 1 Céline Ségur

Part I Participatory Formats 17

2 Harnessing the Potential of the “Demotic Turn” to Authoritarian Ends: Caller Participation and Weaponized Communication on US Conservative Talk Radio Programs 19 Sébastien Mort

3 From Layperson to TV Celebrity? Televising the Sovereign People in the French Debate Program Parole de Candidat (TF1, 2012) 45 Sheila Perry

4 The People During the Presidential Elections on French TV: Announcement of the Election Results and Audience Representations 69 Stéphanie Kunert, Frédéric Lambert, and Beatriz Sanchez

vii viii Contents

5 From Televised Media Space to Internet Hypermedia: How Much Room Is There for the Opinions of Ordinary People? 91 Sébastien Rouquette

Part II Audiences and the Public Sphere 107

6 Television Audiences and Digital Social Networks: In Between an Experience and a Commitment 109 Céline Ségur

7 Online Communication of African Francophone Women Dealing with Infertility: Practices in the Face of Different Asymmetric Relationships 125 Emmanuelle Simon

8 Not All Fans Leave a Trace: The Case of a Digital Comic Serial Inspired by Television Series 149 Julien Falgas

9 The Contingencies of Becoming Public: Lessons from an Unachieved Revolution 165 Smaïn Laacher and Cédric Terzi

Index 203 Notes on Contributors

Julien Falgas is an associate professor (Information and Communication Sciences) at the Université de Lorraine (France), Centre de recherche sur les mediations. After a thesis dedicated to the sources of narrative innovation, it emerged that authors and journalists had to deal with a digital ecosystem dominated by a couple of way to discover and share contents, both conceived in order to sustain the advertisement business model. That’s why Falgas devised a way to build a large federated meshwork, where people would cross around contents that matter to them. The valo- rization of this idea through the needle.univ-lorraine.fr project appears as a breaching experiment. Stéphanie Kunert is an associate professor at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France). She is member of the Équipe de recherche de Lyon en Sciences de l’information et de la communication (Elico). Her research deal both with contemporary forms of engagement on digital social networks, and with construction and communication of public issues. Smaïn Laacher is Professor of Sociology at the Université de Strasbourg (France), where he is member of the scientific council of the Faculty of Social Sciences. He is a member of the research center Dynamiques Européennes. From 1998 to 2018 he was Assessing Judge representing the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) at the National Asylum Court (Paris, France). He is the author of Croire à l’incroyable. Un sociologue à la cour nationale du droit d’asile (2018, Gallimard).

ix x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Frédéric Lambert is Professor at the Université Paris 2 (France), Institut français de presse, where he is head of the master “Media, languages and societies”. He is Director of the information and communication sciences doctoral school. His research focuses on images and media semiotics; in particular he questions the processes of denunciation and the forms of adherence to the objects of mediacultures. Sébastien Mort is Associate Professor of American Studies at the Université de Lorraine in Metz (France). His research focus is political partisanship in the US news media and the conservative resurgence of the late twentieth century, with an emphasis on the communication and media strategies of the GOP and the conservative movement, and the way they harness antimedia politics. His publications in English include “Tailoring Dissent on the Airwaves: The Role of Conservative Talk Radio in the Right-Wing Resurgence of 2010” in New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture (2012). His project addresses Trump’s intimidation of the news media and the ways in which the Trump presidency forces media scholars and practitioners to reassess journalistic practices and norms in the post-broadcast media regime. Sheila Perry is an associate-assistant professor at the University of Nottingham (UK), affiliated to the Laboratoire Communication et Politique in Paris (CNRS-IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine) and co- founder of the French Media Research Group (UK). She has edited and contributed to a number of volumes on contemporary France, including (with Raymond Kuhn) the 2017 French Presidential Election and the Media: une campagne inédite?, Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 57, No. 2, 2018. Sébastien Rouquette is Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the Université Clermont Auvergne (France), where he heads the Communication and Societies Research Laboratory (ÉA 4647). He has recently published an article together with Agnès Bernard: “J’adore Les reines du shopping. Les réceptions d’une émission de coaching” [The receptions of an emission of coaching] (2019, Télévision, n°10, CNRS éditions, pp. 179–197). Beatriz Sanchez works for Centre national de mémoire historique (CNMH). Her PhD (2015) focused on election speeches, media writings and images, public sphere and communication rituals. She has published “Être candidat: la performance du “je” en politique” (Semen–Revue de sémio-linguistique des textes et discours, 43, 2017). NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Céline Ségur is an associate professor at the Université de Lorraine (France) and is a member of the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM). Her research focus is media reception and audiences. She is the author of Les recherches sur les téléspectateurs. Trajectoires académiques (2010, Hermès Lavoisier) and the co-director of À la recherche des publics populaires (2). Être peuple (2017, Éditions universitaires de Lorraine), Devenir public. Modalités et enjeux (2018, Mare & Martin). Her project deals with the issues of participation and participatory formats on French Television. Emmanuelle Simon is Associate Professor of Information and Communication Sciences, member of the Centre de recherche sur les mediations (CREM, Université de Lorraine). Her research focuses on circulation and hybridization of knowledges and communicational practices in the health sector. She recently co-edited a book entitled Savoirs d’Experience des Patients (published by Éditions universitaires de Lorraine—2019). Cédric Terzi is Associate Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the Université de Lille and a researcher at the Centre d’Étude des mouvements sociaux of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research focuses on the analysis of public experience from a pragmatist and ethnomethodological perspective. Together with Stéphane Tonnelat he wrote “The Publicization of Public Space” (2017, Environment & Planning A, Volume: 49, issue: 3, Sage Publishing, pp. 519–536). Furthermore, together with Louis Quéré he contributed to The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’ (2014) and published “Some features of pragmatist thought still remain insufficiently explored in Ethnomethodology” (2010, Qualitative Sociology, vol. 34, n°1, pp. 271–275). List of Tables

Table 5.1 Proportion of farmers, employees and so on (the six OSCs), in the televised social space in relation to French society 95 Table 5.2 Fundamental choices for public media spaces 98

xiii CHAPTER 1

French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences: Introduction

Céline Ségur

The idea of a book on media, participation and audiences came about following the publication of a series of seminars, studies and discussions between the members of the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM, Université de Lorraine) as part of its 2013–2017 scientific program “Faire public”. The aim of the program was to define the terminological outlines of the concept, as well as the theoretical and methodological boundaries of the subjects to which it refers.1 Accordingly, for the editor of this book, the issue of the public in particular was handled through an epistemological approach on the one hand (Ségur 2010, 2015) and from the perspective of the performative value of audiences on the other (Dakhlia et al. 2016; Ballarini and Ségur 2018). The concept of participation thus became a new paradigm for considering the relationship of individuals to the media. Indeed, we observed the extent to which the phenomena

Translation: Ian Margo, Teri Jones-Villeneuve & Céline Ségur

C. Ségur (*) Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM), Université de Lorraine, Metz, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 1 C. Ségur (ed.), French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33346-1_1 2 C. SÉGUR involved in identity-building as members of a public occur today through participatory practices. A public, which John Dewey (1927) defined as a community awaiting reflexivity and self-representation, is not a given in itself. It is through practice that individuals acquire awareness of belonging to a group, as Gabriel Tarde (1901) explained with regard to readers of the press. In France, this definition was used again several years later to characterize the reception of media, television in particular. In the early 1990s, Daniel Dayan put together a selection of texts written by French- and English-speaking specialists (Ien Ang, Jérôme Bourdon, John Corner, James Curran, Peter Dahlgren, Tamar Liebes, Elihu Katz, Sonia Livingstone, Peter Lunt, Éric Macé, David Morley, Kim Schroder and Michel Souchon, among others) for publication in the journal Hermès. The texts, which were in or translated into French, were published in a special issue entitled “À la recherche du public. Réception, télévision, medias”. The publication helped initiate a theoretical assessment of media audiences, where being part of the public was considered to be both a collective experience and a performance. For these authors, being recep- tive to a television program means considering oneself as being invited to be part of a collective experience between the television institution and the viewers. It means “an experience of watching with, no matter how lonely the spectator may in fact be”, becoming part of “an imagined community of spectators” (see p. 47 in Dayan 2005). Daniel Cefaï and Dominique Pasquier (2003: 14) stabilized this definition of publics by explaining that they are formed by participating in a cultural, political, social or other kind of experience: “The idea of ‘publicisation’ implies that the ‘public’ is not a given in itself, either preceding or outside of the performances that concern it: it ‘publicises’ itself by ‘publicising’ a social issue or policy measure, a theatrical work or a television programme—by ‘publicising’ at the same time, manifestations of pleasure and criticism, support and disapproval, shame and indignation, justification and condemnation”.2 Here, the concepts of public and experiences are closely related. This leads to the question of how to distinguish between television viewers consuming a media program and involving themselves in a public. The researchers called upon by Sonia Livingstone (2005) came to a similar conclusion: audiences are the subject of growing mediation and their activities are increasingly visible (public). Interactions between the public and private spheres are central to these issues and today serve to highlight the concept of participation. 1 FRENCH PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA, PARTICIPATION AND AUDIENCES… 3

From Reception to Participation We began exploring this issue at a time when the communication environment had undergone a profound shift in the way in which a public is defined, a fortiori, a media public. The audiences, which were previously viewed as being on the receiving end of messages, are now considered to be at the center of the participatory situation, which takes numerous forms: spontaneous, desired, encouraged, mythologized, directed, restricted and so on. This is what led Henry Jenkins (2006) to consider that media communication in Western societies in the twenty-first century occurs through the convergence model. Participatory culture is one of the two pillars of contemporary cultural convergence. Producers and consumers of media messages must be considered as participants interacting with each other. The passive user model has changed: “It is no longer possible to proceed without the receivers or consumers of meaning, who are no longer content to react, appropriate and divert informative messages and entertainment content, but who at times may be involved as early as the production phase” (see p. 7 in Maigret 2013). In this model, we cannot talk about audiences but rather about participatory communities. Today, the media—and especially television—build audience loyalty through strategies based on formats that call for participation (“Comment live on …”, “Vote!”, “See us on …”, “Watch the replay”, etc.). The forms and formats of audience participation in media programs have always existed (viewer and listener participation, namely by phone). What is new is that the channels and producers have now made participation a key component in their production (Thornborrow 2015). The participation of “ordinary people” in particular is now commonplace in many types of media, to which several chapters of this book can attest. In the case of television, two factors partly explain this shift. First, there has been an explosion of reality television (Nadaud-Albertini 2013) and lifestyle and dating shows (Mehl 1996) that present some or all of the intimate lives of those on the show. Second, a system based on interactions between “traditional” media and digital platforms has developed, such as social TV.3 However, it should be noted that since its inception, French television has always attempted to get to know its audiences while tightly controlling their participation. In the 1950s, the leaders of Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF, a former French national public broadcasting channel, which enjoyed a monopoly4) considered the public to be a means to achieve political unification and cultural democratization as well as to 4 C. SÉGUR educate the masses (see Ségur 2019). RTF surveyed and consulted its viewers through a customer relations department (“Service des relations avec les auditeurs et les spectateurs”), which was tasked with promoting and rating the organization (see p. 208 in Bourdon 2011). Information about what television viewers thought was gathered through a few sporadic surveys (Méadel 2010),5 letters received by the television channel and its hosts (Poels 2015) and what viewers said on air. For example, programs such as Jeux de société (1963), which portrayed “real life” situations in a fictional way, were interspersed with interviews with viewers commenting on what they saw. Although putting television viewers on air—through interviews in the street designed to get their opinions of an event, person or even the media—was an initial and regular form of participation (Jost 1999), new formats followed. In particular, the television game shows of the 1960s and 1970s sought to capture television viewers’ visual attention, often by giving them a mystery to solve (Leveneur 2006). In the 1980s and 1990s, hosts of television programs began asking audiences to participate in the programs themselves, by offering their opinions, showing their emotions and being involved through a “compassionate pact” (Mehl 1996). Mediation services also emerged in the late 1990s, with their official role being to act as “interlocutor and interpreter of the public” for the channels (Goulet 2004). A more recent practice is to ask the public to interact during a program—reality television programs are an emblematic example of this—by voting (via texting on mobile phones) for one of the candidates or sending in a question (via Twitter) for a guest on the show. Some believe it is the development of social TV that has enabled television viewers to participate in programs, through “the creation of ‘interactive television’, which offers more possibilities to participate beyond the imaginary interactions written into the scripts of television game shows or the reactions of studio audiences. Interactive voting, which is entertaining, collective and unifying, makes use of multiple communication options (phone, texting, Internet) and brings the fantasy of modern mass media to life because it has enabled large-scale participation” (see p. 30 in Pereny and Amato 2011). However, the participatory turn leads us to consider at least three issues. First, shall we really consider audiences’ feedback as participation? Are the multiple communication options linked to the development of transmedia experiences proposed to audiences an achieve form of media participation? Referring to the distinction made by Nico Carpentier (2016) between access, interaction and participation, we wonder if 1 FRENCH PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA, PARTICIPATION AND AUDIENCES… 5

contemporary media participatory formats enhance interactions between members of online communities rather than interactions between media producers and audiences. Devices such as vote, call for SMS and Tweets, rendez vous on digital social networks can be considered more as parts of audience loyalty strategies rather than participation. But people tend to appropriate for themselves the forums provided by media. That leads us to consider participation that takes place through media and digital social networks rather than participation in, as suggested by Nico Carpentier (2019). Public opinion may emerge through discussions and activities held on Internet forums (as researchers have observed it here, see Part II). Then, the “invitation to participate” (Rouzé 2017) is now an integral part not only of media discourse but also of the worlds of business, politics and associations. It is time to revive participation to fight against society’s dysfunctions, but individuals have to agree to participation instead of being enjoined to participate, says philosopher Joëlle Zask (2011). Participation is synonymous with equality, solidarity, democracy and digital technologies because many participatory media rely on crowdsourcing- and crowdfunding-type platforms. However, there are also numerous pitfalls when it comes to this participatory ideal, such as audience instrumentalization. Peter Dahlgren (2012) emphasizes the overlapping of social and media worlds as well as the ambivalence embodied by Internet with respect to the increasing participation of citizens. One point of ambivalence regards the sharing and broadcasting of opinions: the appropriation of digital public spaces by individuals makes social interaction easier, but this interaction tends to occur within micro-spaces (“solo sphere”), which can be described as isolated opinion enclaves. What effect does this have at the media industry level? Is the increased visibility of viewers’ voices an illusion of democracy? At a time when there are increasing calls for participation, the purpose of participation should be considered. Does “participate” mean “become a public”? The idea that convergence enables modes of reception that are more collective than individualistic must also be tested: what is the effect on viewers’ identities? At last, as we observe a reconfiguration of the relationship between media and audiences, we also observe a reconfiguration between media and citizens. Media have always been considered as playing a political part through the mediatization process: they make actors and actions visible and analyze them, and they provide forums for debate. Most of the times, explains Peter Dahlgren (2009, 131), citizens are not presented as political actors on television news. They are interviewed “in the street” to express 6 C. SÉGUR emotional reactions on events, to comment on situations but not to offer political proposals: “The portrait of citizens that emerges here is largely in keeping with elite theories of democracy, where citizens respond and follow, but they do not initiate and participate”. Let us remind everyone that France has a long tradition of audience participation in political programs on television. Some authors in this volume have studied how ordinary citizens are presented and represented in television French political programs, in particular during the 2007 presidential campaigns (Chaps. 3 and 4) as no fewer than four analogue channels simultaneously used participation of members of the public as a key feature of the program format (Perry 2008). Sometimes the process used by producers switches from instrumentalization to peoplization. Other times, and not only in France, they create ideal type of publics: in the case of participation of listeners in a US radio talk show, Sébastien Mort (Chap. 2) comes to consider the media show’s apparatus as a simulacrum of democracy. Thus the question about whether media support or hinder democracy tends to be replaced by the issue: how media may impact on citizen’s participation and the modes of engagement, as new forms of political participation arise? And what are the effects of technical convergence on public sphere? The reappropriation of a kind of democratic process by citizens, as is observed by Smaïn Laacher and Cédric Terzi in the case of the Tunisian revolution (Chap. 9), sets some signals to better understand contemporary processes such as becoming public.

French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences The aim of this book is to contribute to a theoretical assessment of these issues, based on empirical case studies and on construction of a public, the participation of audiences in the media system and the types of experience individuals have. There have been numerous scientific publications in English on issues of audience participation and media in recent years (Butsch and Livingstone 2014; Hodkinson 2017; Nightingale 2011; Ruddock 2015; Thornborrow 2015; Turner and Tay 2009; see also Participations. Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, which is special ized in this field of research). There has also been more research in the French-speaking world on these issues (Châteauvert and Delavaud 2016; Gimello-Mesplomb and Vilatte 2015; Jost 2014; Kredens and Rio 2015; 1 FRENCH PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA, PARTICIPATION AND AUDIENCES… 7

Olivesi and Hubé 2016; Soulez and Kitsopanidou 2015). However, there is still not enough scientific dialogue between French-speaking and English-speaking researchers with regard to these internationally relevant issues. This is why the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM) decided to support and fund several editorial projects to translate French- speaking research. While publications in English by French authors remain rare, there is shared, growing and converging international interest in participation and media issues. This book aims to outline a distinctly French approach to the current debate on audience research. Three aspects can characterize this approach in particular. The first way in which this book contributes is through its appraisal of real-world practices, that is, what audiences actually do in new participatory media spaces. People appropriate spaces that appear to be intended for participation, such as online forums and social media sites, through such practices as “lurking”. More broadly speaking, the variety of emerging practices gives rise to a number of questions regarding both public figures and the idea of public space, which has thus been reexamined. Individuals who are part of a group are no longer seeking to exchange rational arguments but rather to be reassured regarding a lifestyle choice or, in other cases, to be seen and acknowledged. Next, the focus is on the collective product of audience participation. Speech is an element that contributes to making audiences visible. English- speaking researchers have studied the types of mediation that lead to this transition from private to public spheres (Livingstone 2005). French- speaking researchers, on the other hand, have concentrated on observing and understanding the processes by which groups are created. The groups are seen as the product of social processes that encompass identity, social, territorial and other factors. The reference here is to the work of the sociologist Norbert Elias. Elias (see p. 52 in Elias 1991) explains that each human group is functionally interdependent: every human group has interlinking ties and relationships that create a sort of “invisible order”. “This is the way in which all individuals are obliged to act. They are obliged by the fact that they live in a relationship of constant functional and reciprocal dependence with other individuals”. Here, the researchers aim to understand the complexity of the connections that support group formation. Media practices are considered through the role they play in individual socialization. The media experience is not meaningful solely because of a reaction to a media, transmedia or social media system, but 8 C. SÉGUR becomes significant when it interacts with the system, which is to say when the group appropriates the system. Finally, the study of ordinary participation in the media is brought to the fore. Researchers agree that ordinary speech has become a common practice, not only in radio and television but also on social media sites (online forums, Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts). This has led English-speaking researchers to examine the meaning of “ordinariness” with regard to identities and performances (Thornborrow 2015). In France, it is the instrumentalization of ordinary speech that is criticized. Indeed, one of this book’s key interests lies in its development of a critical approach to participatory systems: the authors reveal the instrumentalization of ordinary people and their words. It is about the mythologizing of ordinary participation, which characterizes both the Internet and traditional media (e.g., with an overrepresentation of certain categories of individuals to the detriment of others).

How This Book Is Structured We selected contributions produced as part of CREM’s scientific program (described above) that, published together, would further consideration of issues on media, participation and audiences. The authors here use approaches from various fields and schools of thought: social anthropology, media studies, pragmatism, and information and communication sciences. These texts have already undergone peer review for publication in French6: they are excerpted from three collective works and one journal published between 2015 and 2018.7 They examine case studies based on a variety of audiences and media systems to bring the key media participation practices up to date. The contributions are divided into two sections: in the first, the authors explore, often critically, the types of participatory media systems and their aims; in the second, the focus is on the participatory performances of audiences in the public media space.

Part I. Participatory Devices The first section deals with mechanisms that enable listeners and television viewers to call in and participate in radio programs. The authors examine the methods, effects and aims of audience participation in different media (radio, television and websites). The observation is conclusive: the participation of individuals is staged and limited by a series of elements that are 1 FRENCH PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA, PARTICIPATION AND AUDIENCES… 9 inherent to the program’s script; it is also limited by a phenomenon of self-censure that mainly affects the most disadvantaged socio-professional categories. This first section opens with a study of a media format that was somewhat of a precursor and mostly emblematic of the staging of audience participation in the media: radio talk shows in the United States, and more specifically partisan political talk radio (here, conservative, with the example of the Rush Limbaugh Show). The aim of this type of program is clear: to give audiences a voice. Talk show success (or lack thereof) in programming is strongly linked to the host’s ability to prompt large numbers of calls from listeners. However, Sébastien Mort (Chap. 2) reveals the ambivalence of the audience status in American conservative talk radio shows: while the host makes explicit and numerous requests to listeners to participate in the program, the latter are extremely constrained and not allowed to express themselves freely. This process contributes to creating an ideological and political audience persona for this type of program. This is far from the “critical television viewer” shown on the English- language televised shows studied in the late 1980s by Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt (1994). The instrumentalization by talk show hosts is analyzed from the perspective of the “demotic turn” (Turner 2010), a theory which states that “ordinary people who appear in the media are not individuals whose own and genuine identity is made visible to the public, but rather fictional individuals whose identity is fabricated”. Beyond the restrictions that are specific to speaking on the radio (limited speaking time, screening process, topic related to current events and/or that day’s chosen theme), the listener’s access to the public airways is subject to a violation of the rules of conversation, which the author explains is enabled by the imbalance between the host’s and listener’s positions. Audience participation is screened—this is the operator’s role—and instrumentalized in such a way so as to “showcase” and legitimize the host and his or her ideology. Television also gives ordinary people a voice in certain ways, through a hybridized commercial and citizenship approach. Sheila Perry (Chap. 3) and Stéphanie Kunert, Frédéric Lambert and Beatriz Sanchez (Chap. 4) examine audience participation at a critical moment in a nation’s democratic life: presidential elections. Perry turns her attention to the political shows on TF1, a historic private French television channel that enjoys top audience ratings. The shows she studies brought in “real people” during two election campaigns (2007 and 2012). The author shows how factors such as participant selection or the staging on the shows lead to a 10 C. SÉGUR

mythologization of ordinary participation. By analyzing the discursive strategies adopted by the participants (adapting to the requirements of a televised program), she shows the extent to which they incorporate television standards, and as such, the power of the media. Kunert, Lambert and Sanchez made a comparative analysis of show content from two channels on election night: the private terrestrial channel TF1 and the non-stop news network BFMTV. They analyzed the shows as arenas of public debate that allow regular citizens to be represented. Here, the issue is not the physical participation of viewers on the show, but rather groups of individuals (activists at campaign headquarters, a crowd in the street, etc.) who gather little by little as the announcement of the results nears. In spite of themselves, they participate in the show: regular people are staged, in all their sociocultural and generational diversity. In any event, efforts to offer on-screen representations of the public are a result of three closely related imperatives:

• Maximizing the audience, through a supposed mirror effect: making television viewers feel as though they are represented. • Supporting the democratic ideal by staging the people’s participation in politics. • Rising to the occasion of a historic moment: by showing the crowds and their diversity, the channel prides itself on witnessing history in the making, as reflection of the people’s will.

With regard to participation and media, the myth of an Internet that supports democratic debate continues to be a current topic (see Flichy 2008). In Chap. 5, Sébastien Rouquette ponders whether it is easier to have a voice on the Internet compared to traditional media. In particular, he looks at the differences between socio-professional categories. The most disadvantaged tend to have restricted and constrained access to television. In televised debate shows, independent professionals, managers and professionals with advanced degrees (especially social “engineers”) have easier access, namely because they embody specialized know-how and because many of them represent an activist association. Similarly, certain socio-professional categories are as overrepresented on the Internet as on television. Factors such as certain abilities and psychosocial skills facili- tate participation in the public sphere on websites: a predilection for information and writing, knowing how to answer a journalist’s questions as well as feeling legitimate enough to participate in public debate. 1 FRENCH PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA, PARTICIPATION AND AUDIENCES… 11

Part II. Audiences and the Public Sphere It is clear that certain media programs are built around public participation. This is increasingly occurring through convergence between traditional media content and socio-digital applications. However, audiences are able to adopt some or all of the participatory systems offered to them. Several cases are examined in the second section, which show the variety and diversity of participatory performances in the public media space and beyond. Before delving into empirical case studies, this section begins with an epistemological consideration of the effects that these participatory practices have on the ways audiences are defined and represented, particularly by the researchers who study them. Céline Ségur (Chap. 6) explains that since the 1990s in France, the development of a “sociology of audiences” has defined media reception, especially televised, based on the concepts of “experience” and “performance” (Dayan 2005): television audiences are motivated by a principle of visibility and an experience during which they stage themselves. The transmedia experiences offered today by television channels (content available on other screens at later times, comments on ad hoc social media networks such as Twitter, etc.) appear to create a favorable environment for studying the public experiences of highly participative television viewers. However, while these systems appear to allow Internet viewers to interact with the program host, they do not always enable interactions among “participants”. And yet, the interactions among participants in a digital system can form the basis of a public participatory experience. This is what Emmanuelle Simon observed with the public experience of African women discussing assisted reproductive technology on online discussion forums. The author observed the creation of a group based on an identity (that of patient, resulting from a socialization ritual: the codified presentation of oneself before any participation in the discussion) and a common goal (becoming pregnant), within a cultural context where this goal is experienced as a social necessity. However, the purpose of the observed discussion forum is not to produce a rational exchange of arguments according to Habermas’s definition of the public space 1962( ): the participants are above all looking for reassurance regarding the reliability of a biomedical protocol. Here, a group is formed by those wishing to remain invisible: the participants emphasize the benefits of anonymity that characterizes online discussions. This is why participation is not always visible. In Chap. 8, Julien Falgas also demonstrates this in another context, with his study of fan “lurking”. 12 C. SÉGUR

This leads him to put forward an expanded definition of fan posturing (see also Segré 2017). Simply looking at the digital traces of a community is, in this situation, considered as participating in the community. The enthusiastic viewer is not necessarily an active participant. Media practices play a role in the socialization process of individuals. This has been demonstrated in reception studies since the 1990s (see Pasquier 1999). This led the author to expand the concept of participatory practice to other types of uses than just digital contribution. Having conversations online and/or outside the media space is one example. The simple consumption of the media product (in this instance a digital comic) is considered by some as participation which makes them fans. Self-recognition in the participatory traces of other individuals also contributes to considering oneself as a member of the group: “The mirror offered by the public expression of their peers comes into play in their ability to see themselves as an audience” (pp. 156–157). Finally, in Chap. 9, Smaïn Laacher and Cédric Terzi adopted an empirical approach when looking at the emergence of a Tunisian public at a particular moment in the country’s history: the political and cultural revolution of 2010–2011. In other words, they analyzed the public experience under exceptional circumstances characterized by instability and uncertainty. These historical events create a potential for publicization reflected in several ways: the appropriation of a collective identity (of the Tunisian people); the urban space in which to become visible; the many collective initiatives that were more or less undertaken; the expression and mobilization on social media. What the Tunisian revolution shows is that the collective identify created in this way is threatened by its own conditions of emergence, that is, the development of a public life that becomes the theater where divergent opinions clash, which interferes with the “rhetoric of the united people”.

Notes 1. In particular, this resulted in an interdisciplinary project called Publictionnaire, an online “Encyclopaedic and critical dictionary of audiences” (access: http://publictionnaire.huma-num.fr). To date, it has more than 250 entries written by more than 150 contributors; additional terms will be added following current and future research. 2. Translation by the authors (as for all French quotes in the book). 1 FRENCH PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA, PARTICIPATION AND AUDIENCES… 13

3. In France, “the term ‘social TV’ is used to describe technologies that enhance content and interaction between viewers and the content they are watching or want to watch and between viewers themselves regarding this content” (CSA, 2013, Première approche de la télévision sociale [First approach to social television]. Access: http://www.csa.fr/Etudes-et- publications/Les-etudes-thematiques-et-les-etudes-d-impact/Les-etudes- du-CSA/Premiere-approche-de-la-television-sociale. Accessed 27 April 2018). It mainly applies to technologies that allow viewers to react to a television program (before, during and/or after broadcast) using digital means: Twitter feed, contests and so on. The aim is to enhance the television viewer’s experience. 4. France’s second and third television channels were created in 1964 and 1971, respectively. 5. Audience measurement as those common today (in particular with the use of audimeters) are conducted in France since the 1980s. Before that, surveys about viewing practices and satisfaction were held by the Service de relation avec les téléspectateurs, then the Centre d’étude de l’opinion. 6. At times, the authors had to update certain elements of their work due to political and/or media changes with regard to the analyzed situations. Most often, a productive dialogue ensued between the translators and the authors, which helped refine their stances. We would like to thank all those who contributed to this project. 7. Dakhlia J., dir. 2015, À la recherche des publics populaires (1). Faire peuple, Nancy, Éditions universitaires de Lorraine, série « Actes », 26, 250 p.; Dakhlia J., Le Nozach D., Ségur C., dirs, 2016, À la recherche des publics populaires (2). Être peuple, Nancy, Éditions universitaires de Lorraine, série « Actes », 33, 218 p.; Ballarini L., Ségur C., 2018, Devenir public. Modalités et enjeux, Éd. Mare & Martin, collection « MediaCritic », 191 p.; Journal Études de communication, livraison 47 published in 2016, Université Lille 3.

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Carpentier, N. (2019, September 12–13). Participation as Ethical: An Argument for the Relevance of Participation Beyond the Bad/Dark Participation Concept. International Symposium La participation dans un monde de communication (LASCO–PreCOM), Bruxelles. Cefaï, D., & Pasquier, D. (Eds.). (2003). Les sens du public. Publics politiques, publics médiatiques. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Châteauvert, J., & Delavaud, G. (Eds.). (2016). D’un écran à l’autre, les mutations du spectateur. Paris: L’Harmattan. Dahlgren, P. (2009). Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dahlgren, P. (2012). Web et participation politique: quelles promesses et quels pièges? (Translated from English by J.-F. Nominé & R. Dickinson). Questions de communication, 21, 13–24. Dakhlia, J., Le Nozach, D., & Ségur, C. (Eds.). (2016). À la recherche des publics populaires (2). Être peuple. Nancy: Éditions universitaires de Lorraine. Dayan, D. (2005). Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists: Genealogy, Obstetrics, Audiences & Public. In S. Livingstone (Ed.), Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere (pp. 43–76). Bristol: Intellect. Dewey, J. (1927). The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Elias, N. (1991). La société des individus. Paris: Fayard. Flichy, P. (2008, January 14). Internet, un outil de la démocratie? La vie des idées. Retrieved February 7, 2019, from https://laviedesidees.fr/Internet-un-outil- de-la-democratie.html. Gimello-Mesplomb, F., & Vilatte, J.-C. (Eds.). (2015). Les recherches sur les publics en sciences de l’information et de la communication. Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication, 7. https://doi.org/10.4000/ rfsic.1466. Goulet, V. (2004). Le médiateur de la rédaction de France 2. L’institutionnalisation d’un public idéal. Questions de communication, 5, 281–299. Habermas, J. (1962 [1993]). L’Espace public. Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise (Translated from German by M. B. de Launay). Paris: Payot. Hodkinson, P. (2017). Media, Culture and Society. London: Sage Publications. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jost, F. (1999). Introduction à l’analyse de la television. Paris: Éd. Ellipses. Jost, Fr. (Ed.) (2014). La télévision et après: vers le transmédia. Télévision, 5. Kredens, E., & Rio, F. (Eds.). (2015). Pratiques télévisuelles à l’ère du numérique. Études de communication, 44, 9–130. Leveneur, L. (2006). Du télé-viseur au téléspectateur. Quand la télévision joue avec ceux qui la regardent. Questions de communication, 10, 333–348. 1 FRENCH PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA, PARTICIPATION AND AUDIENCES… 15

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Participatory Formats CHAPTER 2

Harnessing the Potential of the “Demotic Turn” to Authoritarian Ends: Caller Participation and Weaponized Communication on US Conservative Talk Radio Programs

Sébastien Mort

Introduction Since he launched his presidential campaign in June 2015, Donald J. Trump has taken an authoritarian approach to power both as a candidate and as president (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2019: 65–67). Following the

French Original Publication: Le statut du public dans le dispositif des talk-shows radiophoniques conservateurs aux États-Unis. In L. Ballarini & C. Ségur (Eds.) (2018). Devenir public. Modalités et enjeux, Paris: Mare & Martin. Translation: Teri Jones-Villeneuve

S. Mort (*) Centre de Recherche sur les Médiations (CREM), Université de Lorraine, Metz, France Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones (LARCA), Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]

“authoritarian playbook” (Ben Ghiat 2017), Trump utilizes what rhetorical scholar Jennifer Mercieca defines as “weaponized communication” (Mercieca 2019). A rhetorical approach typical of authoritarians, weaponized communication is “the strategic use of communication as an instrumental tool and as an aggressive means to gain compliance and avoid accountability” (p. 266). Contrary to “instrumental communication”, which mobilizes the use of rhetoric to achieve persuasion and requires consent, “weaponized communication” is designed to enable “dangerous demagogues” to force compliance among the audience and exempt them from responding for what they say and do—as such, it represents a form of violence (p. 270). This is not unprecedented. Through his embrace of authoritarian discourse, Trump makes the most of a long-standing discursive tradition established by conservative role players writ large, particularly by nationally syndicated conservative talk radio (CTR) hosts. Like authoritarian leaders, CTR hosts conceive of the social order as precarious and under threat from dangerous outgroups who jeopardize “time-honored” normative values (Hetherington and Weiler 2009: 4) with the complicity of a failing establishment, which in turn warrants stricter responses such as the use of force or the sacrifice of freedom for safety. They operate by creating an enemy, indicting media (Bourgault 2015) and political establishments, and marginalizing any individual or group deemed to be deviant from normative values (Hetherington and Weiler 2009: 4). They display proclivities for personalized power (Von Soest and Grauvogel 2017), particularly when it is exerted by a providential figure, whether real or aspirational. While the authoritarianism of CTR programs is expressed discursively, it is also reflected in the hosts’ approach to media practice and the specificity of the shows’ apparatus, and within it, the status of the audience such as it is embodied by callers. In this chapter, I analyze how the affordances of CTR shows’ apparatus enable the hosts of nationally syndicated CTR programs to instrumentalize audience participation to avoid accountability as part of their strategic use of “weaponized communication”.

Literature Review CTR programs have garnered a great deal of scholarly attention. Stephen Earl Bennett has examined the factors predicting exposure to radio talk shows (Bennett 2002a) and analyzed the impact of the genre on listeners’ knowledge of public affairs (Bennett 2002b). Other scholars have explored 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 21 the influence of CTR on listeners’ leanings and opinions, as well as on the importance they place on certain basic issues, focusing, for instance, on the correlation between how frequently certain topics are covered and listeners’ views on these issues (Barker 1998a). Yet others have addressed CTR’s influence on the way listeners view government and democratic institutions (Hollander 1996; Pfau et al. 1998) and the president (Holbert 2004), and attended to the ways in which listening to CTR shapes listeners’ basic views (Cappella 1989), particularly the outcome of presidential elections (Cappella and Hall 2002), and how it affects interpersonal trust (Lee et al. 2003). Researchers have also studied how listening to CTR influences political participation, revealing, for instance, that without Limbaugh, Republicans would not have secured a victory of such magni- tude in the 1994 midterm elections: if Limbaugh listeners had divided their votes between Democrats and Republicans in the same way as non- listeners, Ann Richards would have been reelected Governor of Texas instead of George W. Bush (Bolce et al. 1996: 461). Talk radio has also been shown to exert influence specifically during primary elections (Jones 1998), and to increase conservative and moderate listeners’ political effi- cacy while producing a dissuasive effect on more liberal listeners (Barker 1998b). More recently, scientific interest in CTR has been revived following the 2012 controversy sparked by Limbaugh’s derogatory comments about law student Sandra Fluke, who, during a congressional testimony, advocated mandated insurance coverage of contraceptives. Following a symposium on the controversy, the Journal of Radio and Audio Media published a series of articles analyzing the persuasive attacks used against Limbaugh in the wake of the incident (Legge et al. 2012), how audiences used social media to discuss the controversy (Warner et al. 2012), the strategies Limbaugh unfurled to repair his image (Bentley 2012; McGuire 2012; Furgerson and Benoit 2013), and his appropriation of the rhetoric of the disenfranchised (Butler et al. 2012). Surprisingly, the topic of callers has only recently been addressed and to a much smaller extent. The first caller-specific study examinedElection Call, a radio show broadcast by the BBC during the two weeks before the 2001 UK general election (Ross 2004). In France, Christophe Deleu conducted a comprehensive, longitudinal study on audience participation in French radio programs (Deleu 2006). In his comparative analysis of talk radio conversations aired on US, British, and Israeli commercial and public radio stations, Gonen Dori-Hacohen (2012a) argues for two categories of talk radio formats: the “talk-back” format, which defines the host as 22 S. MORT

“star” and in which conversations are only meant to reinforce this position, and the “dial-in” format, which puts the focus on the callers. Focusing more specifically on Israel talk radio and US conservative talk radio, Dori- Hacohen has refined our understanding of “callers” by proposing a typology that considers the different nuances in the way callers interact with the host, namely, “standard”, “anonymous”, “regular”, “returning”, and “first-time” callers (Dori-Hacohen2012b ). Regarding The Rush Limbaugh Show specifically, Dori-Hacohen argues that the sole purpose of the interaction between host and caller is to allow the latter “to achieve fandom”, namely, to establish their credentials in the eyes of the host and the public, thereby legitimating their on-air contribution in the process (Dori- Hacohen 2013). Finally, our critical analysis of women audience members’ participation in CTR programs reveals differences between The Rush Limbaugh Show and The Laura Ingraham Show in the way women are treated. It finds that “Limbaugh invites women’s participation mostly to reinforce the status quo of gender relationships [whereas] Ingraham reca- librates gender relationships in a way that is as favorable to women as it is to men” (Mort 2015: 29).

Conservative Talk Radio Audiences and Their Discursive Construction Audience participation is a standard feature of CTR shows. The leading format among non-musical radio programs (Nielsen Company 2017: 11), CTR provides listeners with a daily opportunity to speak on air. As a radio genre that claims to be participatory, CTR is intended to be a forum where listeners can engage in conversation with the host. In this respect, hosts regularly encourage listeners to call in and, to that effect, regularly remind them of the show’s phone number (“We’re here, we’re glad you’re with us right here, our toll-free telephone number: 800-941-SEAN, if you wanna be part of the program […]” The Sean Hannity Show, 12/04/2010). When CTR programs began to be syndicated nationally in the late 1980s, they were the only conservative media programs aimed at the general public. CTR thus afforded possibilities for the enfranchisement of conservative citizens by representing their opinions in a media environment that they perceived to be dominated by liberalism. Kansas, Missouri, KMBZ’s termination of its contract with Rush Limbaugh in 1984 for lack of a 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 23

sufficient number of callers (Brock 2004: 263) testifies to the importance of on-air conversations between hosts and callers as a component of the show’s apparatus. This study starts from Shaun Moores’s contention that “there is no stable entity which we can isolate and identify as the media audience, no single object that is unproblematically ‘there’ for us to observe and analyse” (Moores 2000: 1–2). I therefore posit that the individuals who are offered an opportunity to speak on air do not form a clearly delineated, homogeneous, and internally consistent group, building on John Hartley’s argument that audiences are in fact constructed in discourse: “in all cases the product is a fiction that serves the needs of the […] institution. In no case is the audience ‘real’, or external to its discursive construction. There is no ‘actual’ audience that lies beyond its production as a category, which is merely to say that audiences are only ever encountered per se as representations” (Hartley 1987: 5). Relying on that premise, I approach audiences who speak on CTR programs as the product of the show’s apparatus, which, owing to its specific nature—time constraints and limiting conversations notwithstanding—in and of itself precludes the possibility of an authentic host-caller interaction. Central to the broader strategy deployed by the commercial role players that control the apparatus—the producers and the syndication network—is a representation of callers that is consistent with Graeme Turner’s “demotic turn”. Set forth in Ordinary People and the Media (2010), the demotic turn refers to the significant change in the relationship between the media and ordinary people who appear in the media: “I coined the term ‘the demotic turn’ as a preferred means of referring to the increasing visibility of the ‘ordinary people’ as they have turned themselves into media content through celebrity culture, reality TV, DIY websites, talk radio and the like” (Turner 2010: 2). Turner defends the idea that the media have gradually shifted from mediating the identity of different socioeconomic and cultural groups in Western societies to producing this identity. According to the theory of the demotic turn, ordinary people who appear in the media are not individuals whose own and genuine identity is made visible to the public, but rather fictional individuals whose identity is fabricated. As such, Turner demonstrates that far from serving a democratic purpose, the participation of ordinary people in the media is instrumentalized to serve strategic ends. 24 S. MORT

Using primarily episodes of The Rush Limbaugh Show aired between 1994 and 2010—two years when Republicans overthrew a Democratic majority in the House—and of The Laura Ingraham Show, The Sean Hannity Show and The Savage Nation aired in 2010, I argue that, as they open the airwaves to callers, CTR hosts strategically harness the authoritarian potential of their shows’ apparatus in order to use audience participation “demotically” and create the illusion of democratic dialogue, while in fact staging compliance to evade accountability. After offering a definition of the apparatus of CTR programs, I analyze how it operates—first institu- tionally, then discursively—to constrain on-air conversations and construct the representation of the audience, which I examine in the last part, focusing on the role of such representation within the overall strategy of CTR.

The Institutional Edifice of Conservative Talk Radio’s Apparatus

Definition(s): The Apparatus as Instrument of Power CTR mainly achieves its effectiveness and potential for influence through the way in which it uses the tangible and symbolic elements of its apparatus, over which the host maintains hegemonic control. Because it establishes modes of engagement that greatly restrict what callers can say, the apparatus plays a crucial role in their access to the airwaves. The concept of apparatus as described by Michel Foucault in an interview published in 1977 in the journal Ornicar is the starting point for this analysis: “What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid” (Foucault and Colin 1980: 194). Foucault’s postu- late includes two primarily relevant principles. First, the elements that make up the apparatus are “heterogeneous” and can be part of the apparatus in an implicit way, without being manifestly identifiable—as such, the apparatus is more than a simple configuration of material and technological elements. Second, as these diverse elements can be either tangible or intangible—part of both “the said” and “the unsaid”—the apparatus ties together what pertains to the discursive and what pertains to the institutional, two dimensions essential to the way CTR operates. Elaborating on Foucault, Daniel Peraya (1999: 153) makes the definition operational for the analysis of media apparatuses: “An apparatus is a 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 25 forum, a social venue for interaction and cooperation, having its own intentions, physical and symbolic operating processes, and modes of interaction. The economy of an apparatus—its operation—determined by the intentions, is based on the structured organization of physical, technological, symbolic and interpersonal resources that, based on their own characteristics, model the subjects’ social, cognitive and communicative behaviors and actions (emotional and relational).” First, the apparatus includes the technological elements necessary for it to operate logistically (“its material operation”; “the structured organization of physical and technological resources”), a key aspect of CTR as technical medium. Second, as a “social venue for interaction and cooperation”, the apparatus appears as a virtual space that enables individuals to interact. Finally, the author highlights the apparatus’s strategic design by emphasizing that the interaction of its different elements is meant to influence behavior—as such, it is an instrument of power. On that very point, Isabelle Gavillet (2010: 11) emphasizes that “Foucault focuses in particular on the chiefly strategic nature of the apparatus, as a rational and con- certed manipulation or intervention within a power relationship, i.e. as power plays related to types of knowledge”. She validates Peraya’s propo- sition by highlighting the crucial importance of the principle of intention- ality inherent to the concept. In light of these definitions, I consider the way in which the “heterogeneous ensemble” of institutional, human, and discursive components interact to form the CTR apparatus, showing how its characteristics map onto the defining properties of authoritarianism, with a view to examine how they constrain audience participation in a way that is by essence undemocratic.

Conservative Talk Radio Within the News Media Ecosystem: From Alternative to Hegemonic Niche Media From an institutional standpoint, the status of CTR within the news media ecosystem—defined by its relationship to the mainstream news media— factors significantly in caller participation. When it was syndicated nationally in 1988, its status was that of “alternative media”, which the existing literature defines as highly diverse media formats and genres (Atton 2004: ix) dedicated to expressing viewpoints that are not generally covered by the mainstream media, and which gives minority groups a certain visibility (Frau-Meigs 2006: 70). Their purpose is to question the established power structures, including media power, to enable social change (Couldry and 26 S. MORT

Curran 2003: 7). To this end, alternative media make use of technological innovation (Atton 2002: 27). Finally, as drivers of social change (Haas 2004: 116), they are very sensitive to the current political, economic, social, and cultural contexts (Coyer et al. 2007: 11). In 1988, CTR displayed several of these characteristics. Through its role as promoter of the conservative ideology and in response to what it considered to be liberal bias, it offered a platform where citizens could express political views that were not represented in the mainstream news media. In that respect, the launch of The Rush Limbaugh Show nationally in August 1988 was an unprecedented media phenomenon—it was the first attempt at airing a partisan program on a mainstream medium at a time when conservatism was represented only by newspapers with low print runs. Whereas in 1987 the New York Times and the Washington Post boasted a daily circulation of 1,022,899 and 761,142, respectively, the Washington Times had a print run of only 91,508 (Editor & Publisher Annual Yearbook, 1988); political magazines such as the National Review attracted a sizable, but educated, conservative. It was also the first time that a political radio show combined a conservative viewpoint with entertainment, whereas traditionally (with the exception of Ronald Reagan), conservative personalities were seen as off-putting and unlikeable. As such, CTR gave conservative citizens increased and unprecedented mainstream visibility. Second, CTR programs fundamentally challenged political, cultural, and media power structures. Not only did they hold the Republican Party to the standards of the conservative orthodoxy, but because they ultimately sought to secure conservative majorities in every branch of government, they decisively contributed to the party’s success in forcing Democrats to loosen their grip over institutions, particularly in Congress, in the wake of their landslide victory in the 1994 midterm elections. In line with the show’s status as infotainment media, CTR hosts also deployed discursive and stylistic strategies that put mainstream journalism’s norms and practices to the test—the hosts’ uncompromising conservative stance, their grandiose and hyperbolic style, and the especially abrasive rhetoric they used to discuss news and current affairs combined to define singular and unique aesthetics (Lattin 2000) that clashed with the objectivity, neu- trality, and civility of 1990s’ mainstream journalists. However, with the number of stations airing The Rush Limbaugh Show rising from 56 in 1988 to more than 600 in 1994 and its minor though decisive effect on the midterm Republican landslide victory (Bolce et al. 1996), CTR came to occupy a prominent position in the American news media ecosystem as early as the mid-1990s, becoming the dominant 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 27

category of all non-musical talk radio formats (Radio Dimensions 2005: 14), a position that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 reinforced as it broadened the show’s distribution throughout the territory by dramati- cally loosening the rules of radio ownership and licensing (Sterling 2004: 1382–1384). While Limbaugh remained the undisputed leader of the genre, by the early 2000s, the format of his show served as a model for emerging hosts like Hannity, Ingraham and Savage, whose programs ranked just behind Limbaugh’s.1 During the same period, CTR also ceased to be the only conservative medium with such a large audience, as its golden age coincided more or less with the beginnings of the Fox News network in late 1996 and a moment when newspapers welcomed an increasing number of conservative editorialists among its columns (Alterman 2004: 45–69). Following the expansion of the conservative news media ecology and the naturalization of conservative voices in the mainstream press, CTR lost its status as alternative media. CTR’s dominance over non-musical radio formats and shift in status is in large part the result of the control that national syndication networks exert over the sector. As these networks make the mass diffusion of the message possible throughout the entire territory, while ensuring the programs’ financial profitability, they are a central component of CTR programs’ apparatus. These networks have indeed largely benefited from the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which completely reconfigured the radio sector. Until 1996, radio was the electronic media that was the least consolidated, the most locally anchored, and with the lowest advertising rates (Aufderheide 1999: 69). The new legislation helped the sector generate enormous profits by relaxing ownership regulations, which in turn led to massive consolidation, as a single entity could own up to 8 commercial stations within a single radio market of 45 stations or more (Sterling 2004:1383). Around a dozen large corporations now own the 15,514 American radio stations (Radio Advertising Bureau, 2019) and Premiere Networks Inc. (PN) and Talk Radio Network (TRN)—two networks that existed before the 1996 legislation but grew faster after it was enacted—and dominate the syndicated radio sector. While PN syndicates The Rush Limbaugh Show and The Sean Hannity Show, until 2012 TRN distributed The Laura Ingraham Show and The Savage Nation. In 2005, Premiere Networks Inc.’s parent company and the largest syndication network, Clear Channel, owned 1225 stations in 291 markets throughout the country, while Citadel Communication, the third most important network, owned only 219 stations in 46 markets (Radio Financial Databook 2005: 58–59). These networks thus operate in such a way that they have to secure a firm foothold in all radio markets to maintain profitability. 28 S. MORT

The dynamics of syndication contribute to making CTR a hegemonic type of medium both externally and internally. First, because they are aired around the clock and on multiple channels in every market, CTR programs are ubiquitous and constantly available. In addition, such a message resonates with the infinite offer of conservative content relayed by other media such as Fox News and One American News Network, and online conservative publications. Syndication therefore enables CTR to operate symbiotically with other ideologi- cally similar outlets to make the conservative message propagandistic in the way it reaches the individual. This is consistent with Jacques Ellul’s argument that “propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal—the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. Modern propaganda must utilize all of these media” (Ellul 1973: 9). Second, as Dori- Hacohen (2012a: 155) argues, “the ownership of the stations explains the differences in the programs’ formats and agendas”. In other words, the status of CTR as commercial medium both influences the programs’ structure and more specifically determines the status of its callers, as well as the ways in which they are allowed to participate. Because of the increasing financial pressure resulting from the reconfiguration of the sector, hosts have every incentive to saturate the verbal space and inten- sify their rhetoric to maintain an audience that is large enough to attract and retain advertisers. This reinforces the phenomenon of “starification” of CTR as the hosts dominate the show and host-caller conversations are relegated to a secondary, even marginal, status within the programs.

An Authoritarian Apparatus Structured Around the Host’s Hegemonic Persona

The Host as Sole Master of Talk-Back Radio Programs In addition to its highly commercial aspect, CTR displays many characteristics of the “talk-back” format as described by Dori-Hacohen. According to the author, “Talk-backs are centered on the host and his opinions, since the hosts are the anchor of the program’s popularity and commercial abilities […]. Therefore, the names of the programs include the host’s name” 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 29

(Dori-Hacohen 2012a: 155). In CTR programs, hosts speak in the first person and position themselves as the sole master of the apparatus and the program’s content; the very names of the programs immediately link the content to the host. In this respect, CTR is what Deleu defines as a “personalized program” (Deleu 2006: 76). Consistent with the talk-back format, Limbaugh exercises hegemonic control over The Rush Limbaugh Show: “This is also a benevolent dictatorship—I am the dictator. There is no First Amendment here, except for me” (The Rush Limbaugh Show, 18 February 1994, 00:09:47). Limbaugh controls who gets to speak and he alone enjoys freedom of speech, his reference to the First Amendment signaling that he positions himself as the sole judge of the law on his program. In this respect, CTR appears to be an archetype of the talk-back format in that the host’s opinion is content in and of itself, as “the hosts determine the agenda of the programs and talk about various topics, mostly politics, yet the hosts may include other topics in the programs’ agenda” (Dori-Hacohen 2012a: 155). Such a conception of free speech also indicates that the host is fully entitled to monopolize the discussion, which is reflected in Limbaugh’s refusal to include guests on the program and the requirement that, if they want to participate in the show, experts must call in just as any other ordinary person would (The Rush Limbaugh Show, 18/02/1994: 00:09:24). What experts, politicians, or specialists have to say therefore is not held in higher esteem and is treated as an ordinary opinion. As New York Times journalist Lewis Grossberger (1990) sums up, “There are no guests. Limbaugh is his own guest.” As the host determines the agenda, no other interpretation of events than his appears to be allowed: “It’s a program also, I should say, dedicated exclusively to what I think. We don’t sit here trying to learn what anyone else thinks” (The Rush Limbaugh Show, 18/02/1994: 00:11:08). By his own account, Limbaugh is therefore the only legitimate authority when it comes to analyzing current affairs and societal issues. Just as authoritarian heads of state or leaders concentrate and personal- ize political power and undermine the legitimacy of dissenting voices, CTR hosts monopolize discursive power on their shows, where no voice other than the host’s is welcome. This holds true even when guests join the conversation by phone, as is the case on The Laura Ingraham Show and The Sean Hannity Show, because they are invited only to reinforce the host’s point of view, not to have an open debate. For instance, all the guests invited to talk on The Laura Ingraham Show between 12 and 16 April 2010 were prominent conservative figures: Michelle Bachmann 30 S. MORT

(12 April), Grover Norquist (14 April), Rick Santelli (15 April), and Family Research Council’s Cathy Ruse (16 April). Through their complete control over the structure of the show, CTR hosts are thus in a position to strategically create the conditions of unaccountability.

Enemy Formation: The “Liberal Bias” Critique as Legitimization of the Conservative Stance Key to the discursive component of the CTR apparatus and to CTR shows’ authoritarian proclivities is the deployment of partisan discourse. Unlike legacy media—broadcast and cable television, radio, and newspapers of record—which follow the “objectivity norm”, CTR promotes a proud conservative stance. The dominant standard of US journalism, objectivity governs journalists’ work practices, but is also a professional norm designed to legitimize journalism as an occupation in its own right. Journalists’ compliance with the norm is achieved, among others, through a self- reflexive discourse on the practice (Mort 2012: 98); this ultimately ensnares journalists as it makes them susceptible to attacks from conservative politicians and commentators. Such discourse is indeed systematically countered by accusations of bias for the liberal ideology, an intimidation tactic taking the shape of “moralizing editorial pressures” (Frau-Meigs 2006: 78) designed to legitimize the critics’ own ideological bias. The alleged liberal bias of the mainstream news media is a basic theme of talk radio, and pronouncements by Limbaugh and his colleagues on the subject are legion. In 1996, the host famously said: “I’m proud to admit my bias, I’m a conservative. These people won’t even in public admit to this stuff, but I have always said that it is impossible for a thinking caring person to be objective. This is why media bias doesn’t bother me, it is the denial of it that bothers me, it is the denial that they are liberals that has always bothered me” (The Rush Limbaugh Show, 16/04/1996). More than a decade later, CTR’s antimedia rhetoric had become more abrasive, particularly in the spring of 2010 when Tea Party rallies were being held throughout the nation in protest against the fiscal policies of the Obama administration. Following a series of polls conducted by mainstream news media consortia on the predominance of white Americans at those rallies in April 2010, Michael Savage had an on-air meltdown: “the vermin at CNN […] had the nerve to point that most people in the Tea Party are white and middle-class, and that is a crime onto itself. I notice that the vermin on CNN and Rick Sanchez, King of the Worms … King 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 31 of the Worms … notices that they were white as though it was a crime onto itself” (The Savage Nation, 15/04/2010). The spectacle of on-air outrage notwithstanding, CTR’s indictment of the mainstream news media serves an imminently strategic purpose: systematic accusations of liberal bias create a frame that legitimizes both CTR hosts’ partisan treatment of news and current affairs and the representation of conservative viewpoints in the news media ecosystem more generally. Although the bulk of academic literature on the subject finds no conclusive evidence of a slant in mainstream outlets’ treatment of the news (D’Alessio and Allen 2000; Niven 2003; Covert and Wasburn 2007), the idea that the mainstream news media is biased in favor of the liberal persuasion has become an article of faith for CTR hosts (Mort 2012: 105) and conservative role players more broadly. By presenting such a bias as an established fact, CTR hosts create a false equivalency that makes it imperative to rebalance viewpoints for the sake of fairness, as summarized in Limbaugh’s pro- nouncement that “I don’t need to be balanced with equal time, I am equal time!”2 By leveling such accusations, CTR hosts marshal a type of antimedia rhetoric that is typical of authoritarianism in two respects. It aligns with authoritarians’ systematic challenges to the status of mainstream journalists as legitimate participants in the democratic process, which is itself central to their strategy of “sidelining the key players” (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2019: 177). More broadly, it is also consistent with the process of enemy formation that is consubstantial with an authoritarian style of rule, as it enables leaders to solidify the support of their base. Consistent with Gavillet’s contribution to our understanding of the apparatus, marshaling antimedia politics is therefore elemental to CTR’s business operations as it serves the ultimate purpose of disrupting media power structures by coun- tering the domination of legacy news media in setting the agenda. Lastly, such accusations of liberal bias and challenges to objectivity are also relevant to the apparatus internally as they create a significantly narrow discursive framework for callers’ participation. Altogether, support for an ideological movement that saw itself as a minority, the strategic objective of taking over the political majority, the use of aggressive rhetoric to achieve these goals, as well as the personalization of CTR and the host’s total dominance of the apparatus all combine to significantly restrict listeners’ access to the airwaves and constraint callers’ participation and the content of what they say. 32 S. MORT

Marginal Participation and Controlled Interaction

Lesser Importance of Conversations and Restricted Access to the Airwaves In his book Les Anonymes à la radio (Ordinary people on the radio), Deleu (2006: 58) argues for three formulas for participation in such emissions: the “forum formula” (parole forum), the “psychoanalyst’s couch formula” (parole divan), and the “documentary formula” (parole documentaire). Caller participation in CTR seems to reflect the first formula: “Via the telephone, listeners ask questions or give their opinions on a particular subject live on air.”3 This formula sets out a specific role for the listener as “here, listeners [are perceived] as citizens who want their opinion to be recognized by others”4 (ibid.: 60). The programs following the forum formula appear to be designed as spaces where citizens can express a point of view, formulate an opinion, and take part in the debate with the host, or react to something said by other callers. According to this model, CTR can be seen as an instrument of enfranchisement of conservative citizens— or to employ Peraya’s words, a “social venue for interaction and cooperation” with like-minded fellow citizens—who have long felt that their ideas suffered from a lack of visibility in the mainstream news media. As such, it appears as a tool facilitating the access of an underrepresented political minority to representation in the media coverage. However, the relative import, duration, and structure of on-air conversations significantly contradict this point. First, the total number of host- caller conversations seems to have consistently shortened since the advent of CTR, as host Mike Gallagher suggests: “I think, in general, people are taking less calls than before because a lot of people are patterning what they do after Rush (who has taken fewer and fewer calls over the years)” (Casey 2003). Jack Swanson, Program Director for the KGO and KSFO stations in San Francisco, explains that the political nature of CTR accounts for the declining number of callers. For Swanson, “the increasing number of conservative-type stations aren’t built on debate, they’re built on affirmation” (Casey 2003: 16). Second, the very short amount of time the host allocates to calls, a common characteristic across CTR programs, further tightens the rule of engagement. For example, during the week of 12–16 April 2010, Rush 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 33

Limbaugh devoted under 24 minutes per episode to caller participation, which amounts to 22.4% of the program’s 1 hour and 47 minutes of airtime (excluding commercials). The total amount of time spent talking to listeners can fall to just 12 minutes, as was the case for The Laura Ingraham Show on 12 April 2010, when it was just 11.3% of airtime. These figures—which show that the time dedicated to callers never reaches a quarter of total airtime—indicate that, in reality, CTR allows only very few callers to speak: consistent with the talk-back format of these shows, the person who talks the most is the host, a fact which contradicts the declared intention of giving audiences a voice. Moreover, callers do not have direct access to the airwaves, but have to go through a screening process that preselects those who may be allowed to speak. On The Rush Limbaugh Show, the person who selects callers and acts as the gatekeeper deciding which visitors can enter the fortress is known by the audience as Bo Snerdley. The host often speaks to him or mentions him throughout the program: “Our screener of calls […] is Mr. Bo Snerdley and he is eagerly answering calls now in our studio control room, and placing these calls on hold, readying them for the airwaves” (The Rush Limbaugh Show, 18/02/1994). A central component of the show’s design, the screening process is thus fully disclosed to the audience—as such, the host’s hegemonic control over the apparatus is in full display. Furthermore, Limbaugh emphasizes that he selects only listeners who want to defend a chosen point of view based on the issues he deems relevant:

How do we choose these callers? Well the first and foremost thing that must happen to you if you are a caller, is that you must be judged to be one who will make me look good. Now you’re probably thinking that it is an ego statement, but it is not. It is simply … just because you get through does not mean you get on the air: you have to be passionate, you have to be opinion- ated, you have to be articulate, and you have to have a topic or an idea or a subject matter that is relative to something that is in the news either today or recently has been […]. We don’t want people saying other people’s words but rather speaking from their hearts. (The Rush Limbaugh Show, 18/02/1994, 00:10:21)

The screener’s role is not simply to welcome the caller to find out what they want to talk about and share with the host, but it also includes testing them to determine whether they fit Limbaugh’s desired caller profile. 34 S. MORT

Finally, Limbaugh’s statement that the caller “must be judged to be one who will make me look good” tends to suggest that the host is looking for well-spoken, articulate individuals over whom he can prevail after a hard- fought debate. Yet, he also wants callers to be “speaking from their hearts”, spontaneously and without preparing what they have to say, which somewhat contradicts the promoted desire to debate with callers skilled in the art of debate. This initial paradox sustains the blurred nature and purpose of the conversations as much as it raises doubts about the possibility that such conversations might be authentic. As such, CTR programs appear to be structurally designed in such a way as to make accountability impossible, thereby facilitating the use of weaponized communication.

Violating the Rules of Authentic Conversation In his article on conversation theory, Klaus Krippendorff (2009) offers a model for authentic conversations and identifies several defining characteristics. The Oxford Dictionary’s definition of the word “conversation” which can be summarized as “a way of being together in talk and interaction” is the starting point for Krippendorff’s model. Among the characteristics that define authentic conversations, five are relevant to the analysis of host-caller conversations on CTR programs. In an authentic conversation, (1) participants are dialogically equal and (2) maintain mutual understanding. Conversations (3) offer possibilities of participation; (4) are irreversible, progressive, and unique; and (5) intuitive, not rule governed. Krippendorff defines dialogical equality as every participant’s right to have an opportunity to contribute and to have their contribution acknowledged and “appropriately responded to” (2009: 139). This implies that participants consider the content of remarks and contributions made by other speakers—when participants’ attention is redirected to something that is not related to what was said, authenticity is violated. Equality also implies that participants in a conversation enjoy equal status: in an authentic conversation, no participant should feel that they are in a position of authority, nor in a position of submission. This means that none of the participants should fear expressing their personal point of view because they believe one of the others to be in a position of superiority. Conversely, none of the participants should feel they are in a position to be conde- scending with others, nor consider that their point of view is more valid than the others due to their supposedly higher position. 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 35

For each participant’s contribution to be considered and appropriately responded to, mutual understanding is key. The conversation should progress step by step, and each step should be fully understood by all. However, mutual understanding does not mean mutual agreement but allows for the conversation to unfold on solid grounds and expression of mutual understanding “constitutes an invitation to go on” (ibid.). Observers, on the other hand, are not easily able to detect this mutual understanding, as participants engage in performative understanding, reflected in speech acts such as “I understand”, “exactly”, or “you’re right”. Finally, understanding the speaker’s point of view also involves being asked questions meant to clarify a viewpoint or expand upon an answer. These questions must be authentic and not rhetorical questions: they must be asked to fill in missing information and not with the aim of asserting an opinion. When there is mutual understanding, new possibilities of participation arise. The conversation advances to points that had not been previously mentioned, which invites participants to construct new responses. The idea of construction is essential because it defines the authentic conversation as a dialogue in which participants do not engage with prepared or ready-to-use answers. The search for truth occurs through “togetherness” in dialogue, without preconceived ideas about it. This implies that participants do not censor themselves out of fear that their opinions will be answered negatively, and that they are completely honest to allow all others to have the necessary elements to arrive at the truth. Authentic conversations are not only progressive but also unique, which thus excludes repetitions because they prevent the principle of incremental progression: the repetition of an opinion several times hinders the conversation’s progress and betrays an intention to assert a point of view rather than to seek truth with the others. Finally, for Krippendorff, authentic conversations are intuitive and not governed by rules; they lead to even more conversations. This means that the conversation must be free of external restrictions that could influence both its progression and content. Content notwithstanding, because of the way the apparatus is designed, conversations between host and caller on CTR programs seem to violate at least three criteria and the principles upholding them: dialogical equality, freedom to participate, and intuitiveness. First, due to the time restrictions imposed by the programs’ internal structure, not only is the overall amount of time dedicated to callers’ contributions limited, but these 36 S. MORT

contributions are also very short. Hosts never have more than ten minutes of speaking time between advertising spots and local broadcasts. For example, on The Sean Hannity Show, speaking time is divided into unequal segments: the first was ten minutes (00:00:06 to 00:15:52), the second eight minutes (00:21:00 to 00:29:00), the third ten minutes (00:35:00 to 00:45:00) and the fourth eight minutes (00:50:00 to 00:57:40) (The Sean Hannity Show “Weekday Program Clock” 29/12/2008). If the host takes two or three calls per segment, callers must be extremely concise when sharing their ideas and opinions. Under such conditions, it is difficult to imagine that callers can take the time to think about what they want to say, and even less likely that they can pause as they deliver their message. The example of Steve, a listener of The Rush Limbaugh Show on 5 May 2004, is particularly telling. He called in to react to the host’s analysis regarding the Abu Ghraib prison scandal:

Steve: “I think you’re making too much light of these immoral pictures that we’re seeing, you know, with our—those pris- oners—over there in Iraq, with the marines, and you know, they already think we’re evil. They already think we’re sinful as hell.” Limbaugh: “Yeah. But we’re not, are we?” Steve: “Well, we’re not, but those pictures tell—tell—too many things.” Limbaugh: “All right! OK. Look. Look. Here’s the problem. Steve, I don’t have much time. And you got your—you made your point and I appreciate it, but I want to answer this before the hour ends. Bottom line’s this—I said the last two or three days. This is Tuesday. The last two days—admitting this is not good. That this was a mistake. That this is a problem. But I’m not going—I’m not going to sit here and just beat it to death.” (The Rush Limbaugh Show, 07/05/2004)

In this case, the caller had not yet finished his argument when Limbaugh interrupted him to impose his own view of the issue. Moreover, not only does he recognize that there is little time to deal with the issue—the conversation being strategically placed a few minutes before a station break— but that it is his time, not the time initially meant to be given to the caller when he began speaking. This betrays Limbaugh’s “weak commitment to the democratic rules of the game of public deliberation,” which enables him to escape being held accountable (Mercieca 2019: 272). 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 37

Also, the unequal status implied between host and caller means that the principle of being “dialogically equal” is not respected. Hosts enjoy a position of authority and portray themselves as the sole source of truth, even engage in starification, which is the case with Limbaugh. On the contrary, callers are ordinary people whose participation is likely to be strongly influenced by the exceptional context of the discussion (Fiske et al. 2016). For example, all callers express their admiration for the host and their loyalty to the program, especially The Rush Limbaugh Show and The Savage Nation. “Rush, a pleasure after 15 years to be able to speak to you”, “Rush Limbaugh, it is an honor, a supreme honor to talk to you” (The Rush Limbaugh Show, 07/05/2004); “Professor Savage! I’m one of your long- time students, please keep up the history lessons, and I love the oldies” (The Savage Nation, 15/04/2010). These few examples are consistent with Dori-Hacohen’s argument that these programs’ main goal is for callers to show themselves to be fans and that “performing fandom, rather than discussion of the topic at hand, is the real reason for the call” (Dori- Hacohen 2013: 2702). Additionally, caller selection processes appear to ensure not only that relevant issues will be discussed but also that callers who want to bring up a topic the host does not completely master have no chance of getting on the air. Krippendorff (2009: 137) explains that, in an authentic conversation, “everyone is able to engage in conversation with others without specialized knowledge”. However, if hosts choose callers based on issues about which the former are more knowledgeable, they create a power relationship that prevents authentic conversation. Finally, hosts’ total control over the apparatus puts them in a position to silence callers by keeping them off the air if they disagree with them, and to thereby deny them what Deleu calls “the right of rebuttal” (droit de suite) (Deleu 2006: 81). The experience of Rick, a listener from Tallahassee, Florida, who called in to the Sean Hannity program, illustrates this point:

Rick: “I just wanted to pass along a little item when Sarah Palin threw out that ‘hopey-changey thing working for you’. It’s actually working pretty well for me. I’m seeing what I wanted to see through my vote for President Obama, except for the public option—which I think is a major decision, maybe we can fix that in the future. But the guy’s a rookie, he saved us from the depression, he’s reestablished the United States’ reputation, respect throughout the world—.” 38 S. MORT

Hannity: “You are nuts! Wait a minute, let’s deal with this one at a time: he’s being ridiculed by Ahmadinejad … As a matter of fact, he’s being called an amateur, he’s being called inexperi- enced … the President of the United States of America, frankly, isn’t even respected abroad! Even our allies […] don’t respect him. They don’t trust him, they don’t think he’s loyal, they don’t think he has moral clarity … I don’t know what fantasy world you are living in, that is not the truth!” (The Sean Hannity Show, 14/04/2010, 01:22:35)

If one accepts Hannity’s logic at face value, any caller who phones in to support a Democratic figure is undoubtedly mentally insane (“you are nuts”) or delusional (“fantasy world”). Additionally, the sound engineer shouted “you, big dope” before the caller was kicked off the air. Therefore, only callers who adhere to the fundamental tenets of conservatism, abide by the discursive and stylistic standards of the show, and support conservative Republican candidates considered legitimate. Dissenting viewpoints are pathologized, and those who express them see their character impugned, are verbally abused, and ultimately silenced, consistent with the fact that “all weaponized communication tactics are designed to overwhelm audiences and are thus force, or “pre-political” and “despotic” ways to deal with people [...]” (Mercieca 2019: 272). In that regard, this exchange provides a striking instance of the violence inherent to weaponized communication. Conversations on CTR also frequently give the impression that once they have given their opinion or asked a question, callers stop talking and let the host monopolize the conversation. While a host may sometimes thank callers for their contribution, signaling that their speaking time is up, oftentimes the callers simply go off the air. This is how CTR host Neal Boortz appears to handle callers: “I use callers, right now, for the entertainment value of the show. If they’re not entertaining, I get rid of ‘em and find one who is” (Casey 2003: 16). Hosts’ control over the apparatus means they are in the position to ignore the basic rules of courtesy and respect if the caller’s contribution fails to meet the host’s expectations. In other words, before a caller even gets on the air, the CTR screening process breaches the norms of dialogical equality and intuitive conversations. Under such conditions, the speaking platform that CTR purports to offer callers cannot be a forum where conservative citizens are free to speak genuinely and express views that differ from those of the host. Pushing the analysis further, it would seem that hosts consider callers to be a threat to the smooth running of the program, which Nate Lundy, program 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 39 director at Clear Channel affiliate Memphis WREC, confirms: “There are fewer caller-driven shows than there used to be. It goes back to running the risk of the callers steering the direction of the show” (Casey 2003: 16). Thus, CTR programs follow a prescribed formula that hosts fear callers might jeopardize should they elicit reactions from other callers that stray from the show’s established framework—the audience therefore has no leeway to define the content or change the direction of the conversation, or that of the program. When applied to CTR programs, Deleu’s theory about the status of caller participation in French forum programs thus appears to be validated: “Far from expanding the public space and helping to democratize speech, private […] radio media, through forum-type programs, instrumentalize people’s words”5 (Deleu 2006: 60). Because they restrict speech to serve manipulative purposes, the programs of Limbaugh and his counterparts thus reverse the process of free speech liberation that had been initiated in the 1970s when the space for citizen expression in the media was expanded. Consequently, while CTR programs appear to follow Deleu’s “forum formula”, what they do is define an additional category of program where audience participation is elicited out of sheer tokenism: as such, callers are instrumental in providing the popular validation of the host’s views and, in the end, contribute to legitimizing their message. By restricting democratic discussion under the guise of promoting it, CTR shows’ apparatus plays a central role in enabling the host to evade being held accountable by dissenting voices.

Conclusion The participation of ordinary citizens in the media, which began in the 1980s, was welcomed by political analysts as both a healthy departure from the professional practices of mainstream news media—which were perceived as overly detached from ordinary citizens’ concerns—and the reappropriation of the democratic process by those citizens. However, in the case of CTR programs, audience participation is instrumentalized to forge a representation of what is supposed to be an archetypal conservative. By no means real, the conservative identity that takes shape in host-caller conversations is in fact put together piecemeal by the program’s apparatus, under the control of an omnipotent host. Because of the impossibility of an authentic conversation between host and caller, and especially because of the fictional and predetermined nature of the message that emerges, CTR shows are a prime example of Turner’s “demotic turn”. The virtual absence 40 S. MORT of the right of rebuttal for callers and the impossibility for them to express an opinion contrary to the conservative orthodoxy—of which the host is a custodian—defines an archetype of the conservative citizen who better reflects the idea than the real person behind the microphone. This process of creation makes Limbaugh and his counterparts into “radio Prometheuses” of an ideal type of conservative, served up to the public as a model with which they should identify. The ideal conservative who speaks on the air is a person who adheres fully to the fundamental tenets of conservatism and who is prepared to defend decidedly clear-cut positions, without debate or consensus. This ideal conservative is also a citizen whose rights, and even survival, are constantly under threat by the liberal establishment. As such, callers are an essential component of the CTR apparatus because they are the “popular token” of the host’s message. Through the unequal dialogical inequality that is inherent to these exchanges, the disdain for the rules of the game of public deliberation, and the complete disregard for the implicit conventions of authentic conversations, hosts are in a position to saturate the verbal space, interrupt callers, elicit deference from them, or simply silence them, thus evading accountability. All these elements combine to stage the audience’s acquiescence and compliance, which is made acceptable by the simulacrum of democratic exchange that the show’s apparatus creates. In that respect, CTR provides a case in point of how “dangerous demagogues” can also use weaponized communication against members of their own community to keep them in line, thereby creating the appearence that such a community forms a monolithic, internally consistent group.

Notes 1. Limbaugh’s broadcasts have fairly consistently led the “News/Talk” format, with 15.5 million weekly listeners in early 2019 (Talkers Estimetrix, 2019), ahead of Morning Edition, the top program for National Public Radio (NPR), which captures 14.2 million listeners every week (National Public Media, 2018. Accessed: www.nationalpublicmedia.com/npr/programs/ morning-edition/)—though at times, the rankings fluctuate. 2. Paley Center for Media. Museum of Television and Radio Seminars Series: The First Annual Radio Festival “Rush Limbaugh and the Talk Radio Revolution,” 24 October 1995; 7:30 p.m. Catalogue reference: T:40932. 3. “Par le biais du téléphone, l’auditeur pose des questions ou donne son avis en direct sur tel ou tel sujet.” 4. “Ici, l’auditeur est perçu comme un citoyen souhaitant que son opinion soit reconnue par les autres.” 2 HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF THE “DEMOTIC TURN”… 41

5. “Loin d’élargir l’espace public et de participer à la démocratisation de la parole, les médias radiophoniques […] privés, à travers les émissions de type forum, instrumentalisent aujourd’hui la parole des gens […].”

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From Layperson to TV Celebrity? Televising the Sovereign People in the French Debate Program Parole de Candidat (TF1, 2012)

Sheila Perry

Introduction France has a long tradition of audience participation in political programs on television, beginning as far back as 1960 when the program Faire face provided a video link between politicians in the studio and viewers in a public venue; since then there has been a plethora of examples with vari-

French Original Publication: La peopolisation des profanes? La mise en scène du peuple souverain dans Parole de Candidat. In J. Dakhlia, D. Le Nozach, C. Ségur (Eds). (2016). À la recherche des publics populaires (2). Être people. Nancy: Éditions universitaires de Lorraine. Translation: Kate Martin

S. Perry (*) Department of French and Francophone Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Laboratoire Communication et Politique, CNRS-IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 45 C. Ségur (ed.), French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33346-1_3 46 S. PERRY ous modes of intervention. The proliferation of such programs—aided by technological progress and increases in the number of television channels—was such that in the early 1990s Éric Darras (1994: 84) claimed that putting ordinary people in the limelight had become “a real obsession”. This obsession, if that is what it was, came to a head during the 2007 presidential election campaign when no fewer than four analog channels simultaneously used participation of members of the public as a key feature of the program format (Perry 2008). Of these, the private channel TF1 caused the most controversy by totally ousting political journalism in favor of audience participation, reducing the role of its star political journalist, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, to that of a conductor allocating speaking turns (Perry 2011). And yet, for the next presidential election campaign in 2012, TF1 was the only channel of the four to renew this format involving members of the public, in a program entitled Parole de Candidat (The Word of a Political Candidate) (henceforth referred to as PDC). PDC reinstated political journalism with a panel of five journalists, but most of the airtime (about one and a half hours from a total of two per program) was taken up by dialogue between the politician and ordinary people, which remained central to the format. However, if we compare the 2012 PDC with TF1’s 2007 program J’ai une question à vous poser (I have a question for you), we find significant changes to the forms this participation took; these modifications, and their impact on the role played by the participants, are the focus of the present analysis. There were two major differences in the 2012 program compared to that of 2007: firstly, a significant reduction in the number of participants and, secondly, a change in the way they were recruited. While around 50 people got to speak in every episode of J’ai une question à vous poser (out of a total of 100 people present in the audience), a mere 14 people made up the panel in PDC. As for the way in which they were recruited, in 2007 TF1 enlisted the services of the polling institute TNS-Sofres, who recruited anonymous people to fill the various representative quotas; for PDC, however, TF1 used its own address book and invited people who had already featured in one of their news bulletins; some of them had also played the role of layperson—neither journalist nor expert, nor celebrity— in political programs with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The symbolism of a percentage established by the presence of 100 people in J’ai une question à vous poser and evoking the idea of an opinion poll was replaced by a narrative setting of sociocultural situations represented by individuals. At the same time, genuine lay people with no experience were 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 47 replaced by stars of the TV news bulletin and people who were experienced in talking with political personalities. What sort of a performance does this lead to, and what is the significance for the notion of the people being represented by the panel members? Are we witnessing the transformation of anonymous individuals into celebrities and thus seeing a new example of how the media treat politics like celebrity culture (Dakhlia 2008) and, if so, do these individuals still remain members of the people? We work on the assumption that the notion of the people is an “elastic concept” (Bourdieu 1983: 98) and that “everything is a matter of context” (Badiou 2013: 9). In the context of a presidential election, the concept of the people mobilized by a political program where electoral candidates are questioned by ordinary people is the one that lies at the heart of democratic mythology and is referred to in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic: it is the sovereign people. And yet, in analyses of programs designed to give a major role to ordinary people supposedly representing the sovereign people, the concept evoked is rarely the sovereignty of the people but rather the “taming” of the people (Neveu 1989; Darras 1999). The constraints placed on the ordinary participants lead some analysts to denounce these programs as “sham democracy” (e.g. Muzet 2007; Charaudeau and Ghiglione 1997). We propose to place PDC in the context of these debates about the sub-genre of political programs with participation by members of the public. Given that the symbolism of a TV program is created through team- work, we will first analyze what we call the institutional sovereign people—the concepts mobilized by TF1—and then look at the behavior of what we might call the empirical ordinary people, that is, those who actually participated in the four episodes of the program. The third part will examine the notions of layperson and peopolisation (a French neolo- gism, used to mean the blurring of the boundaries between politics and celebrity culture), in order to assess to what extent PDC participants became celebrities through their appearance in the media, and to gauge the implications of the recruitment method adopted in 2012. Lay participants in PDC will be referenced as follows: FH1, MLP5 and so on, where the initials are those of the political candidate being questioned, and the number that of the turn taken by the layperson—for example, FH1 is the first person to question François Hollande. This makes it possible to situate the examples within the context of the four programs of the series, broadcast on 20 February 2012 (with questions addressed to François Bayrou, followed by Eva Joly), 27 February 48 S. PERRY

(François Hollande), 5 March (Marine Le Pen followed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon) and 12 March (Nicolas Sarkozy).1

The Institutional Sovereign People The notion of the institutional sovereign people is adapted from Jean- Pierre Esquenazi’s institutional TV viewer (1995). Like its predecessor, the institutional sovereign people is an image created by the institution producing and broadcasting political programs. The names used by TV professionals—“ordinary” people, “real” people—reflect this institutional position, contrasting the role played by these people with the role of the other participants in televised discussions (experts, politicians, celebrities, journalists): to be a member of the people means positioning yourself in relation to the other participants in a spoken exchange. It means playing a pre-established role, although this role changes according to the terms of participation laid down by the host organization. In this first section, we will try to establish the terms implemented by PDC. Ordinary or real people elsewhere (e.g. when the Head of the News Desk was announcing future programs, or on the channel’s website), the participants whose role was to represent the sovereign people, were above all “French” once they were in the studio: that is how they were systematically referred to by the journalist hosting the program—Patrick Poivre d’Arvor in 2007 and Laurence Ferrari in 2012. French nationality, the gateway to becoming a French citizen, is the basic must-have if a person wants to be able to vote and to become an integral member of the sovereign people. In most cases, it was also the characteristic that all the participants had in common—politicians, journalists and program hosts—except that these people relinquished their voter status to take on the status of journalist or political candidate. While politicians could refer to their nationality if they wished (as Nicolas Sarkozy did at times) or if they needed to do so in an attempt to prove they were legitimate political candidates (as was the case with Norwegian-born Eva Joly), journalists on the other hand were supposed to conceal their voter status in the name of the neutral status required by the code of ethics of their profession. But in institutional discourse, no mention was ever made of the nationality of either journalists or politicians. “The French” were exactly that because they were neither political candidates nor journalists, and the program designers deliberately used the term to remind their viewers that the (few) French people in the studio represented “the French people” as a whole, 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 49 that is, the entire electorate. Without hesitation or the faintest hint of irony, Laurence Ferrari introduced “the French people” (the 14 panel members) and then, to camera, said to the viewers “Your voice is being heard through these people” (program with François Hollande, 27/02/12). This institutional discourse combined social reality and mythologization. Other than the myth-creating aspect of this discourse, it seems that in 2012 there were considerably fewer components of the studio design marking the sovereignty of the people than in 2007. Even though the set retained its semi-circular shape, the red benches symbolic of the French National Assembly had disappeared, as had the red-white-and-blue colors of the French flag. The photo of the presidential palace (Palais de l’Élysée) remained, on a giant screen behind the politician—but this is a symbol of presidential power, not the power of the people. The idea of a representative assembly was also discarded with the introduction of a studio layout on different levels in different sections; whereas in 2007 the people who were going to speak were scattered throughout a larger audience (creating the impression that anybody present could speak at any time), in 2012 there were two distinct audience groups: the 14 participants at the front of the stage, sitting in raised boxes under the spotlights; and the audience sitting behind, in semi-darkness, clearly confined to the role of onlooker. In this way, the studio layout minimized any aspects likely to symbolize the sovereign people as a whole, emphasizing instead the role of the panel members as witnesses (and the boxes they were sitting in actually looked like the witness boxes in a courtroom). Also scrapped was the notion of public opinion through reference made to opinion polls and through the involvement of the specialist firm TNS-Sofres. Faced with the choice inherent in any kind of representation, between statistical representation and embodiment, PDC favored the latter whereas J’ai une question à vous poser focused on the former. Thus, the 2007 program was more aligned with L’Heure de vérité (Antenne 2/France 2, 1982–1995), which emphasized numbers (polls conducted via the pre-Internet messaging service Minitel; reading out viewer phone calls with, in the background, several operators receiving “thousands” of such calls), whereas PDC was more aligned with Point sur la table (TF1, 1990–1993) with its four to six panel members per program. But unlike the previous program, PDC did not seek to put a “certificate of scientific reliability” (Darras1994 : 86) on its panel. 50 S. PERRY

With a total of 54 in-studio participants and 19 internet participants over the four episodes of PDC, TF1 could in no way aspire to reproducing the social and geographical diversity of J’ai une question à vous poser, with its 191 speaking participants. However, there is always a quantitative disparity between the actual sovereign people and the select few that can be hosted in a TV studio—however big it is—so this reduced number of people did not necessarily undermine the microcosm strategy which having members of the public participate is meant to serve. In fact, for the same total airtime, this gave each participant, on average, triple the amount of speaking time, which allowed greater familiarity with each participant and also increased their chances of inspiring an emotional response from viewers, whether it be approval, rejection or boredom. And although in 2012 there was the same insistence on the need for a participant to stick to the role they had been assigned, that is, to ask a question (like Patrick Poivre d’Arvor before her, Laurence Ferrari would interrupt a participant if she felt they were going on too long, to get them to ask their question), there was also a second, equally important role, which consisted of giving their testimony and thus explaining the meaning of the question. In 2007, TF1’s casting highlighted the fact that the TV channel acknowledged the diversity of the French population and was holding up a mirror to the viewers: a visual mirror, because of the variety of looks (age, sex, skin color), but also a conceptual mirror, because of the variety of professions, social status, marital status or place of residence. Admittedly, it was a magnifying mirror (Perry and Allison 2011), but the large number of participants meant an increased number of sociocultural variables as compared to a panel system, including the PDC system. For PDC too, care was taken to have discernible diversity and a variety of social situations: the little CV appearing on the screen still looked like the one from 2007, but this time it included a map of France designed to emphasize the geographic diversity of the participants and also photos showing their family status. But these factors were to a certain extent secondary to the fact that each participant represented a subject on the current affairs agenda. The theme of the subject that each person was going to speak about appeared on the screen, and when they were about to speak, there was an introductory clip showing a sequence of excerpts from the news bulletins in which the participants had already appeared. To emphasize that the subject was a current affairs item, Laurence Ferrari kept reminding viewers that these participants had already featured in a news report in the context of news bulletins broadcast by this TV channel. TF1 was criticized in 2007 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 51 for having enabled “little people” to raise “little questions” (Abélès 2007), so it hoped that in this way it could legitimize not only the questions asked as being worthy of interest but also the participants, who—because of their increased media status—were no longer totally ordinary people but a little bit outside the norm and also worthy of interest. At the same time, by reminding TF1’s loyal viewers that they had already seen these people, the presenter was trying to create a link of familiarity and complicity both between participants and viewers and between TF1 and its regular viewers, who thus found themselves members of a club of people who knew each other. In this way, TF1 was fulfilling its role of “interactive television” (Mehl 2007) at the hub of a social network (a virtual or remote social network, like Twitter or Facebook, except in this case signed TF1). TF1 could also hope to gain another advantage from doing this: ensuring loyalty not only from its viewers but also from its participants who, having had the privilege of repeatedly receiving preferential treatment from this TV channel, would perhaps now obey instructions and meet the expectations of the program producers. When Laurence Ferrari was introducing Éric Glorennec, a chef (MLP2), she said to him: “You have just found a job thanks to TF1’s series on the world of work.” Her aim was naturally to spotlight the achievements of the channel, but if what she says was true, then wasn’t the participant likely to feel indebted to TF1? The organizers could choose their participants wisely and give them a specific role based on their previous performance, thereby avoiding an unforeseen event or rebellious act (e.g. according to the newspaper Libération of 5 March 2012, a young man, Aurélien Rodrigues, 26, was allegedly excluded from the program for having long ago had a militant past in the Socialist Party at the age of 16). The editorial staff were also familiar with the participants’ communication skills, having already worked with them, and could rely on them not to get intimidated by the spotlights and cameras even for a ten-minute debate, although on average televised discussions only last two or three minutes, according to research by Sébastien Rouquette (2002). In this context, where there was some manner of “professionalization” of ordinary people, it is interesting to look at what use they made of the airtime they were given. Given the number of participants, the people that made up this microcosm could not hope to be a true representation of the social diversity of the entire electorate, but nor were they le peuple (in the sense of the common people). Of the 54 participants (27 men and 27 women), a good third were bosses, managers or supervisors employing or overseeing other 52 S. PERRY people: company managers, presidents of associations or of local committees, head teachers or high school principals, chefs or corporate executives. Another third was made up of self-employed workers or skilled tradespeople: cereal and vegetable producers, cattle breeders, fishermen, den- tists, jewelers, roofers, bakers and so on—also employers in many cases. So only one-third was made up of employees without rank, very few of whom could be said to be on a low wage. There was only one unemployed person (FB7). The other people not in paid employment were not job seek- ers: one retired person (FB10), one stay-at-home mother (EJ2) and one student (FH7). Women formed the majority in this group with no professional income or on a very low wage, and they were the minority in the top group in this selection of guests which—and this was a first!—had equal representation in terms of numbers. This gender disparity was a reflection of an existing social reality. The sociological profile of PDC participants was comparable to that of other televised debate shows, in which Sébastien Rouquette (2001) shows us that the lower social classes are underrepresented. The participants were essentially middle to lower-middle class, with no extremes: no CEOs of large industrial groups or bank managers (rather, chartered accountants or small business managers), no homeless or long-term unemployed—rather, people who had recently become unemployed, to keep to matters currently in the news. The one unemployed person (FB7) was introduced as an “ex Lejaby (luxury lingerie) employee” and the female employee (FB1) as having a husband and a son working at a major steel company in north-eastern France (ArcelorMittal in Florange), which is a good illustration of how TF1 framed the topics: in the above cases, the question of unemployment was broached through firms in difficulty and the question of job losses in areas where the main employer was closing its doors. The same went for the worker (NS7), who was the union rep who recovered the keys to the factory where he had been working, when the owner and the managers just walked out and left everything. The panelists were thus controlled by the producers of the show who selected them and gave them pre-established themes that they were required to communicate to the viewers through being a living example; the viewers were invited to see these themes as being their own concerns. 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 53

The Empirical People: Behavior of the Panelists This method of casting meant that each participant represented a pre- established discussion topic assigned by TF1. Reusing the same subjects for different politicians meant that the details of each person’s life were of secondary importance, included in the program as an example or illustration but more or less interchangeable. Marine Le Pen encountered Joëlle Percheron, a 46-year-old woman, a shop owner and mother of four, living in the region of Maine-et-Loire (MLP4), while Nicolas Sarkozy was confronted by Anthony Arbona, a 30-year-old man, single, a roofer by trade, living in Bordeaux (NS2). Although these two people differed across all sociocultural variables, they both asked the same question regarding small business contributions. Jean-Luc Mélenchon was challenged by Francis Nion, a divorced 62-year-old father of two, a jeweler living in Paris (JLM1), and Nicolas Sarkozy by Vanessa Gibiino, a female restaurant owner, 30, married with two children, living in Fontenay-le-Marmion in the Calvados département (NS6). Both of these people asked questions regarding public safety, their only point in common (apart from both being local business owners) lying in the fact that they had each been a victim of assault during an armed robbery. In each case, the participant was reduced to the function of illustrating a general experience that affected only one part of their life. But that was exactly what raised them to the status of representative, speaking not only for themselves but also for other people who had found themselves in similar situations: while giving their own testimony, the participants were at the same time acting as spokespersons. This meant they had recourse to certain discursive techniques, like frequently using the plural pronoun “we” to include others working in the same sector, with the same responsibilities or working in the same locality (“we in the town center”); or using a possessive to show that a certain group of people were all in the same boat (“in our organizations”, “our part of town”); or using comparisons (“companies like mine”); or using generic expressions “entrepreneurs”, “SME”, “made in France”, “young farmers”, “young teachers” and even “the French people”. In each show, there was at least one official spokesperson, such as the president of an association (FH8, MLP5, NS8, NS10), a union rep (NS7), the chairman of the tobacconists’ union (FH10) or the president of local committees (FB11); when they spoke, they placed the emphasis either on the collective aspect (the inclusive term “we”) or on the others in whose name they 54 S. PERRY were speaking. The people to whom they referred were specific cases, raised to the level of principle by accredited or self-proclaimed spokespeople who succeeded in combining the individual with the general and thus in “playing the good citizen” (Talpin 2006). In four instances, however, the inclusive “we” highlighted a difference rather than a similarity. We can see the way the term “me” slid into “the others” in whose favor he was speaking in the following extract taken from Tibault Baka’s discourse (NS3) (the underlining is ours): “In the suburbs, it’s people like me, like a heap of others, who have plans, a head full of dreams, who want to get France to move forward. But you don’t trust those people, you so don’t trust ‘em that it ends up being Qatar or the US embassy that invests in those young people.” A young manager of a recruiting agency in the Val d’Oise département and also a writer (he started his talk by giving a copy of his book to the French president), Baka introduced himself as someone who had succeeded socially and who wanted to share his success with other less fortunate people. The same goes for Siham Khalef (NS9), a young accounts manager in Strasbourg who benefited from the “ZEP à Sciences-Po” program (a Priority Education Zones initiative in conjunc- tion with the Paris Institute of Political Sciences) and wanted a similar program to be made available to everyone (“made global”, as she put it). Nathalie Jacq-Richard, a personal assistant (FH4), took an interest in what happened to unemployed executives; she said “things are fine with [her]” but “[she] thinks a lot about those who are on the other side of the fence”. Serge Venturini, a metal worker (FH12), started off his intervention with “a thought for my mates who have been made redundant”. It is interesting to note that, while these self-proclaimed spokespeople purported to be speaking for people like themselves, they were in fact highlighting how different they were from people of the same original background. Paradoxically, the presence of these spokespeople emphasized the absence of the people they were representing; there were actually several levels of representation. In addition to the use of the inclusive “we”, participants also made use of the concept of “the field”, what was happening on the ground. Many of them based the legitimacy of what they were saying on their knowledge of their field; they did this not only to explain the relevance of their question but also to contest the response given by the politician they were addressing. This could be in an explicit manner, as with the chef Éric Le Glorennec (MLP2), who prevented Marine Le Pen from interrupting when he was describing the conditions for young apprentices, saying on 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 55 two occasions, “Yes, but that’s how things are out there, Ms Le Pen”; and he finished with this challenge to her: “So you should go out there into the field before saying things like that.” Others did not specifically use the word field but, nonetheless, used their everyday expertise to show their superior knowledge of an issue as compared to the politician’s knowledge; for example, the dairy farmer Sophie Poux (FH2) defended her opposition to François Hollande’s comments by explaining how the price of milk was established. Stéphanie Bullier (MLP1) clarified that she had 17 years’ experience in the company she had been managing for the last 7 or 8 years before going on to explain why the measures proposed by Marine Le Pen regarding protectionism and getting out of the eurozone would pose a problem for her company. Here, the field was equated with reality as opposed to discourse (seen here as evasive or meaningless) or with expertise as opposed to the presumed ignorance of politicians. In a context where politicians had a reputation for being cut off from everyday life, the “field” could be used to legitimize the arguments of lay people and to delegitimize the politicians if they did not give the impression that they were taking into account the interpretation of the world as put forward by the lay people, based on their actual experience. These discussions were founded on a balance of power, which implied the sovereignty of the lay people. The fact that the participants were convinced of the validity of their opinion can also be seen when they insisted that the politician should answer the question asked and not a different question. An example of this was when Bruno Liguori (EJ1), a fisherman, tried—in vain, it transpired— to bring Eva Joly back to the question he had asked about pollution of the oceans when she was talking about overfishing. Philippe Motais of Narbonne (EJ3) said to Eva Joly: “You are not answering my question”, when the candidate of the Greens was talking about the dangers of nuclear power, whereas what he wanted to know was how France would have got through the previous winter without nuclear power. Two people from so- called visible minority groups, Tambo Bathly (FB4) and Carole da Silva (MLP5), raised questions on the subject of discrimination and integration. Neither of them would allow their respective politicians to widen the scope of the discussion to include all types of discrimination; they wanted to talk solely about “French people of foreign extraction” or of discrimination “based on origins”. Carole da Silva stressed on two occasions the fact that her question was not about anonymous CVs, and when Marine Le Pen finally agreed to answer the question put to her, da Silva vehemently 56 S. PERRY rejected the candidate’s assertion that the only real discrimination was social discrimination: “No, no!”, “Absolutely not!” and “No, that isn’t true” could be heard throughout Le Pen’s answer. Another example was Samuel Leroy, anesthetist (NS14), who emphasized several times that Nicolas Sarkozy was not answering the question asked as the problems he raised were not relevant to maternity, the area in which Leroy works. These participants thus clearly demonstrated their conviction that it was not enough merely to justify one’s position on a given theme, but that the politician had to accept the framing of the question as chosen by the ques- tioner. The participants fully assumed their sovereignty when confronted with politicians who were running for the position of President of France. The confidence shown by the participants led some of them to correct the errors of the politicians they were addressing. When Marine Le Pen was talking about the Harkis, Adil Naciri (MLP3) reminded her that he was talking about the two world wars and not about the Algerian war, thereby suggesting that she did not know her history very well. Or again, Dominique Cantrell, the principal of a hotel management school (NS4), interrupted Nicolas Sarkozy to correct his estimate of the number of students who were able to keep up. And Thierry Moysset, manager of Forge de Laguiole (FB3) (manufacturing traditional quality tableware), made such an impression on François Bayrou with his knowledge of his field of work that their roles were reversed (with Bayrou putting questions to Moysset, and not vice versa). François Bayrou ended up conceding that his interlocutor should act as his guide in this sector. The amount of time that participants were allocated allowed them to comment freely on the politicians’ answers. Their responses were mostly negative, for politicians across the board: Philippe Notais de Narbonne (FB12) found it “troubling” to want to “acknowledge the reality of [parental] ties” for homosexual couples; Sophie Poux (FH2) jabbed her finger at François Hollande to express her disapproval of him; Georges Tayar (FH3) accused the politician of an “error of judgment”; Adil Naciri (MLP3) shouted at Ms. Le Pen “You’ve changed your tune!” while Carole da Silva (MLP5) disputed what Le Pen had said before asking her own question; Francis Nion (JLM1) interrupted the politician after two sentences to express his anger; and Vanessa Gibiino (NS6) disagreed with the president so scathingly that the two interlocutors ended up hurling accusations at each other. Interruptions happened all the time, especially protests and contradictions, fervently expressed; agreement and approval were also verbalized and shown by facial expressions, but less frequently. 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 57

The most striking example was Edouard Boucher (FH1): throughout François Hollande’s answers about floating oil prices TIPP( ), Boucher nodded and gave little verbal signs of agreement (“yes”, “that’s right”, “that’s true”), and then closed his argument saying—with a complicit grin—that “there should be more people like us, then”. Also, the first person to question Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Francis Nion, initially very aggressive toward him, ended up agreeing with his arguments with a little nod of approval, when Mélenchon talked about the psychological effects of assault. Even though the candidates talked for a lot longer than the lay participants—the name of the show, PDC, indicated that this would be the case—we should be careful not to infer from this purely quantitative imbalance that there was any qualitative dominance of the politicians over the lay people. In general, participants used a number of different discursive strategies. For example, even the most aggressive of questioners respected the social norms of remaining polite in their discussions: Thibault Baka (NS3) and Adil Naciri (MLP3) interspersed their harshest criticisms with marks of respect, such as “Mr Sarkozy”, “Mr President” or “Ms Le Pen”. Others would acknowledge a point of agreement but only so they could better oppose the stand taken by the politician; this was what happened with Stéphanie Bullier (MLP1), who seemed to have taken on board the pre- cepts of the art of persuasion that suggest we are more likely to convince someone with whom we share a few points in common and used this to further the debate, abandoning opposition which would have become redundant and unproductive. The next participant, Éric Glorennec (MLP2), adopted the same process with the aim of asking for concrete details about the way the politician planned to implement the measures she was proposing. By bringing to the debate a calm yet firm opposing position, they managed to have a discussion with the politicians without becoming aggressive, which would have discredited them in the eyes of those members of the public who do not like to see their politicians getting harassed or who might have got bored and wanted to move on to another topic. Like Edouard Boucher (FH1), Béatrice Lartisant (FH6) agreed with the position adopted by François Hollande, but neither of them remained silent when Hollande launched into a long speech. Mostly, there was genuine interaction—debate or conversation—and not merely a monologue by the politician, dotted with questions that would have served only as an excuse for them to launch into a pre-planned speech, learned by heart. Despite the imbalance that exists between politicians and 58 S. PERRY lay people in terms of media experience, the lay people proved to be far from incompetent communicators, and the politicians had to adapt to their successive questioners, to avoid finding themselves in an awk- ward position. In his study of Les Absents ont toujours tort, Éric Darras (1994: 90) wrote: “The naïve belief that the layperson and the professional politician have the same discursive skills is a fundamental myth of democracy.” Professionalizing lay people to a certain extent can help counteract this disparity in skills, and the discursive strategies detailed above show that the lay people in PDC were far from being without such means. Even so, PDC did have a few more reserved participants: FB1, FB7, FB10, NS2 and NS10 all demonstrated a certain lack of assurance, through reading their script, getting thrown by an interruption or unexpected question or simply seeking approval from Laurence Ferrari before proceeding. But they were only a very small minority (9.3%), and the fact that most of the less confident participants appeared in the very first program shows that the lack of ease came not only from their social status but also from when they had their turn to speak: it is easy to imagine that participants would have watched a previous show in order to get an idea of how things proceeded, which goes to confirm the importance of media experience. Most participants seemed to be comfortable with their task and did not hesitate to attempt to keep going even when Laurence Ferrari or the guest politician wanted to interrupt them; they were happy to interrupt the politicians whenever they felt like it. There was nothing in their discursive behavior to indicate that they felt inferior or intimidated; however, they always yielded to the authority of Laurence Ferrari when she gave the floor to the next person. Two discursive strategies demonstrated that the lay people were aware of the constraints of a show of this kind. Above all, they had taken on board the lack of time and the necessity of being quick, firstly, by showing they were capable of summarizing a complex situation in a very concise manner (e.g. MLP1 presenting the challenges her company was facing, or FH10 who summarized her own question after having presented it in detail); secondly, by implementing a meta-discourse in their own discourse (e.g. by numbering their questions [NS4: “Actually, I have two questions: my first is about your proposal to […] and my second question, which I will ask in a minute, concerns school health”] or by anticipating other questions to follow [FH10, who let Laurence Ferrari interrupt, but said: “Yes, but afterwards I have another question”]). These strategies enabled 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 59 them to say everything they wanted in the limited time they had (being concise) while remaining clear (giving structure to what they say). If, however, they forgot or did not adhere to the rules, they were quickly brought to order by the presenter. Conforming to the codes of the show like this raises the question of autonomy. For Érik Neveu (2005: 331), “the power of television lies in its ability to make guests conform to its rating imperatives”, while Sébastien Rouquette (2002: 13) goes so far as to talk about a “stopwatch censor”. However, the examples referred to in our study show that an agreement was reached between the different parties and that the journalist hosting the show could only exert her authority over the participants because they accepted it. They did not always accept it, and not always straight away, even if they did end up yielding to her request. The case of Guy Le Rochais (NS10) provides insight into the negotiated aspect of these relationships once on air and is worth looking at more closely. Guy Le Rochais used meta-discourse throughout his intervention, showing that he was fully aware of the program’s constraints, especially the need to be quick and not be boring. However, at the same time he did not respect these rules and was often interrupted by Laurence Ferrari. The list of examples of meta- discourse scattered through his talk is very revealing of the perverse effect of the constraints of this kind of media: “I’ve got heaps of questions to ask him. I know time is limited so I’m going to try and be brief. […] I’m not going to quote any figures as that would be boring for everyone [he, nevertheless. proceeded to quote two figures]. […] My first observation […] The second observation […]. My third observation […], we. … I say ‘we’, don’t I, because I’m nice … [interruption by Laurence Ferrari urging him to ask his question]. I’ve got a three-part question, the rule of three […]. What gradual and specific—and I stress ‘gradual and specific’—financial proposal can you make … [Laurence Ferrari interrupts his second part, but he insists on ‘one last point’, which he makes quite quickly.]” It is clear that, paradoxically, it was the participant’s willingness to respect the guide- lines given by the program producers that made him go into lengthy explanations which prevented him from being concise and getting straight to the point as required; but at the same time, Laurence Ferrari was forced to make numerous concessions and did not manage to prevent him asking the questions as he saw fit. However, these negotiations happened solely within each turn to speak; the participants stopped trying to continue when it was clear that Laurence Ferrari was handing the microphone to the next participant; and there were never any discussions amongst the lay 60 S. PERRY people, nor were there any interruptions from people trying to speak before their turn or again afterward. Some kind of adaptation to the requirements of a televised show can also be seen in the linguistic register used. We have already seen this in the use of generic terms that we also find in “expert” or scientific discourse. Some people used technical vocabulary from their field of activity: for example, “care professionals” to designate people caring for Alzheimer patients (NS10). But at the same time, there was extensive use of everyday language, polite but not over “policed”: contractions, the odd word omit- ted or “th” dropped: “you don’t trust ‘em” (NS3); familiar terms, without much sophistication: “stuff like that” (MLP2); “I’ve got heaps of questions to ask him” (NS10); interjections: “sometimes it’s a bit less, innit?” (NS4); “I haven’t got enough staff to have a roster, yer see?” (NS8). Clichés can be found in the metaphors used: “it’s daylight robbery”, to talk about very low retirement pensions, or money that “goes straight into the State’s coffers” to describe social security contributions (NS2). However, there was no coarse or vulgar language and no insults, the most daring term used being “thug” (voyou) used by a union worker (NS7) when speaking of an absent person … the factory owner who, after closing the factory down, invested in another business. They sometimes used language that was colloquial, but still socially acceptable in many social circles and not ostensibly common: no slang or expression that would only have been understood in very limited circles— language meant to be inclusive rather than exclusive. So, we see a certain lack of formality in people’s discourse, but no slack or slovenly language, unlike language used on chat shows as described by Érik Neveu (2003). For Dominique Cardon et al. (1995: 7), speaking in public means speaking “under the gaze of, and with reference to, a third party”; participants are producing an act of speech intended for the general public. It is a “theatrical discourse” (Haarman 2001), produced to be performed.

Transformation into TV Celebrities? In a society of increasingly interactive communication, some social groups participate more than others, and sometimes we find the same individuals participating via webcam in different political programs, as seen, for example, in the 2007 presidential election (see Perry and Allison 2011); so the trend of repeated participation was not entirely new with the creation of PDC. But participants via webcam are people who are responding 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 61

spontaneously to general appeals made to all viewers. By openly inviting specific individuals for the very reason that this was not their first TV appearance, TF1 was breaking the mold by breaking an unwritten law for this kind of program. Of course, TV channels have always used their address books to get what French producers call “a good customer” back again, but so far they had taken care not to flaunt this tactic of conve- nience; in PDC, this method of recruitment was openly talked about and viewers were frequently reminded of it. Introductory clips, made up of excerpts of news bulletins in which participants had appeared, were broadcast as of the second episode. Now, being a layperson is by definition being uninitiated and coming from the outside. The more the representatives of the sovereign people became TV celebrities, the less they resembled the voting mass and the closer they got to other celebrities, becoming a factor in the trend toward celebrity culture invading political life. What is the connection between their status as the initiated, their discursive behavior and their role as representatives of ordinary people on PDC? The confidence displayed by participants playing to the camera and confronting politicians, their communication skills and their proactive participation in the discussions may have stemmed from the fact that they were experienced, in some way TV “professionals”, recruited by TF1 because of their previous successes. Even the most reserved participants were not completely disconcerted, as has sometimes been the case in the past (e.g. in La France en Direct [France “Live”] [France 2, 1995], when a participant in a bistro converted into a studio for the occasion remained speechless when handed a microphone). Some of them were doubtless more self-assured because they had already had experience under the spotlights. This must have been even more true for two of the participants, who, as well as appearing in TF1 news bulletins, had already had an experience similar to PDC: Sophie Poux (FH2) and Stéphanie Bullier (MLP1), who participated in Paroles des Français (The French People Speak) to question Nicolas Sarkozy (TF1, 2010, 2011). Stéphanie Bullier said that she felt her previous performance had been unsatisfactory, regretting the lack of time, the lack of forcefulness on the part of the participants and their inexperience when faced with a “pro” (Le Parisien, 12 February 2011, Le Télégramme.com, 12 February 2011). Her determination to dispute Marine Le Pen’s proposals may well have been due to that experience, as may the concise manner in which she introduced herself, since a comparison between the two programs clearly demonstrates how her discursive skills had progressed. It could also be that, having been the last to 62 S. PERRY speak in the previous program, she had negotiated a better speaking slot this time (she was on first in the program with Marine Le Pen), in order to be sure she had enough time. Having said that, the participants’ skills cannot be ascribed solely to their previous experience. Mostly, they were professionals used to speaking in public: account managers, teachers or business managers, to name just three. Carole da Silva (MLP5), for example, president of the AFIP Association (association to promote professional integration) that she herself created, had ten years’ experience supporting the cause of young people from African families and was a member of the High Council for Integration and also of the advisory committee of the French Equal Opportunities and Anti-Discrimination Commission (HALDE, at the time). Her participation in the program was by no means the first time she had been called on to defend her ideas against an opponent. And if there has indeed been any “transformation into a celebrity”, in her case this happened prior to her appearing on the show. The L’Oréal website posted a page of “celebrities who speak out” with a photo of Carole da Silva looking very beautiful, as glamorous as any celebrity (wearing make-up doubtless by L’Oréal); she appeared alongside other more well-known figures, such as Patrick Lozès, president of the CRAN (Representative Council of France’s Black Associations), and Jean-François Amadieu, director of the discrimination watchdog authority. This is further evidence that Carole da Silva had herself chosen to be “assigned” to her ethnic origins. The same is true for business managers: self-promotion works in their best interests, and taking part in this program offered them the opportunity to showcase their field of activity. Stéphanie Bullier (MLP1) admitted that participating in Paroles des Français had already won her a certain amount of “fame […] a bonus for us and for our trade” (www.ouestfrance. fr, 2 March 2012). It is therefore hardly surprising that she was “happy to come back” despite a not entirely satisfactory result, in political terms, the first time: the economic benefits took priority. She took advantage of her first appearance, in 2011, to give President Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni some of her new products—make-up brushes. If Stéphanie Bullier did not become a TV star herself, she tried to be the first to recruit the most important celebrity of the time to promote her products. This also meant she got a great deal more publicity in the regional press, launching, for instance, an open-door campaign with the editorial team of Ouest France, who were happy to promote this Briochine (woman from Saint-Brieuc, Brittany) who provided them with a ready-made subject. 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 63

The participants got publicity in the regional press in particular, with emphasis being placed on the local aspect: “a Montpelliérain” (a resident of Montpellier in SW France) (Midi Libre, 5 March 2012); “a Saumuroise” (a female resident of Saumur in the Loire Valley) (Ouest France, 5 March 2012); “the Aveyronnais business manager” (from the Aveyron area, southern France) (Midi Libre, 22 February 2012); “the Sétois fisherman” (from the seaside town of Sète) (Midi Libre, 22 February 2012); a “cardi- ologist in Falaise”, “the Falaisien” (in Calvados, NW France) (Ouest France, 1 March 2012). Few of them got publicity in the national press— which focused more on the responses of the politicians—except one: Sophie Poux (FH2). She appeared in L’Express of 28 February, because after appearing in Paroles de Français in 2010, she was awarded the Order of Merit by President Sarkozy. Although they were celebrities on a local level, the participants did not make it to national renown unless they were associated with the then president of France or the “First Lady”. Nevertheless, being a star even for just one day enabled them to put their business or association in the limelight while at the same time getting their demands onto the political agenda. Being linked to their area or neighborhood in the regional press reestablished their local ties, which meant they didn’t stray too far from the real sovereign people.

Conclusion PDC had more modest aims than J’ai une question à vous poser and focused more on the local aspect than on representation at a national level, even though the presenter’s discourse mobilized the notion of French nationality. This was an alternative way of establishing a relationship with the viewing public, allowing a more detailed showcasing of the participants’ daily lives. With regard to the way in which the participants were recruited, our study shows a certain paradox: on the one hand, there was a certain amount of professionalization of lay people, who gained confidence and thus potentially also independence, but, on the other hand, this occurred through the employer TV channel’s increased control, as it cultivated its relationships with these privileged individuals. This makes it difficult to disentangle the participants’ freedom from their assimilation of the codes of practice imposed by the TV channel. There was some media stereotyp- ing, as when people of color were assigned to their ethnic origins, and yet the examples of Carole da Silva (MLP5) and Tibault Baka (NS3) demonstrate the total ambiguity of the situation. On the one hand, they had both 64 S. PERRY already proclaimed themselves spokespersons for so-called visible minority groups, so it would be wrong to say that TF1 assigned them this role; on the other hand, it was indeed the TV channel that decided to ask them to confront the two politicians who made immigration and integration their favorite topic, hoping no doubt to get a few spectacular moments out of their discursive skills. Was this manipulation? Was it exploitation? Yes, it was, in that we find the same old patterns: two people from minority backgrounds on each of the programs with Marine Le Pen and Nicolas Sarkozy, to speak about integration and the role of Islam; only one such person on the program with François Bayrou; and no such person for Eva Joly, Jean- Luc Mélenchon or François Hollande. The “theatrocratic constraint” (Balandier 1980: 13) took precedence over the mission of providing information. No, it was not, in that the participants took part of their own accord and even through their own initiative within their local communities. In fact, rather than talking of the TV channel’s manipulative power, perhaps it would be more accurate to talk about a collective production, where there was mutual benefit. This was particularly true for small business managers, skilled tradespeople and small retailers (a large majority in our corpus), who took advantage of these opportunities to gain publicity and put their concerns on the media agenda. It is true that participants often expressed some disappointment afterward. Their main grievances were the lack of time, the poor responses given by the politicians or, in one particular case, the fact that they were not able to question the politician of their choice (Bruno Liguori [EJ1], a fisherman, required to question the ecologist Eva Joly instead of the candidate for the Center, François Bayrou [Midi Libre, 22 February 2012]). As a host welcoming carefully selected guests and full of generosity, TF1 did seem to have certain advantages; the reciprocity of the relationship had its limits. The fact is that the participants, driven by a professional or social concern, or out of a sense of civic duty to contribute to a democratic debate, took it very seriously that the presidential candidates should answer to them for their actions (or their proposals) and that, in the relationship between politicians and members of the public, the politicians should be judged according to their ability to meet the expectations of the members of the public. So the participants accepted the balance of power established by the program and the role of sovereign people they had been assigned. In their concept of their role, it was important that there was a real debate and that they did not just act as a sounding board for the 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 65

politicians, in spite of the longer speaking time given to the latter. To prevent any monologues—and this was mostly a prime objective—the participants interrupted, argued with the politician, asked for clarification and expressed their feelings through gestures and facial expressions (sincere or ironic smiles, nodding, frowning, etc.) as well as through their discourse. If everything was organized by TF1, who chose the topics each person would present, allocated speaking turns (with a good number of more talkative people in each show) and even determined which politician would be questioned by which participant, each participant retained a small margin of manoeuver within their own turn that they could use if they wished. It was a jointly written performance or, to use the words of Charaudeau and Ghiglione (1997: 172), a “domination freely consented to”. Representing the people, in these conditions, meant playing a pre-established role but playing it fully and to the best of one’s ability. If the participants expressed some disappointment after the show, it was mainly because they hadn’t had enough time—they would have liked to carry on playing their part—and not because they had a different concept of what it meant to represent the people. Within the range of possible concepts of the people that TF1 might have used in its shows, the people on PDC were not emancipators fighting against an abusive government, despite the fact that their questioning of politicians—taking them to task over their shortcomings—sometimes seemed like a protest by the governed against those governing them. Their demands were not very radical, in that they were not asking for the existing system to be overthrown. On the contrary, by agreeing to participate in this kind of show and doing so without seeking to disrupt its smooth running as planned by the producers, they demonstrated their belief in the existing democratic and media system. Was this a delusion that they had fallen for, as suggested by the term “a sham democracy”? We prefer the term “stage setting” rather than the term “sham”, with its pejorative con- notations (of illusion, even a violation or perversion of democracy). These programs reproduced the discussion format of a kind of direct democracy—a reminder that politicians are answerable to the sovereign people— without turning into deliberative consultations; no policies resulted solely or even directly from these programs, and even less so any political line or action. Their contribution was limited to a debate about ideas and about the choice of politicians in relation to those ideas. In this, the programs were similar to a representative democracy, in which the sovereignty of the people is also very limited and is something of a myth. In the words of 66 S. PERRY

Frédéric Lambert and Sandrine Lefranc (2012: 62) summarizing Joseph Schumpeter, “An election is not so much about getting the people’s wishes converted into policies as it is about allowing an effective selection of the elite.” In contributing to the selection of the French president, a program like PDC had the virtue of emphasizing current issues—chosen, it’s true, by TF1, but expounded by people for whom a given current affairs issue was important in their daily life. In the end, the transformation of lay people into celebrities turned out to be very limited—as was also their power. Their participation in two (or sometimes three) programs gave them a moment of fame that may have been useful—for example, making them more confident in the studio or serving some purpose when the participants went back to their own region. For some, it may have led to new relationships that would be useful at a later date. However, if TF1 continues to take the easy way out by continuously inviting the same participants, the nature of their participation will be put at risk. As they are increasingly marked out by their repeated appearances, they might no longer be sufficientlyordinary , no longer real lay people and no longer playing the same role of representing the electorate. However, if TF1 were to create a pool, constantly renewed through successive news bulletins, of specific people able to embody a wide range of topics of debate, this would enable the TV channel to keep using its method of recruitment, but with new faces. If this possibility remains, nevertheless, uncertain, and TF1 is unlikely to reproduce this particular format, the main reason is PDC’s failure in terms of ratings.2

Notes 1. The Centrist François Bayrou, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Far Left), François Hollande (Socialist Party), Eva Joly (Ecologist), Marine Le Pen (National Front) and Nicolas Sarkozy (Center Right) are six of the ten candidates in the French presidential election in 2012. 2. In fact, at the next presidential election in 2017, TF1 abandoned the idea of a prime-time political program altogether, and instead hosted a debate between the five leading candidates in the polls. In short, they eschewed both participation by members of the public and journalist questioning, in favor of inter-candidate exchanges. See Perry (2018) for a discussion of this outcome and its significance for political broadcasting in France. 3 FROM LAYPERSON TO TV CELEBRITY? TELEVISING THE SOVEREIGN… 67

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The People During the Presidential Elections on French TV: Announcement of the Election Results and Audience Representations

Stéphanie Kunert, Frédéric Lambert, and Beatriz Sanchez

French Original Publication: Le peuple des élections à la télévision. L’annonce faire au public et à ses figures. In J. Dakhlia, D. Le Nozach, C. Ségur (Eds.) (2016). À la recherche des publics populaires (2). Être peuple. Nancy: Éditions universitaires de Lorraine. Translation: Stephen Ward Butler

S. Kunert Équipe de recherche de Lyon en Sciences de l’information et de la communication (ELICO), Université Lumière Lyon 2, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected]

F. Lambert (*) Centre d’analyse et de recherche interdisciplinaires sur les médias (CARISM), Institut Français de Presse, Université Paris 2, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] B. Sanchez Centre national de mémoire historique, Bogota, Colombia

Introduction Jacques Julliard in Les lieux de mémoire wrote that the people is the spiritual foundation of a democracy (Julliard 1992). This is exactly what we would like to show here, that the people does not really exist but is rather a spiritual representation that a democracy creates of itself. A few years ago, Jürgen Habermas made the following statement1: “Even today, an important question is how we perceive that a society acts democratically on itself”. The question is legitimate: what do our societies do every day to maintain the vitality of their democratic culture? Yet, going further in this line of questioning, we might ask, is it important today to understand how societies represent the people and act on the people to express the general will? Inspired by the concept found in À la recherche des publics populaires2 and attracted by the ontological promise of “being people”, which is bound to make the nostalgics of Michelet starry-eyed, we investigated one of the most important moments in the democratic process. The results of the presidential elections in France are announced on television and enabled us to observe how a people as a being was constructed and staged using ordinary people, the television viewers who, for the most part, regularly watch this key moment in the political future of the country. At this precise moment, when the general will of the people coalesces in the election result, it is necessary to create a representation of the people of France. While the candidates each focus on fostering a unified people (all candidates are obliged to represent the people as a whole), television has to face the facts: part of the people have won (the winners) and the other part has lost (the defeated). On that day this divided people must then reconstitute itself. This is the very founding principle of democracy. Yet, unfortunately on that day, some are overjoyed and others are miserable: it is inevitable. What becomes apparent in our study is that the hypothesis of an ontol- ogy of the people does not work. The people is commanded into being; it is the performative result of political discourse and mediated speech. This does not mean that the people have been betrayed, however. All it means is that while the people are clearly sovereign, they have delegated their sovereignty, in the name of the Republic and in pursuit of democracy, to those with skills they do not have. Political speech and media systems play a major role in the performance of the people, the spiritual foundation of democracy. And the public debate taking place in public arenas is there to give the people provisional form. By referring to the 2012 presidential 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 71

elections, and also to the representation of the people during television broadcasts for the 2007 election result, we aim to determine how the people as a concept is depicted in the media.

The People of the Elections and Its Representations on Television

Choice of Corpus and Analytical Method Here we are not interested in the self-representation of the public as a people, but rather the way in which the media applies pressure to “create a people”, or “to be” a people, through a “process of selection, condensa- tion and narrative construction, or in other words through media format- ting” (Voirol 2005: 102). We will use “open semiotics” (Boutaud and Veron 2007)3 to analyze how the people is depicted in two TV programs. These are the news programs of the French TV channels TF1 and BFM TV4 and the footage comes from the announcement of the presidential election results on 6 May 20125 and 6 May 2007.6 We have chosen to analyze a television corpus due to what Marlène Coulomb-Gully called “televisual mediativity”, which is a continuation of the works of Philippe Marion (1997: 79). In her work Coulomb-Gully concentrates on the pro- prioceptive specificity of this media, which relies entirely on viewers’ sensitivity (Coulomb-Gully 2001: 12). With its inter-semiotic mix of sound, image (stationary and moving), and text, television is a form of media that strongly ritualizes how the people is depicted on screen when election results are announced. The choice of the news programs from TF1 and BFM TV will allow us to determine whether there are any variations in how the people is represented on screen by different media outlets. However, we are not observing whether the people is represented differently depending on the respective political positions of the two channels (which are in fact very similar) but rather based on the mechanisms employed in enunciating the results, our hypothesis being that while the people is constructed by televised media this construction is likely to change when the media system changes at a formal level. If we base ourselves on the concept of “contrat de communication” (Veron 1983a, b, 1985), for the two programs, two distinct mechanisms are revealed. On the one hand, there is the classic general TV channel (TF1) which has the usual format expected of a TV 72 S. KUNERT ET AL. news program, with its special post-election editions during the evening; on the other hand, there is a 24-hour news channel (BFM TV) whose news programs repeat continually with additions and changes as they are rebroadcast. We could thus deduce that the speaker and those receiving the message would be different from one channel to the other, as well as the worlds they depict. However, we will concentrate on a precise element of the footage, namely, the representations of the people as created by the channels and we will observe whether, despite the similarity of the channels’ political ideologies, the distinct enunciation mechanisms produce different or similar representations of the people. To analyze the representations of the people that are formed and transformed through performative reiteration over the 16 hours of television investigated, we rely on the concept of performativity (Austin 1991). We will thus describe the French people as it is presented in media locution. Here there is no “constative utterance” as Austin described (a constative utterance is either true or false) but rather a production through the utterances of the channels. Integrated into televised rituals (journalists, panel discussions, giant screens, live footage, duplex broadcasting from two places at once, etc.), the people is constructed according to a specific context. Similarly, the concept of “performative reiteration” is based on Dayan and Katz (1996) who, in their study of ceremonial television, discussed the dramatic force of images. Thus, “How to do things with words” here should be considered as “How to do things with images”. The people constructed on TF1 and BFM TV can be separated into two major representations. On the one hand (TF1), there is the people of the elections, who appear to mirror the channel’s viewing audience, and on the other hand (BFM TV), there is a people mainly constructed from an amassed crowd (but also a parallel people on social networks). To begin with, we will see how the TF1 viewers literally become the people of the elections, divided into two camps (which will in turn be performatively transformed into the people of France while continuing to be divided).

The People of the Elections as a Mirror of the TV Viewing Audience How do we move from the concept of a television audience to that of the people of the elections? The images that appear on the screen during the announcement of the election results on TF1 show individuals, groups of people, and crowds awaiting and receiving the results. Sometimes the 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 73 individuals are at home in small groups but most often they are gathered together in public places (meeting rooms, bars, or streets). These groups and clusters of people are presented to viewers as being the people of the elections due to the cumulative effect of repeated images of crowds, shown to be impatient, nervous, uncontrollable, static, angry, and even disappointed. They are then presented as being the people of France, through a set of national and political symbols, and rituals (cf infra). First, we see the transformation of the TF1 audience into the people of the elections. This process is made explicit in a particularly striking shot of the Special éléctions program from 6 May 2007, which appears twice (19:47:52 and 19:58:267). The image shows the activities of the right-wing UMP Party (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) gathered together in Paris on Rue de la Boétie (HQ UMP Party based there) awaiting the results under a gigantic screen which is itself broadcasting the image of the very same crowd under the screen. The performative aspect of the people is shown here in the reiterated display of the crowd image. We are shown a crowd (of UMP activists), which creates a people, in the process of watching itself become the people on the screen. When the famous journalist Claire Chazal’s face appears on the giant screen, we see that the images broadcast in the street above the crowd are actually the live images from TF1. The media thus creates a mise-en-abyme (a picture within a picture), simultaneously producing crowd images and undertaking a performative portrayal of the people. This presence of a screen within the screen and of a crowd within a crowd clearly reveals the media utterance system that simultaneously shows the crowd as the TF1 audience and as the people of the elections. The people are depicted as being that audience watching itself on the screen. We might think that through the continuity of image and mise-en-abyme of the crowd looking at itself on screen a feeling of unity would be fostered (the creation of a single and same people). We will see, however, that both in 2012 and in 2007, far from showing a united people, the two channels presented the image of two distinct peoples and a divided France.

The Celebratory Unity of the Crowd The narrative proposed by BFM TV is also that of a people consisting of jubilant crowds. The audiences watching the elections (both at BFM TV and at TF1) are excited, enthusiastic, and restless. The voice-over of the journalist said: “At 8 p.m., when François Hollande appeared on the giant screen, there was total jubilation and relief. The famous Place de la Bastille, 74 S. KUNERT ET AL. symbol of the people in power, of humanist values, was already full of people and crowds continued to arrive. Towards midnight, François Hollande arrived on stage and stayed there for more than an hour and a half, in total communion with his voters”8 (we have added the italics). The voice-over repeated the terms “crowd”, “gathering”, “people”, and “cortège” several times. Twice, the journalist referred to the French people as a “swarm”. The crowd on the winning side appeared as powerful, and occupied the soundscape of the TV viewer even more so than the visual scape. In fact, when the audience/people were not in the image, they were still present in the noise (shouting, hubbub, horns) they produced, which almost drowned out the voice-over of the commentator. The public was also present in the gaze and gestures of François Hollande, waving to the crowd. In 2007, as in 2012, the channel thus focused on the visual rhetoric of the elected politician or presidential candidate facing the crowd. Only the faces of the protagonists of the elections were shown; the people were thus presented as a gathering of individuals in a faceless crowd. This treatment by the channel thus appeared to leave a bigger space to be filled by the “new face of France”, by the one who would incarnate the nation through their voice, body, and face (Coulomb-Gully 2012). The voice-over announced: “So we have just listened to the 15-minute speech, against a background of tumult, of jubilation around the Place de la Cathédrale”. Then we see François Hollande shaking hands; the crowd is represented in the body parts of those present. The public is embodied in the outstretched hands. Once again, the people are shown within the televised metaphor of the crowd (high-angle shots or wide-angle shots). We also see this representation in the TF1 footage from the 6 May 2007 news, in which individuals are divided and depersonalized during the president’s walk through the crowd. Here the crowd was alternatively filmed in a high-angle shot (the camera goes over the road from what we imagine to be a balcony) and at the height of the faces and busts of bodies crammed into Rue de Solférino (Socialist Party HQ). Nicolas Sarkozy was filmed on Rue d’Enghien shaking many hands; the camera is located behind the bodies of those stretching out their hands to him.9 As a viewer, this gives us the sensation of “belonging” to the crowd, of being part of the people of the elections. In addition to a similarity in how the channels portray the crowds through images, we can also observe that they ritualized how the results were announced, repeatedly using specific sets of symbols associated with the people of the elections. 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 75

Results Ritual and People Symbols

Symbolic Hyper-Ritualization of the People of the Elections Jubilant France shown both on TF1 and on BFM TV brings to mind the concept of ceremonial television (Dayan and Katz 1996). This can clearly be seen in a ritual for which the results are broadcast at precisely 8 p.m., a ritual which remains the monopoly of television, even though channels compete with each other. The TV viewer is not a simple spectator but becomes an actor and a witness. The program involves “experiencing” and celebrating the present (as represented by the channels). Thus, by repeat- ing these crowd images, the channels were able to ritualize the program. The images were also saturated with symbols, which filled them with meaning. Erving Goffman (1977) might have said that these representations of the crowd as the people were filled with symbols and “hyper- ritualized” as a result. The significant presence of political symbols helped hyper-ritualize the representations of the people of the elections. This is primarily due to “the importance of the visual component in television”, which “asserts, or re-asserts, all the importance of the political symbols related to this visual dimension” (Coulomb-Gully 2001: 73). This is not about random symbols “created by the candidates and their communication teams” (ibid.), but historic symbols such as Place de la Bastille as a symbol of the people’s sovereignty, the red rose as a symbol of François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party (very present on screen10), and youth as a symbol of the future and of progress. We will detail later the paradoxical return of the myth of “Black-Blanc-Beur” France11 as a symbol of “national unity”. There is thus a symbolic hyper-ritualization of the people of the elections through several crowd representations, in particular representations of the “winning side”.

The Versatile Symbol of Youth: The People and Their Generations During the TF1 news program in May 2012, the Socialist Party activists were first shown as the “winning team”, which believed in unity, “reconciliation”, and positive “change”. The close-up shots of people in the crowd were primarily young adults whose comments the journalists chose to relay with sentences like the following: “France is beautiful, today we love France”; “It is a very moving moment and at the same time, a moment of reconciliation. France will be soothed”; “Today we get hope back, the 76 S. KUNERT ET AL. right for respect, the right for dignity. Today human dignity replaces division”. Repeated images of children were added to this symbol of youth representing a radiant future. When the program run-down was presented for the TF1 news program on 7 May 2012, the camera zoomed into the crowd and focused on a smiling little girl, her eyes looking up to the sky, her arms raised. We find this image used again later in the program, pre- ceded by another close-up of a little girl in the arms of an adult, carrying a flag covered with a slogan. When these images came onto the screen, the voice-over announced the words “hope” and “inspire”.12 The term “future” was, later in the program (when the À l’heure des résultats [Results time] report comes on), used by one of two young boys aged between eight and ten years old who appeared on screen one after the other. They were both of diverse backgrounds (meaning they were perceived and constructed as non-white). The youth filmed in 2007 was conversely on the “UMP side”. TF1 depicted the political party through groups of youths gathered in Gaveau hall (where candidate Nicolas Sarkozy is about to pronounce his first discourse as elected president) and at Neuilly sur Seine (where candidate Nicolas Sarkozy voted) (19:50:47:21). They were jumping around, waving balloons and blue banners, and epitomized the energy of youth. Just after the results were announced, the crowd in blue made up of UMP activists was filmed and there is a close-up shot of a young, very excited, white man, perched above the crowd among a forest of blue balloons. He was thrusting his clenched fists to the sky and cheering for the victory, then smiling and applauding. He was wearing a white T-shirt with “Jeunes” (Youth) and “Sarkozy” written in capital letters (we cannot see the entire slogan 20:00:47:03). The crowd in blue was then filmed again in a wide shot that goes over a group of young adults (at the center of which there is a young, white, blonde woman) jumping up and down and chant- ing, “We won!” Still in 2007, among the TF1 images of the “red” crowd of the Socialist Party after the announcement of the results, we can also see a child on the shoulders of an adult (20:02:37:13) but this image is less clear and fades back into the crowd. On the right of the screen which is divided in two during the speech of candidate Ségolène Royal after her defeat had been announced, the face of a young woman is shown at the moment when Royal says: “Strong participation in this election shows that there is a renewal in our democracy everywhere in the country and more notably in 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 77 urban neighborhoods. This has been the case among the youth, who registered to vote in their droves. Bravo to all of those young people for com- pleting their civic duty”. Yet, the face of the young woman shown on screen is withdrawn and concentrated; it shows anything but a feeling of joy13 (20: 05: 32: 20). On TF1, between 2007 and 2012, youth as a symbol of a radiant future switched camps from being pro-UMP in 2007 to being left wing in 2012 (when the UMP militants are shown, at least on TF1, as being older, while young people and children are shown among “left-wing people”). On 6 May 2012, BFM TV also banked on these images of the future. Just after François Hollande’s speech at Place de la Cathédrale, we are shown a child (for 28 seconds) who, with arms raised, seems to be celebrating Hollande’s victory. Progress is embodied here by youth, the future people who will take over (the voice-over of the journalist announced: “all generations are celebrating the victory of the Socialist candidate”). Yet in 2007, both on TF1 and on BFM TV, youth “belonged” to the UMP. Faced with extremely stereotypical left-wing supporters (BFM TV portrayed several Socialist Party activists, all civil servants, most of whom were teachers), Sarkozy’s right-wing supporters were often shown by the journalist as being dynamic, young, and part of the rock ‘n’ roll generation. The young people were predominately men, between 20 and 25 years old, who compared the president to a star or even a music idol (“Sarko is cool, he has a rock ‘n’ roll attitude! I mean, he’s really determined!”). The youth shown on the screen resonated with the musical celebrations at Place de la Concorde. We can conclude that, on both channels, the theme of youth as a symbol of the future is attributed to the “winning side” whatever their political camp. This future is associated also with childhood as a symbol of renewal and hope. The fact that half of the children shown in 2012 are of diverse ethnic backgrounds (or “coming from diversity”) contributes to another representation of the winning left wing in 2012: that of a France united “above and beyond differences”. This renewal of hope is mentioned repeatedly along with President François Mitterrand’s victory in 1981 (of which the omnipresent red rose symbol was already a reminder). There are visual links between the images of the winning side in 2012 and those broadcast on screens on 10 May 1981. In the archive images rebroadcast by TF1, the camera also focused on a little girl carrying a rose in her hand and sitting on the shoulders of her father, as well as on a black 78 S. KUNERT ET AL. man smiling and waving a newspaper with the title “It’s Mitterrand” in the midst of a jubilant crowd including many young people. We thus have another mise-en-abyme: a people within a people (the people of 1981 in the people of 2012), through the frequent representation of Mitterrand throughout the special edition of BFM TV. However, neither roses nor colors were used here but rather a location, that of Place de la Bastille, as emphasized by the journalist’s voice-over, “From 8 p.m. this Sunday, tens of thousands of people came together in Place de la Bastille. 31 years ago, on 10 May 1981, the French Left celebrated the victory of François Mitterrand right here”. BFM TV thus superimposed different representations of the public over a 31-year gap. The people in the image were shown as “descending” from the people in May 1981. They had reawakened socialist ideas, the Mitterrand effect, and were part of the French People’s genealogy.

The People and Diversity The left-wing people were portrayed in the TF1 news program on 6 and 7 May 2012 as embodying diversity. A great number of ethnically diverse people were shown in the crowd through close-up shots and interviews (their comments were then edited out to one sentence per person). These repeated images reactivate a myth that was defined by Barthes (Barthes 1957), that of “Black-Blanc-Beur” (black-white-brown) France from the 1998 football World Cup. The crowds of jubilant young people and the individuals shown in close-up shots wore the colors of the Tricolor (with a small flag painted on their cheeks) or waved French flags like football supporters, and sang the French national hymn “the Marseillaise”. The voice-overs on the “regional celebrations” report (TF1 news program from 7 May 2012 rebroadcasting images from the night before) accompany shots of a young white man, a young black man, and a young man of presumably North African descent side by side. They are waving a French flag together, which covers their bodies up to the chest, making them equal under this symbol of the nation. This image, which stays on the screen, evokes the critical analysis of an old cover of Paris-Match by Roland Barthes in Mythologies (postface of 1970). This cover of the magazine represented a young black soldier saluting the French flag.Paris-Match had just used this image to support the idea of French colonial “greatness”, suggesting, “all the nation’s sons, without distinction of color, serve under its flag” (Barthes1957 [1970]). It was published at a time of fierce debate 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 79 about colonialism. More than 50 years later, it is no longer the supposed “greatness” of the colonial empire that is symbolized by this image of the three young men holding the French flag, but rather “unity” and “coming together” as championed by the Socialist Party. The analogy with the French people as a football nation “brought together across their diverse backgrounds” becomes explicit in the part of the program entitled Croquis d’une soirée (Highlights from Election Evening) with images from the election evening. The report voice-over announced, “On the Champs-Elysées, a very symbolic location, people gave free rein to their emotions. A true Match night atmosphere”. The reactivation of this myth was not without meaning. We know that Nicolas Sarkozy became a divisive figure between the so-called French of pure descent and the French from immigrant families, when he created the controversial Ministry of National Identity (Lambert 2011). Under his presidency directives were issued limiting the rights of foreign residents (see the Guéant directive, limiting access to employment for foreign students), yet paradoxically, he was also the President of the Fifth Republic who appointed the greatest number of ministers from “visible minorities”. In such a government, the aforementioned minorities were often perceived by the opposition as having been instrumentalized to create an official image of openness and tolerance toward “French people from diverse backgrounds”. Does the use of ethnic minorities in the TF1 program to illustrate the left-wing argument about coming together serve the same purpose? The same question may be asked about a young man who, after the victory of François Hollande was announced, stated on camera: “As a gay man I am happy as I hope to get married and to adopt a child one day”. So (in a far less recurrent way than for ethnic minorities) sexual minorities were also used as symbols of diversity in general. Images of a diverse France were only marginally present on BFM TV in 2007, but in 2012 the channel represented France as being multiethic, urban, and united. The myth of “diversity” and of a united people (Black- Blanc-Beur France) was reused in 2012 after having been attributed to the “defeated” supporters of candidate Ségolène Royal in 2007.14 Yet here it was employed paradoxically, since (at least on TF1) this “diverse France” was identified as heading toward certain economic disaster. An image analysis reveals a negative counter-representation of the “people who won”. 80 S. KUNERT ET AL.

Counter-Representations of the People Who Won: An Uncertain Future

A People Heading Toward Economic Crisis In the introduction to the TF1 news program dedicated to the election results of May 2012, one image appears that will gradually erode the idyl- lic vision of a young diverse population moving toward a flourishing future. When the journalist Laurence Ferrari presented the contents of the news program, the video (with the caption: “Victory of the Left – A Night of Parties”), projected on the big screen behind, showed viewers the jubilant crowds on election night (the people who won) yet finished with a rather striking sequence. We are shown a poster with the bust and face of candidate François Hollande, a little hidden by a cloud of smoke, which is carried on outstretched arms through the crowd just in front of a no-entry sign on the road. The last image in this video sequence15 shows a raised arm in the crowd holding a red flare producing smoke, pointing up toward the sky. While here it may be a symbol of victory, boats in distress to signal their position and alert the coast guards can also use flares. This image falls within a crisis paradigm, which is then used throughout the program. We can see in it a negative symbol of the future (literally) being barred (by the no-entry signpost). It should be remembered that during the final phase of campaigning, president and candidate Nicolas Sarkozy had threatened that France risked being faced with an unprecedented economic crisis if his rival were elected. The report sequence entitled “Croquis d’une nuit” (Highlights from Election Night), which shows the jubilant crowds and disappointed UMP activists, closed on the theme of an economic crisis. Journalist Laurence Ferrari announced: “The party at the Bastille cannot help but bring to mind 10 May 1981, exactly 31 years ago. Yet, the comparison ends there, since today we are in the midst of an economic crisis and our society has changed enormously”. The report that followed outlined the close similarities between the results of the 1981 elections and those that had just happened. The voice-over insisted on the theme of economic crisis: “The crisis is clearly the main element in common between the two elections”. This was supported visually with a graph showing growing unemployment, the logo of a branch of the ANPE (French job search organization in 1981), the logo of Pôle Emploi (current French job search organization). The next report focused on the results of legislative elections in 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 81

Greece, a country that, at the time, was experiencing an unparalleled economic crisis. By constantly mentioning the devastating crisis that President Nicolas Sarkozy had threatened would sweep through France if candidate Hollande were elected, the crisis became a reality in the televised discourse, which transformed the threat into a prophecy. The people of the elections on TF1 on the night of 6 May 2012 were a divided people separated into a France of winners and of the disappointed. However, the program was implicitly aimed at those who were worried and disappointed; it repeatedly referred to the theme of an economic crisis ahead, depicting the jubilant people as passengers on a cruise ship approaching dangerously close to an iceberg (thus depicted as being under an illusion) and for whom there were difficult times ahead. The news program Special élections, lasting four hours (from 8 p.m. to midnight) on 7 May 2012, reused the images broadcast the night before. Here, however, they were organized in such a way as to reduce the idea of jubilation and hope and boost the threat of a crisis shown to be imminent, implying that the election of the left-wing candidate would be responsible for what lay ahead.

Going Beyond the “Rallying” Effect of the Left: The National Division As we have seen, the people who won on 6 May 2012 was portrayed on that day as a crowd of hopeful individuals, embodying youth and “diversity”. However, the TF1 news program of 7 May 2012 built the picture of a France divided. This was achieved by systematically comparing the “winning side” with the UMP activists who thought that the defeat of Sarkozy meant “France is going down the drain!” The theme of a France split in two was ubiquitous, reappearing throughout the program. The following extract clearly illustrates this back-and-forth motion between “the two camps” and the staging of a divided France. This has the rhetorical effect of removing any possibility of fraternal unity embodied by the people who won and canceled the positive repercussions inherent in the reuse of the myth of France as being “Black-Blanc-Beur”. As the report sequence entitled “Regional Parties” finished (on the aforementioned images of children embodying renewal and hope), the presenter came back on the screen, announcing in a solemn voice: “As I was saying, once the festivities are over the French expect practical decisions and action to increase purchasing power and improve education. Here is a snapshot of what voters in 82 S. KUNERT ET AL. one housing estate in Châtillon think”. Then the first image of the following report appeared, showing the typical façade of a high-rise block of council flats. The report included a retired couple disappointed with the election results. Two older, white people on modest incomes here embody the people who lost. They are shown “when the results are announced” (the caption on the video) in the process of “surfing the Internet” (according to the voice-over) on an old model of computer to find the results before the official announcement. We then see a woman of apparent North African descent, then a young man of color stating his hope of seeing candidate François Hollande win the elections. This report on the “moment when the results were announced” in this “working-class” urban area thus provides us with a snapshot of a divided France. On the one side there is “diverse France” full of hope and youthful energy and on the other there is a disappointed France filled with worried or angry people. The representation of a people split in two is a major characteristic of how this evening in 2012 was handled on BFM TV. In fact, we see a significant difference between the speeches of both candidates François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy and the film montage created by the channel. The two candidates spoke about a united France, a single and same people (many repetitions, within the semantic field of unity), while the channel presented the division between “left-wing France and right-wing France”, between the “winners” and the “losers”. The voice-over says: “As you see here, two sides, two crowds”. We thus have a sharp contrast between the speech of the two men, who both focus on unity, or on “being” French, and the media setting up a visual schism to emphasize the two sides. The voice-over continually builds on this argument saying, “The right-wing people, the left-wing people”. This also happened in 2007 when the media portrayed a double frac- ture. The campaign depicted by BFM TV focused on the contrast between a man and a woman and between two political ideologies. The supporters of left-wing candidate Ségolène Royal represented another people and another image of France to that of Nicolas Sarkozy’s supporters. The country was shown to be more divided and more hateful than ever. After announcing the results, the left-wing supporters insulted the new president on the screen. “Sarkozy, the people will have your hide!” France, far from being united, faced off in a violent duel. In contrast, BFM TV in 2012 did not broadcast images of decline or of a future economic catastrophe. The channel used its special program as a 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 83 means of immediately sharing information and images; this is almost certainly due to the program’s format (a live news program which repeats on a loop, continually updating itself). Viewers are thus thrust into the emotions of the moment, the celebrations and disappointments, with no sug- gestion yet of a catastrophic future.

The People of the Elections as a Symbol of Divided France The elections audiences, as created in the televised news discourse, cannot be the “united and indivisible” people of the Republic. If “being” a people in these two programs had a function (and in particular on TF1 news), it was that of “being a symbol” of a France divided in two. The theme of a divided people is particularly prominent in the special election news program of 6 May 2007 presented by famous journalists Claire Chazal and Patrick Poivre d’Arvor (PPDA). The depiction of the people throughout the program seems to take the complete opposite view of the declaration made by the politician François Fillon (UMP) on the set of the same news program. Just after the announcement of the election results, he said: “Democracy requires us to rally together to resolve the problems of the French people and I want to say tonight that there are not two Frances, there is only one France, and it is with this France that Nicolas Sarkozy will interact”16 (20:09:30). The screen was split in two from the very start of the program; Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, through a voice-over, provided context for the images that were being broadcast. On the left, there were the headquarters of Nicolas Sarkozy on Rue d’Enghien and Rue de Miromesnil (Gaveau hall, where he was due to give his speech), and on the right of the screen there was the headquarters of candidate Ségolène Royal, located on Boulevard Saint Germain. From the very start and throughout the news program we have a visual mechanism that divides. As soon as the results were announced, the images of crowds shown on either side of the screen represented the winners and losers. The crowd in front of Gaveau hall was scattered with blue balloons and portraits of Ségolène Royal surrounded the crowd on Rue de Solférino, with a dominant presence of red. The camera filming the UMP activists inside Gaveau hall shows us relatively young faces, mainly white, holding blue balloons (19:41), and among the crowd there are quite a few people wearing blue T-shirts. The separate colors thus accentuate the visible division on screen. It allowed viewers, when the image of one of the two camps appeared on screen, to immediately identify which “camp” was being referred to, without needing the 84 S. KUNERT ET AL. voice-over comments.17 The crowd of UMP activists was shown to be significantly different from the Socialist Party crowd. The reporters mentioned how the UMP crowd was “not able to stay still”18 (19:45:48:10) while the Socialist Party activists, awaiting the announcement of the results on Rue de Solférino, were more static, and we can distinctly see a young man yawning (19:44:55:14). We know at this point (a quarter of an hour before the announcement of the results) that the candidates, the news channels, and the activists already knew the results and this contributed to a difference in the crowd’s movement (due to enthusiasm or disappointment).19 The layout of the set further accentuated the division into “clans” since the giant screen behind Claire Chazal and Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, who were sitting next to each other and facing the camera, showed the faces of Nicolas Sarkozy (on the left of the screen) and Ségolène Royal (on the right). Journalist Brice Teinturier commented on the “differences” and the “different visions” of the candidates’ programs and policies in the second round of elections. This thus emphasized, through the repetition of the term “difference” (and the use of terms like “contrast”), the separation between the two “camps”. A mosaic of simultaneously broadcast images did, however (at the end of the introduction to the news program at 19:36), give the impression of a “diversity” of voters rather than a division. Yet, a few seconds before the official declaration of the results, the screen was once again split in two. This time, however, it was split horizontally. The “blue” people were located at the top of the image, waving flags and balloons, and the “red” people were on the bottom of the screen and were stationary (with a young man in the center of the screen rubbing his chin looking concerned; 19:59:45:06). It was then obvious which part of this divided people represented winning France. During the breakdown (a traditional moment and one that is highly ritualized when the results are announced on TV), a mosaic of faces (representing individuals who were part of the French people) filled the screen. They represented a diverse people, individuals coming together to create a single united people, and appeared before the face of Nicolas Sarkozy, the new President of the Republic, who was framed from the chest up, using a close-up shot and placed above the crowd waving blue balloons. Then there was a new series of images taken from above the blue crowd. After that the crowd of defeated people appeared as contrasting black figures on a pink background, moving like shadow puppets in front of Ségolène Royal who was framed from the chest up, getting ready to give her speech. Filmed from behind as shadows 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 85 cheering for the losing candidate and shouting “Thank you Ségolène”, were the defeated people a phantom people? The televised mechanism also presented Ségolène Royal as “cut off” from her people through a split screen showing the losing candidate on the left and the crowd listening to her on the right, while the “blue” crowd was shown behind the face of Nicolas Sarkozy a few minutes earlier without a similar separation.20 In 2012, BFM TV also showed a French people divided between a disappointed right and victorious left. But over the course of its special edition, the channel invited television viewers to observe another audience being formed, on social networks. The channel focused primarily on Facebook “and its many likes” on candidate profiles and on the comments of Internet users on the BFM TV page. Another people was expressing its opinions here. These people were not filmed and shown on our television screen but were present in the channel discourse. The social media people wrote, commented, and created groups on Facebook to support or reject the new president in office. Digital social media audiences thus mirrored a people enacting itself at the same time that the one shown in the street was doing the same (the audience active on Twitter was relatively absent from the discourse of the channel. BFM TV did not mention the supporters’ tweets and preferred to discuss the number of web user comments on the “post-it” section of the television website). In 2012, as in 2007, not one people but two peoples can be observed. In the televised discourse, not one representation but many representations of the public as the people (Mehl and Pasquier 2004: 10) can be observed; this was achieved by frequently switching between the “winners” and the “losers”. But in the political speeches that came just after the election results, the candidates offered up another image of the people: one which would become, once again, the spiritual foundation of democracy, as if responding to the pressure to form a typical ideal people, united despite its diversity.

Conclusion It is the utterances of televised and political discourse that shape the people, the spiritual foundation of democracy. While the concept of being people still exists to signify a people, standing up against injustices, fighting for its freedom, in our analysis we have seen how it is pliable in political discourse or media systems. In a video clip published by the Socialist Party for the presidential campaign of 2012, the victory of François Mitterrand in 1981 86 S. KUNERT ET AL. was used to form the narrative of a genesis of a left-wing victory from within the constitution of the Fifth Republic. Right from the first images, we see Mitterrand make a solemn declaration: “I think about the millions of men and women, who inspired our people, who for two centuries, in peace and in war, through their blood, sweat and tears have written the history of France without having access to it”. On 10 May 1981, in the vision of François Mitterrand, the people were made up of these millions of men and women, dead or alive, united in the history of France. These were the people who would find in the voice of the Republic the political discourse and decisions that would represent them. This theme of giving a voice back to the people is an intrinsic part of the rhetoric in the French Left. On the results evening in May 2012, Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate defeated by François Hollande, made a 12-minute declaration that was broadcast on all general TV and news channels in France. The word people was mentioned just once (in the ninth minute, “I have an even stronger attachment to the French people”). But the core of Nicolas Sarkozy’s statement promoted a rallying together for the nation: “François Hollande is the president of France and must be respected”; “There is something far bigger than us, it is our country, our homeland, it is France”; “Think of France, think of the French, think about unity”; “You represent eternal France”. While in the Mutualité hall he was addressing activists who had come together for him, he also knew that he was speaking to disappointed voters, and he reminded them that they belonged to a unified French people. It is vital to include the representations of the people formed by the media alongside the concept of the people that is constructed by political discourse. By placing screens in the streets in symbolic places chosen by communication advisers for the electoral campaign to broadcast the results, the ritual of the electoral evening contributed to confusing the legitimacy of the general public with that of the voters. Yet the televised images and sounds echoing the crowds produced a caricature. The winners sang and danced. The defeated were disillusioned and cried. The nation’s shared feelings were crystallized in the party activists, while a few symbolic portraits replaced the people, as if the Republican legend had been lost along the way.

Notes 1. In a conference given on 10 January 1997 at the University of Paris 8. 2. “Looking for popular publics” is a symposium that was organized by the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM) at the Université de Lorraine (France) in 2012. 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 87

3. In particular, we will analyze media myths and the “rhetoric of the image” as developed by Roland Barthes (1957, 1964), complementing this idea with the analysis of political symbols and rituals in television by Marlène Coulomb-Gully (2001, 2012) and Daniel Dayan (2006; Dayan and Katz 1996). 4. TF1 is a general interest private channel whereas BFM TV is a 24-hour private news channel. 5. We have also used the news program of TF1 from 7 May 2012, which relayed a large number of the images and reports filmed and shown the day before. They were subsequently re-edited in such a way that, as we will see, they created counter-representations of “the people who won”. 6. We will analyze the corpus from 2012 in greater detail, while the corpus of 2007 will allow us to highlight the differences and similarities in the way “the people” is represented on the screen. 7. The figures mentioned in parentheses throughout the text refer to the timecodes of the program excerpts that we describe and use as examples. The programs are available and accessible in the audiovisual archives of the Inathèque in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France) in Paris. 8. François Hollande, Socialist Party, newly elected French president in 2012. 9. Ségolène Royal was also filmed at different times among the crowd. She is seen greeting people with a raised hand (but does not shake their hands like her rival). The left-wing candidate was thus shown on TF1 as being more distant from the people than the other candidate who shakes outstretched hands from the other side of the safety barrier. 10. As Coulomb-Gully reminds us, the symbol of the rose for the Socialist Party was chosen in reference to the quote by Karl Marx (“There will be bread and roses for everyone”). She was referring to the gesture of F. Mitterrand (Coulomb-Gully 2001: 75). Among the images of the jubilant crowds (the “Hollande team”) during the TF1 news program on 7 May 2012, young couples were observed carrying red roses. There is thus a cognitive amalgamation (Breton 1996) between the rose as a symbol of love and the rose as a symbol of the Socialist Party. These images are recurrent throughout the program until the tone changes and contented left- wing people are then portrayed as being a bad omen, bringing the threat of an economic crisis (we will come back to this later). 11. Black-White-Brown, so as to represent multicultural diversity. See infra “The people and diversity”. 12. “The second region in France to have joined together around François Hollande and this hope that yesterday he said he was proud to have rekindled”. 13. Just after the withdrawn face of the disappointed young woman, the face of François Hollande listening to Ségolène Royal appeared. In hindsight 88 S. KUNERT ET AL.

this image seems to be a kind of prophecy, since in his speech after the results were announced in 2012 (speaking as the winner compared to Royal’s defeat in 2007) Hollande insisted on the theme of youth. In the TF1 news program on 6 May 2012, among the crowd waiting for Ségolène Royal in front of Latin America house on Boulevard Saint Germain (the place chosen for her speech) there is a blue banner bearing in white capital letters reading “Change Is Royal”. In addition to the prophetic effect, looking back from 2012 there was a form of interdiscursivity with Hollande’s slogan: “Change happens now”. 14. Among the images of the crowd listening to the speech of S. Royal who had just lost (20: 05: 20: 20), we see men and women of apparent North African and Sub-Saharan origins with frowning faces and disappointed expressions (20:06:30:01, 20:07:23:10). 15. The negative symbol appeared just after L. Ferrari had finished presenting this part of the program. The reporter’s last sentence was “You will discover all of the images and behind the scenes footage of the evening”. The final image thus appeared during a second of silence by the presenter (her next sentence was “The new President’s team already at work this morning” with an image showing Hollande getting out of a car and waving to the crowd). 16. Interestingly, when François Fillon made the statement and continued the theme of a united France, using terms such as “rallying together”, the image on the big screen behind him on the TV set showed the two, divided “peoples” of the elections, with the left-wing supporters on the left-hand side, those who are losing, and the right-wing supporters on the right- hand side, those who are winning (20:09). 17. PPDA at 19: 56: 10 put into worlds the color division, stating: “As soon as it’s blue, it tends to be Sarkozy’s side and when it’s red, it’s Royal. This is just to help you and to help those among you who don’t necessarily know Parisian geography very well”. 18. The voice-over of the reporter at 19: 46: 01 announced: “Tension is rising as the minutes pass […] Rue de la Boëtie where I find myself is filled with people, the supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy seem simultaneously meditative, focused, but sometimes over-excited. Whatever the case maybe, the fog- horns and cameras are ready and are even already in action […]. It is an entire group of young activists who have met here tonight”. 19. A commentary of PPDA further emphasizes this fact since he announced, at 15 minutes from the official declaration of results: “The heart on the left and the heart on the right, we will continue to attempt to switch between the two sides yet, it is rather complicated since you will have guessed through the faces of each side, we can already try to guess the result. Yet, we will try to be as neutral as possible and not show what we already know” (19:45). 4 THE PEOPLE DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS… 89

20. This goes to illustrate the declaration of François Fillon: “The campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy touched the people” (20:09:37) that he had made a few minutes after the results were announced.

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From Televised Media Space to Internet Hypermedia: How Much Room Is There for the Opinions of Ordinary People?

Sébastien Rouquette

Introduction How much room is there for the opinions of ordinary people in the media? Is there a difference between the space allotted in televised media and the Internet as forums for voicing opinions? Is the web of webs conducive to more inclusive public participation in mediatized debates on social issues? To answer these questions, this study considered two types of corpuses. The first is composed of famous French televised debates on

French Original Publication: De l’espace médiatique télévisé à l’hypermedia internet: quelle place pour la parole populaire? In J. Dakhlia (Ed.) (2015). À la recherche des publics populaires (1). Faire people. Nancy: Éditions universitaires de Lorraine. Translation: Niamh O’Brien

S. Rouquette (*) Laboratoire Communication et Sociétés, Université Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 91 C. Ségur (ed.), French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33346-1_5 92 S. ROUQUETTE social issues that have been broadcast since 1958—such as Ça se discute, La Marche du siècle, Du fer dans les épinards, Les Dossiers de l’écran—in total, a corpus of 40 collections and 400 discussions ( Rouquette 2001) for which one of the key questions is whether there were implicit selection criteria for the guests who participated. The second corpus concerns the Internet media space. Whereas not all websites can be considered to be a form of media strictly speaking, they are part of the media space—in other words a forum where social issues are discussed via the media. The Internet can be identified as a media space for several reasons. The first is the observation that Internet contributes, alongside other forms of media, to spreading awareness about facts and events discussed collectively. The second is that the Internet is one of the “agents that manage and direct this public attention by putting events, themes and issues on the agenda of this forum by decrypting current affairs, among other topics” (La fonc- tion d’agenda: see p. 12 in Quéré 1995). Lastly, the Internet plays a role in organizing, hosting and leading discussions between citizens on news or social issues (Quéré, ibid.). A corpus of 60 news sites, web TV sites, blogs on current affairs and content platforms provided the empirical basis for this study (Rouquette 2010). The decision to take a multimedia approach was less to compare television and the Internet, than to understand, by complementary analyses, the underlying social rationales that have an impact on the space for the opinions of ordinary people in these two subfields of the overall media space. The aim is not to compare in detail two media spaces that are constrained by different rationales—such as those that govern programming, audience expectations, business models, program scheduling and the ways information can be accessed—but rather to study the fragmentation of consumption patterns and the diversification of media content providers from a perspective that focuses neither on mass media nor on media practices online alone. An approach from this perspective should reveal which of the factors “affecting the amount of coverage of the opinions of ordinary people in the media” depend on a “newsworthy” programming strategy in each of these areas, and which explanations depend on broader political and social factors. In order to tackle these issues, the study took the following definition of “ordinary people”: referring to the “general” public, mostly in a market- driven economy, and designating the least economically, socially or educa- tionally advantaged classes; to indicate members of the “working” categories arbitrarily measured by the socio-professional origin of contributors to 5 FROM TELEVISED MEDIA SPACE TO INTERNET HYPERMEDIA… 93

discussions on society, and specifically “employees” and “workers”. This methodology implies accepting the assumptions that come with a breakdown into different occupations and socio-professional categories [occupation and socio-professional categories (OSCs)] (professions et categories socioprofessionnelles—pcs—see p. 36 in Desrosières and Thévenot 1996) since, by definition, this type of classification is itself a research construct. Anyone who manages to convince others that they belong to the vague class of “white-collar” workers earns, with this symbolic recognition, a new, implicit definition of their role, power and responsibilities (Boltanski1982 ). By identifying social and professional categories rather than simply professional categories, this classification is clearly designed to reincorporate differences of social origin, education, income and political and cultural behavior into several social groups. Before interpreting the results produced from this taxonomy, we must be aware of this characteristic of the OSC classification. First and foremost, using OSCs makes it possible to measure the under- or overrepresentation of distinct categories in France’s population. This does not mean the assumption that there is complete uniformity of thought across all members of the working classes, but instead that the opinions supported partly reflect the origin of those that hold them, in accordance with their socially defined positions and characterized by their ways of life (living conditions, education, work, etc.). It is important to point this out so that we may establish what can be expected of a media analysis when considering the least privileged sectors of society. What contribution do sociological analyses of media content and analyses of media production make, when focusing on the coverage of the opinions of ordinary people, where “ordinary people” refers to the socio-professional categories “employees” and “blue-collar workers”?

The Role of “Ordinary” Audiences in the Media and Social Space Paradoxically, when studying televised debates on social matters, one of the most pertinent issues is also the least addressed (systematically, at least), and that is, who is speaking? The aim is not to determine whether it is a witness, expert or politician, but rather which social group(s) they represent. The televised social space is a place where feedback on social tastes, expectations, experiences and answers are given priority. Determining 94 S. ROUQUETTE the origins of these social products meets an obvious immediate requirement, namely what is the socially legitimate definition of a good citizen? The systematic examination of a large number of debates can provide a precise breakdown of the various OSCs. The corpus chosen in this study is based on 28 collections and 400 television programs. For each program, attentive listening revealed the profession of most of the “ordinary” guests (i.e. those who were not experts, political representatives, activists, unionists or corporate spokespersons) based on a number of indicators: the presenter’s introduction of the guest, the mention of their profession in a subtitle and so on. These guests were then classified according to the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE)’s occupation and socio-professional categories (OSC) with certain adjustments in order to account for the specific social aspects when recruiting for these debates. Sociologically speaking, L’impopulaire télévision populaire (Rouquette 2001) shows that one of the key issues concerning speaking on television is how citizens/viewers are selected. The implicit invitation criteria for usual guests, as opposed to ideal ones on TV debates, are extremely selective. As can be seen in the portrait drawn up of ideal guests (citizens who are competent, responsible, interesting due to their own interest), the teams of journalists have a high preference for doctors, lawyers, teachers, psychologists, senior managers in the service industries, other journalists and artists (guests who are not political representatives, union activists, experts or spokespersons for non- profit groups). More specifically, the statistical study of 4000 normal guests for the entire period (1958–2000) yielded the following results:

Around 2.3% were farmers (who accounted for 2.4% of the entire labor force during the same period); 9.9% were in the retail sector (5.1% of the labor force); 3.7% were business managers (0.5% of the labor force); 45.8% were intellectuals, senior executives and liberal professionals (13.9% of the labor force); 19.9% represented workers in mid-level positions (20.7% of the labor force); 7.9% were workers (26.6% of the labor force during the same period)

What role does the general audience of ordinary people play in the media space composed of televised debates on social matters? This forum which enables “society” to discuss itself actually only represents one part 5 FROM TELEVISED MEDIA SPACE TO INTERNET HYPERMEDIA… 95

Table 5.1 Proportion of farmers, employees and so on (the six OSCs), in the televised social space in relation to French society

Proportion in 1975 (for 1) Proportion in 1990 (for 1)

Farmers 0.84 0.58 Artisans, small business owners 1.6 1.9 Company directors 4.2 2.9 Executives and senior intellectual 7.3 5 professions Mid-level employees 0.95 1.1 Employees 0.28 0.24 Workers 0.17 0.11

of itself: the middle and upper strata of the service industry because this category of liberal professionals, executives and senior intellectual professions is overrepresented in television studios with respect to the other categories. This is even more evident when we look at the percentages of under- and overrepresented OSCs in the televised social space in relation to the same percentages of OSCs in French society (Table 5.1). There is therefore an overwhelming domination of one category—liberal professionals, executives and senior intellectual professions on television (in all discussions, they have accounted for half of “normal” guests since 1958). Even more precisely, there is a high proportion of certain professions in particular, such as lawyers, general and specialist physicians (namely psychoanalysts) in the liberal professions, judges, qualified higher education professors in the category of senior public servants and, to a lesser extent, administrative and sales managers in the private sectors and, most importantly, people working in IT, the arts and entertainment sectors (journalists, editorial writers, radio and television hosts, writers, directors, actors and singers). How can we explain the overrepresentation of these experts on social issues? Claiming a space in the media requires admitting their legitimacy in one space where they express themselves, in another space, that is, from legitimacy in social organization to legitimacy in media, and likewise from legitimacy in everyday life to legitimacy in the representation of everyday life. Complicity with journalists is not enough. The following are two recruitment criteria implicitly used to justify this monopoly. 96 S. ROUQUETTE

The Role of Associations when Selecting “Legitimate” Guests The domination of social “engineers” is due to two prior “achievements”. First of all, imposing the idea that one cannot let all those who wish to express their opinion do so, because speaking in public requires skills; second, benefiting from the recruitment criteria—and therefore skills criteria—that are more favorable for this group. The result of this imposed interest is favoritism toward those who can prove either their competence or else their familiarity with the subject being discussed. This is the case for community activists. Recruiting from associations means there is an intermediary readily at hand that is reliable and convenient, thus leading to the selection of informed, classifiable guests as they are stakeholders in the discussion. It means recruiting people that are willing enough to influence the cultural, political and celebratory life of the community as a way of being involved. This guest recruitment produces results equivalent to a selection of social categories that are the most confident of being entitled to offer solutions or contribute something. But 47% of senior executives are members of at least one non-profit association, compared to 26% of workers (Observatoire des inégalités 2011): “This is the case for membership, and even more so for participation in the executive committees. Just like in the workplace or the political sphere for example, being active in an association requires a certain poise or self-confidence in order to feel “legitimate” in getting involved or to assert an opinion (speaking in public, for example), in terms of its organization and running.” Executives and middle managers, those working as independent professionals and senior intellectuals benefit from their activism. They claim a right to expression that is equal to the position they have reached in society by strategically deploying their strengths.

Professional Strengths The second media bias is that most of the normal guests are invited onto a show because of their professional competence. Only the experts on social issues and CEOs truly benefit from their social status (on average, they account for 15% more than the “ordinary” guests). The professionalization of ordinary opinions or remarks is specifically granted only to the senior, qualified professions of the services industry. When doctors and nurses are confronted with similar problems, doctors are invited much 5 FROM TELEVISED MEDIA SPACE TO INTERNET HYPERMEDIA… 97 more often, due to an implicit notion that their technical or managerial competence is applicable everywhere, even though they are called upon to give an ideological, moral or philosophical response to social issues. So, what are the economic, political and social challenges when the general, “ordinary” public grants itself the same recognition? Most importantly, which norms are used to determine standard behavior? First of all, the current majority normative trend can be seen as an outright claim to have a neutral viewpoint, or, at the least, to be as open and tolerant as possible. According to this trend, a media host must avoid expressing opinions that are too openly partisan and thus create a nonstan- dard mediator role who is supposed to refrain from any partisan judgment, except to judge that his or her communicating method is valid. Ultimately, this imperative corresponds to a model that combines traditional left-wing values with cultural liberalism. They must not act as an adversary, nor enforce strict standards for various behaviors likely to be described as “unusual” or “marginal” (sadomasochism, for example). In reality, it is a refusal to reveal the most obvious and burdensome traits of standardiza- tion, so that the opinions of the “experts on social issues”—who are mostly invited to speak on a show because of their activism or professional expertise—have greater visibility and a bigger media impact than other social categories of the population. In this context, how can certain media strategies nonetheless create popular televised debates?

The Fragility of Debate and Popular Values Few debates fall outside this dominant model. Holding a popular debate— in other words, a debate that does not follow the norm—logically leads to greater recognition of “ordinary” professions, priorities and activities. This is true of “C’est mon choix” (1999–2004, France 3). However, since the challenges involved in doing so are much greater than that of selecting guests beforehand, and thereby involve a different conception of public debate, the problems raised and ways of resolving them, the analysis can only be an overall one. It should perhaps even be structural. Two radically different options must be considered globally as two opposing ways of constructing this forum: one features in C’est mon choix and the other in Ça se discute (1994–2009, France 2—Table 5.2). The aim is to understand, by comparison, if there is any connection between the type of citizen chosen, the expertise sought, the way of speaking and the type of response expected. 98 S. ROUQUETTE

Table 5.2 Fundamental choices for public media spaces

Majority model, a sort of endless Ordinary model, focusing on televised debate (Ça se discute) mundane issues (C’est mon choix)

Implicit model with Experts on social issues Citizens from working-class ideal citizen/viewer backgrounds Professional expertise Social, medical, legal or Competence unnecessary educational skill Often ranked hierarchically or a degree holder Social or family-related Competence deemed redundant Vital competence competence therefore unnecessary Value placed on expert Explanatory and general Considered to be superfluous knowledge knowledge, deemed complementary Type of normalization “Gradual normalization”, social Norms outwardly declared, liberalism values cementing the social bond

Regularly pinpointed, the most visible differences obviously concern the importance of the debates. For C’est mon choix, we can use the metaphor of the forum. It would nevertheless be an error to underestimate the importance of the topics, or consider the themes addressed as trivial, which would have the same result. What is more serious than the confirmation of a romantic adventure (or its ideology), the importance of family ties and stories or the incessant repetitive discussion of the physical, fash- ion or style assets and the right appearance for the sentimental and marriage market? Matters such as “changing one’s appearance”, “being an expert flirter”, “not liking brunettes”, or playing “can you guess who lives with who?” all come down to different ways of asking the eternal question of how to choose (or discover) our partner. The same is true for matters of homogamy (birds of a feather flock together), the perfect wedding, breaking the rules, the places and ways that these choices are made (nights out with friends, public places or private places?) and the skills expected of each other, the selection criteria such as their family line, partner, parent, and so on. This approach considers the personal accounts from couples, families and children as crucial, and definitely not superfluous. Stories are told as a 5 FROM TELEVISED MEDIA SPACE TO INTERNET HYPERMEDIA… 99 couple, a father or a daughter. This is even promised during the first talk show: “Each day, we will meet guests that have made a major life decision. Sometimes these decisions are opposed, sometimes they are questionable. We’ll hear their stories and then all say what we think, while trying to understand what made them make these decisions. We will also meet their families and friends to find out if their decision was accepted or not. Then we’ll hear from other guests who made the same decision and regretted it” (Evelyne Thomas,1 C’est mon choix, 22/11/99). This construction of the televised media space around ordinary people is in fact unpopular. The analysis of televised debates on social matters confirms one of the findings from the conference À la recherche des publics populaires/Looking for Popular Publics2: “When dealing with themes and values that are supposed to create public acceptance, populism is generally interpreted as demagogy.” If we needed more proof of the difficulty of sharing airtime, the controversy sparked by the scheduling of C’est mon choix (It’s my choice) during prime time is an enlightening example. How can we explain the fact that this program, which deals in a light, amusing way with everyday topics far removed from controversial or political affairs, or rather deliberately defends everyday chit-chat, came under fire from French MPs (see the controversy that erupted over the program as soon as it was moved from daytime TV to prime time in the evening)? The comments in the opinions/debates sections of the major daily newspapers in December 2000 appeared to be that of confused MPs being called upon to “defend” the preeminent excellency of high-level television debates as opposed to chit-chat. But is the reality of the televised social space and mass media the same as that of the new media space online? Of course, it is difficult to answer this question at a time when the shattering of cultural models and the fragmentation of consumption patterns appears to herald the end of the “masses” and when Internet use blurs the distinction between content producers and consumers. Nonetheless, it is necessary, given the growing importance of the Internet in the global media system— there is an increase in the number of sites, number of connected users and hours spent online, and time spent consulting news sites (Rouquette 2010). 100 S. ROUQUETTE

Does the Internet Help Increase the Participation of “Ordinary People” in Political Platforms, Artistic and Informative Issues? To answer this question, we must now focus on the social origin of citizens/opinion bloggers—Internet users who publish their opinions on current affairs in regular blog posts. Given that it is doubly significant in terms of readership (readers) and involvement (bloggers), can this opinion blogosphere, if not revitalize citizens’ political discourse (Jeanne-Perrier et al. 2005), at least influence the way debates are organized, the public agenda and the answers given to the topics dealt with collectively? A first clue, quite significantly, is that opinions published online are more representative of the reality of the opinions of ordinary people than those found in the mass media. As several consistent observations seem to show, “unlike the conventional media, Internet users were apparently massively on the ‘no’ side in the referendum on the European Constitution. Socialist “e-comrades”, meanwhile, were apparently massively in favor of Segolène Royal’s proposal to establish a just order, while local umbrella groups rejected it” (Bommelaer 2007). In short, forums, blogs and citizens’ opinions on the Internet would give a better idea of the state of popular opinion than the dominant media representation systems. Due to the rhetoric of abstract egalitarianism wherein the media never raise the very real issue of minority invisibility (see pp. 297–310 in Macé 2006), and to social censorship by the mass media who favor the experts on social issues, as well as the selection bias of journalists, the large, mainstream media—at least in relation to certain political issues such as Europe—tend to censor more, and are therefore less representative of society than the blogosphere. In other words, the online media space now plays the role that was traditionally that of the conventional media.

Significance and Limits of the Internet as Counter-Media This paradox is a result of two characteristics of the opinion blogosphere. The first encourages “media” representation of political opinions that differ from other media. Internet gives a greater number of people the opportunity to express their ideas, thoughts and ideologies. The second is that, correlatively, the Internet becomes a space where no local authorities, associations or experts are in the majority. Does this paradox mean that the 5 FROM TELEVISED MEDIA SPACE TO INTERNET HYPERMEDIA… 101 online media space allows more room for the opinions of ordinary people? A priori, the fact that the discussions are in writing and physically distant means that less confident people are free to speak whereas normally they would be reserved in public situations. There are many forms of participation such as forums, article comment sections, rankings and blog articles. Some require a high degree of involvement while others enable people to participate without much effort. Another argument comes from Metcalfe’s law, which says that the effect of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. To express it another way: “The more active participants there are, the higher the number of potential participants will want to join the community” (see p. 7 in Carpano 2001). In reality, however, the Internet has not significantly modified the extent to which ordinary people are able to express their opinions and participate in public issues. Apparently, contrary to the idea of greater representation of popular opinion online, we must not ignore the fact that most political bloggers are citizens with a certain political awareness. Several studies of the sociological profile of writers on two citizen platforms revealed that they do not represent the average profile of the whole population (see p. 51 in Rebillard 2007). Among 36,657 “citizen reporters” on the Korean website OhMyNews, most (77%) were men living in the city (42% live in Seoul, while the capital is home to just 10% of South Koreans). Meanwhile, the socio-professional categories whose professions, tastes or level of education mean that they take pleasure in writing and in the news, for example, are overrepresented among the site’s contributors, which accounts for a higher percentage of students (23%) and professionals working in the media or in artistic activities (10%). Others were a lot less represented (e.g. just 1% of the writers were farmers [Eun-Gyoo and Hamilton 2006]). Similarly, among the 3521 “citizen reporters” declared on AgoraVox in 2006, the categories with the highest representation were journalists (8%), students (7%), researchers, doctoral students (6%), followed by educators and teachers (5%), consultants (4%) and engineers (4%) (see p. 180 in Barbe 2006). It is thus clear that what the Internet offers in terms of technology and communications tools for expressing opinions does not fundamentally change things in terms of unequal participation in public affairs. Political opinion blogs are not protected from the political censorship revealed 30 years ago by Daniel Gaxie (1978), which comes from the fact that in addition to the political knowledge acquired in school or at home, “certain social agents are recognized as being political commentators, i.e. as having a socially recognized and prescribed ability, and as being in a good position 102 S. ROUQUETTE to accumulate political knowledge. In turn, this legitimizes their status of being entitled to give their opinions on political issues” (ibid.: 185). This unequal participation is not a result of unequal knowledge of public affairs, which everyone is capable of acquiring by reading the press, and discussing and debating with the people around them. A significant proportion of the working classes have a relationship with politics that is fundamentally dominated by “a feeling of misunderstanding and incompetence, which leads them to stay away from political conversations, press that is seen as too sophisticated and many political issues, sometimes including elections” (see p. 754 in Gaxie 2007). This feeling of inadequacy causes them to avoid giving their opinions, particularly in public, except in fields where they feel particularly competent or on topics that concern them directly: a social measure that will affect their everyday life, for example, a political decision that will affect their purchasing power (ibid.). Unless we were to adopt a very “mediacentric” view and attributed a disproportion- ate importance to the intrinsic characteristics of the blogosphere, we need to remember that Internet users will be much more likely to want to express their opinions online if they feel socially empowered to do so. We must not underestimate the importance of the social, political and cultural context when we look at the developments in the media brought by Internet. How, then, can we explain that the blogosphere offers a more apt media representation of political opinions in society than other media? Simply by the fact that, in terms of politics, the Internet adds no media bias to the political ones that already exist. If the opinions published on forums and blogs generally correspond to the election results, then it follows that the population which expresses its opinion online and votes is—approximately—the same in both situations. It is logical that voters who abstain massively from all elections are also very far removed from the stereotype of the political blogger, and avoid giving their opinions on the Net. The consistency in the results is therefore neither paradoxical nor contradic- tory to the fact that the Internet is indeed a tool for circumventing the dominant media system.

Conclusion This study has led to two conclusions. The first concerns the contribution of sociological analyses of the media space granted to the opinions of ordinary people, defined by the OSCs of “employees” and “workers”. This 5 FROM TELEVISED MEDIA SPACE TO INTERNET HYPERMEDIA… 103 type of research on media production reveals the previously hidden selection criteria. This is even more important as these criteria for a media- imposed selection of legitimate speech in news programs are never accounted for when diversity in the media is publicly discussed. For example, the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA, the French audiovisual regulatory council) publishes a report every year on “the representativity of the diversity of origins and cultures on the television and the radio” in line with the legal framework that assigns it the following responsibility: “The Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel contributes to actions that foster social cohesion and combat discrimination in the field of audiovisual communication. In particular, it ensures that the programs scheduled reflect the diversity of French society” (Macé 2008). However, the criteria used to ensure that the diversity of French society is respected in the various programs show that the analysis of socio-professional diversity is not subject to the same scrutiny as the space that the “visible” minorities occupy in the media. Concerning news media, “the Council [ has] selected two criteria to measure diversity in news: the presence of journalists from minority groups; topics that deal with the presence of journalists from minority groups and topics dealing with issues on integration and corresponding citizen initiatives.” The fact that the space for popular opinion in news programs has not been examined by the public body that is supposed to be in charge of enforcing diversity in the media is an indicator of the scant importance accorded to it both by the media and in politics. However, the social and political consequences and the media impact of this underrepresentation are significant, whether they refer to legitimate family behavior models, cultural or culinary practices or the way they are talked about. The second result concerns the space occupied today by an audience of ordinary people in the mass media forum and in the new online media space. In the latter there is little presence, but this is not only due to media mediations. Ultimately, the space allotted today to ordinary viewers is created by the combination of media and social factors. The selection criteria that limit the space allotted in the media forums wherein society discusses itself are thus even more effective—and more importantly, rarely questioned—that they rely on censorship and self-censorship that already exist. Among these reflexes is primarily media censorship. An analysis of mass media helps reveal several social selection criteria justified by “newsworthy reasons” presented as irrefutable, such as the need to ensure personal 104 S. ROUQUETTE

stories are “interesting” or interests that require expertise or professional, associative and even cultural guarantees. Another contributing factor is social self-censorship. Meanwhile, the analysis of the online media space shows that factors other than the journalists’ implicit selection criteria must be taken into account. The media space is not protected from the political censorship analyzed by Daniel Gaxie (1978). This fact also reveals the importance of the social, political and cultural context. Internet users are much more likely to comment on a news article online if they feel socially empowered to do so. Lastly, we also observed political censorship. Why is the underrepresentation of ordinary people in the media rarely addressed by state agencies? Why does a state body such as the CSA pay so little attention to the issue of social representativity (space occupied by the opinions of ordinary people)? Is it for reasons related to “physical” visibility? Does a distinctive skin color stand out more on the television than the difference in bodily hexis? This is most certainly a partial factor, but it is not the only one. Is it a more strategic way of joining in the “new politically correct battle” for diversity while minimizing the political risk? Making an official statement about diversity in popular media implies taking the risk of pointing out the (lack of) political, social and economic diversity in general. Not talking about it comes down to avoiding a politically sensitive issue: the political and economic space occupied by the specific values, issues and categories of ordinary people in French society. All of these issues reappear during major electoral events, but—and this is important—only periodically (Todd 1995). These are structural factors that highlight the comparison between online media spaces and television.

Notes 1. Evelyne Thomas is the TV host of C’est mon choix. 2. À la recherche des publics populaires/Looking for Popular Publics is an international Symposium held in Nancy, Université de Lorraine (France), in October 2011.

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Audiences and the Public Sphere CHAPTER 6

Television Audiences and Digital Social Networks: In Between an Experience and a Commitment

Céline Ségur

Introduction Trying to define a television public is often like trying to find the answer to a riddle because defining televisual practice is in itself problematic; does it simply mean being where the television screen is turned on, or watching a program attentively, or reacting to the program, before, during and/or after its airing? Audience measurement professionals (the Médiamétrie Institute in France) have chosen a basic definition of a TV viewer, from

French original Publication: Publics de télévision et réseaux socionumériques. In L. Ballarini & C. Ségur (Eds.) (2018). Devenir public. Modalités et enjeux, Paris: Mare & Martin. Translation: Ian Margo

C. Ségur (*) Centre de recherche sur les mediations (CREM), Université de Lorraine, Metz, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 109 C. Ségur (ed.), French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33346-1_6 110 C. SÉGUR which they then developed a set of mechanisms1 for building “an” audience locally (Méadel 2010). Audio-visual program designers, on the other hand, shape the profiles of target recipients, referred to as audiences. Sébastien Rouquette (2015) showed how the audience (consisting of ordinary people in France) of a television show (C’est mon choix) does not actually exist because it is an element of a system, that is, the media strategy for positioning the program. The same observation was made by Alain Labouze, manager of Universcience.tv, the science Web TV of the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, who admits having a priori knowledge of the target audiences of programs for which he is responsible, namely that the audiences turn out to be (only) props for staging a media project (CREM seminar on 11 February 2014). Many researchers have emphasized the uncertainty about such an object: A “Groupe exotique et mystérieux” [Exotic and mysteri- ous group] (see p. 3 in Le Grignou 2003); “Inconnu, méconnu, énigma- tique” [Unknown, poorly known, enigmatic] (see p. 9 in Mehl and Pasquier 2004); “Nous traquons les définitions, les traces” [We track the definitions, the traces] (see p. 6 in Méadel 2004). Nevertheless, the widespread use in France of a theoretical and methodological approach toward audiences and publics, hinged around concepts of experience and performance has led media sociologists and information and communication science researchers to agree on the importance of observation and analysis of spontaneous comments of publics. For example, Dominique Pasquier (1999) investigated the attitudes and motivations of fans of a very popular French TV sitcom by analyzing fan mail sent to the company that produced the series. This approach was based in particular on Daniel Dayan’s publications2 denouncing the major methodological obstacles in procedures for collecting reactions (Dayan 1992),3 as well as on the author’s work with the sociologist Elihu Katz on “media events” (Dayan and Katz 1992). In this investigation, the authors highlighted the social interactions inherent in the television viewing experience: the reception of television images is part of a complex mesh combining the sociability of everyday life, the sociability of the event (de facto the related rituals) and identity staging (staging of oneself as a member of an audience). How has this approach been adopted in more recent studies of television audiences? Nowadays, TV viewing practices resonate more and more with the use of digital social networks. How does “media convergence” (Jenkins 2006) encourage researchers to develop new ways of understanding television audiences, and what audience representations does it produce? The development of television programs that put pressure on viewers to 6 TELEVISION AUDIENCES AND DIGITAL SOCIAL NETWORKS: IN BETWEEN… 111 participate via digital social networks (which we refer to as social TV or even smart television) seems to be a promising field for the study of television practices as experience. With the idea of integrating the use and adoption of digital tools such as digital social networks, the experience would become the outcome of a transmedia practice or habit, called “participation”.

A Sociology of Performing Audiences In France, Daniel Dayan’s theories about television publics in the 1990s, and the popularity that followed the author’s publications, helped to shape a sociology of publics articulated around the concepts of experience and performance. Indeed, the definition of a television audience proposed by the researcher is based on two characteristics. The first concerns the transition from the individual to the collective, that is, the subjective experience that leads a person to become a member of an audience. The second concerns an additional process: the transition from private to public, which Daniel Dayan calls “performance”. Initially, Daniel Dayan’s main thesis is that television publics do not exist de facto but only through the subjective experience of their members. This is a generally accepted assertion today, shared by social science researchers in particular. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, author of the manual Sociologie des publics [Sociology of audiences], shares this opinion: “Not every spectator automatically becomes a member of an audience” (see p. 318 in Esquenazi 2002). Today, we speak of “publicization” to describe the process by which a collective turns itself into an audience: “The idea of ‘publicization’ implies that the ‘audience’ is not a given in itself, either preceding or outside of the performances that concern it: it ‘publicizes’ itself by ‘publicizing’ a social problem or policy measure, a theatrical work or a television program—by ‘publicizing’ at the same time, manifestations of pleasure and criticism, support and disapproval, shame and indignation, justification and condemnation. It is ‘publicized’ in the arena of multiple social conflicts, parliamentary debates and legal battles, philosophical disputes and scientific controversies, literary sparring and word battles which an event provokes” (see p. 14 in Cefaï and Pasquier 2003). This thesis is the result of a reflection on the concept of a fictional “public”. Daniel Dayan (1992) thus began by challenging the written criticism of British Cultural Studies researcher John Hartley (1987) that the public is (only) an imaginary fiction, produced by those who talk about it, those who 112 C. SÉGUR study it and those who make TV programs. Based on Benedict Anderson’s (1983) work on “imagined communities”, Daniel Dayan chose to consider television audiences as “imagined”, and not “imaginary”, fictions, in other words, from which viewers conceive of themselves as an audience: “Perceiving themselves as an audience occurs in relation to an image of the audience. This image is a fiction. It may also be the instrument of a process whereby an audience becomes real by identifying with another imagined one” (see p. 182 in Dayan 1998). In other words, a fictional public constructed by the members of the audience themselves. The television viewers shift from an individual practice to a collective experience when they become aware of being part of a television audience: “The awareness of being part of an audience” (ibid.: 184). This awareness may be triggered by television programs, according to the author, while referring to the work of Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt on talk shows (1994).4 “Receiving a broadcast means interacting para-socially, not only with what is shown, but with what is off screen. It means recognizing oneself as a guest”. In other words, the television viewers agree to play the social role of a member of the audience. “Being a television viewer means looking through the eyes of an audience” (see pp. 185–186 in Dayan 1998). The audience thus defined is the product of an achieved performance, since it is driven by a principle of staging to become visible: that is, it stages itself. This performance may lead to a change in status from being a mere audience statistic to being a member of the public for the event in question. For several years, Daniel Dayan and the sociologist, Elihu Katz, studied the reaction of television viewers during the TV relaying of major international events, referred to as “political shows”: the funeral of President Kennedy in the United States (1963), the visit of the Egyptian President Sadat to Jerusalem (1977), that of Pope Jean- Paul II to Poland (1979) and the royal wedding of Lady Diana and Prince Charles in London (1981). They thus defined a “ceremonial grammar”, that is, a particular role played by televised ceremonies in individuals’ relationship to the media: they trigger specific spectator practices (ceremonial and reflexive, that is, being aware of one’s own spectator practices) and are tools of sociability; they place the events celebrated on the public agenda; they “introduce citizens to the political structures of a society” (Dayan and Katz 1992), in other words, they connect the institutional spheres (diplomatic, political) to the civil 6 TELEVISION AUDIENCES AND DIGITAL SOCIAL NETWORKS: IN BETWEEN… 113 sphere; they relay the effects of the religious world within society; they play a role in the collective memory; and finally, they transform the traditional boundaries between public and private space. The individuals who receive the images are in this case actors, both individual and collective, who construct the meanings of the event. The “acts of speech, acts of presence, and acts of looking” (see p. 59 in Dayan 1999) are manifestations of the performance of the audience thus formed, which take the form of interpretation, testimony and argumentation activities. “To be an audience is to engage in a public performance” (see p. 50 in Dayan 2003). Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz thus witnessed a performative process that takes place in three successive moments: the feeling of belonging to a group (i.e. subjective experience), the willingness to participate in the event, the appropriation and claiming of the values embodied in the event. Since then, in France, the figure of the performing audience has been used to study the meanings of television practice and of the public’s relationship to media. As part of a doctoral thesis in information and communication science, Stéphane Calbo (2000) observed television-viewer performances that consisted in “accepting the collective game of reception”. When watching the televised broadcast of a sporting event, individuals expressed a feeling of belonging to a group, visible through the circulation of an object, the adoption of common behavior (shouting, etc.), the synchronization of behaviors in different places: “We can consider this as the production of an audience who are made to behave in the same way as the event in question unfolds. This audience is formed in the moment of television reception as a community of body and mind that manifests itself through the expression of behavior, emotions and judgements” (see p. 214 in Calbo 2000). The responsiveness of the audience to television programs is a variation of the figure of the performing audience studied by Guillaume Soulez (2004) and Dominique Mehl (2004). In these studies, it is the letters from readers of television weeklies and those sent to the mediation service of France Télévision that are used to constitute an audience and its expression: “In a way, the television viewer builds the collective that it then mobilizes” (see p. 115 in Soulez 2004). The correspondence analyzed here is the means by which individuals declare themselves to be television viewers or even members of an audience. 114 C. SÉGUR

Digital Social Networks: Places for Development and Deployment of a Public? Since the 2000s and the massive and daily adoption of social networks by individuals as well as by television channels and other content producers, the possibilities for featuring television-viewer reactions have increased while the conditions for the staging of their words and images have evolved. Indeed, television channels are now stage-managing their communication through and around social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. In addition, they are developing so-called interactivity systems that enable them to increase their social audience ratings.5 For example, the “live-tweet”, which invites viewers to express themselves on the Twitter network while the television program is being broadcast; a selection of tweets—those that either boost the promotion or contribute to the changing program script—are then broadcast on the air. In this case, publics are defined based on the observation and analysis of the transmedia experiences of Internet-television viewers.

From Practice to Experience We now have to consider television experience rather than television practice. A well-rounded form of this experience is embodied by “fan” audiences who epitomize the performing audience, especially when their practice consists in taking over and adopting digital social networks. Daniel Dayan did not manage to consider fans as a real public, but rather an “almost public”. Why? The fan public is made up of individuals who are fully aware of sharing their passion with others, with whom they form an “imagined community”, which they claim to be part of most of the time, and which corresponds to a certain form of sociability, with its own norms and rules and which sets it apart from other audiences. These are individuals who have an activity that aims to influence the work of which they are fans (e.g. narrative demands); performance, that is, self-presentation, is an inherent characteristic of fan activity. The fan public is defined by Philippe Le Guern (2009: 38): “An active public, a co-producer of the meaning of the works, engaged in a real dynamic of appropriation, and participating in sociability and interactions that go beyond the simple moment of reception”. But for Daniel Dayan, the fan public evolves in a social universe parallel to the common social space, that of a fictional existence, which is not anchored in reality. 6 TELEVISION AUDIENCES AND DIGITAL SOCIAL NETWORKS: IN BETWEEN… 115

This is referred to as “fandom”, that is, “a community, active reception practices, collaborative activities” (Bourdaa 2015). The fan culture is systematically characterized by a specific lexical field: “performance”, “commitment”, “participation culture”, “activity”, “productivity”. Mélanie Bourdaa explains that, for fans, the practice of television is an experience which extends well beyond the moment of exposure to audio-visual content. The reception moment is in a certain sense “elongated”. This is accentuated by the development of information and communication technologies, the Internet in particular, as a platform for discussion, sharing and creation. This led the information and communication science researcher (Bourdaa 2015) to develop a typology of fans’ performative practices, based on their discursive and significative productions, that is, their manifestations and claims, their belonging to a virtual community, which can sometimes take the form of civic-minded commitment. The typology is divided into five elements: “Creative activities, mediation activities, collective intelligence activities, social bonding activities, civic- minded commitment activities”. It is not only a particularly precise knowledge of a media object that confers the status of fans on a group of spectators, but it is also the ability of the spectators to declare themselves, in many varied forms, as constituent members of this fan audience within the public space. The possibilities of expression offered by Web 2.0 have led users of online discussion forums to appropriate these systems to make them real social experiences. This is evident in Barbara Laborde’s (2016) study of fans of the popular television series Grey’s Anatomy. The author studied the characteristics and codes of these “community practices” that blur the traditional boundaries between expertise and amateurism, such as discussions and interpretations around the diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds of the series, sometimes playful audio-visual rewrites. The applications now integrated in television channels, particularly in connection with reality TV programs, lend themselves well to the examination of spectator practices from the perspective of experience. Céline Ferjoux (2016) analyzed how the particular elements of such a system and its appropriation, produce performance utterances in the public space. The study was based on the Dance with the Stars program, a television show during which “stars” (such as “a previous Miss France, a retired athlete, a singer in need of publicity”, Chagnoux 2016) are coached by sports dance champions and thus led to compete with each other. The author chose to study in particular “the media experience of the spectator of Dance with the stars” as an 116 C. SÉGUR

“emotional experience that leaves traces and signs, in the computer data- base of the Twitter microblogging platform” (see p. 69 in Ferjoux 2016). She explains how the public adopts the “second screen” activity offered by the television channel, that is, develops socialization via the Twitter network, during and around the viewing. Furthermore, this experience is precisely “emotional”: the sending of tweets is analyzed as an act of communication that allows the individual to express the emotions felt during the reception of a program precisely designed to offer “a sensory experience that is based on spectacular effects and the power of the spectator’s emotional response”. So it is clear that, beyond fan studies, many investigations of transmedia practices nowadays focus on the audience’s experience. This is the case of a study conducted by Jean Châteauvert (2016) on “new distribution platforms”. Specifically, it concerns the transmedia experience of watching a television series on a screen other than that of the television set, that is, on a smartphone, tablet or laptop. The experience is characterized here by its fragmentation: technically, the audio-visual qualities of the series are diminished; in a nomadic situation, listening is likely to be interrupted by a conversation or a change of place. It is also an “experience of the moment”: the experience begins before the broadcast and ends afterward; it begins “by being part of a community of Internet users” (see pp. 219– 222 in Châteauvert 2016) and continues with the comments that individuals then produce in turn with likes or recommendations. Above all, the Canadian author observes that the multiplication of platforms leads individuals to assume multiple roles corresponding to as many audiences of which they become a member, through their experiences: “At the same time I add new dimensions to my experience as a spectator: I can be a spectator who recognizes himself in the community of Internet users who follow the series, a fan who exchanges gossip, interviews or photographs with other fans, a serious amateur who participates in the broadcast of the series, or a rare insider who converses with the creators of the series” (see p. 226 in Châteauvert 2016). In each of the cases discussed by the author, there is a practice that results in the creation of a social bond, the acquisi- tion of knowledge or the attainment of a privileged social status (one of the few initiated persons), that is, a participative “experience”, which is “live” and collective.6 6 TELEVISION AUDIENCES AND DIGITAL SOCIAL NETWORKS: IN BETWEEN… 117

From Experience to Commitment Speaking out in the public space of a forum or social network linked to a television program leads individuals to position themselves as television viewers. In other words, they demonstrate a more or less spontaneous and more or less provoked television-viewer competence, which can be observed by adopting different postures of expertise, sometimes synonymous with commitment: citizen television viewer, critical television viewer, non-television viewer and so on. We then wonder where we should draw the line between participation in a system connected to one’s television practice and an involvement of oneself as a television viewer. Does speaking in a digital public space related to television mean becoming a member of the television public? Can the social television audience be grasped in the same way as the performing public thus defined by sociologists Daniel Cefaï and Dominique Pasquier (2003: 19)—“The many different members of the public collectively experience their coexistence in relation to the same issues, ‘feeling’ it (their coexistence) without necessarily having an explicit representation of it? They share an access to the world, cooper- ate and communicate in spheres of remembrance and projection, expressing textures of collective experience through discussion, investigation and experimentation”? In her study of Twitter messages about and during the broadcast of the French popular daily television series Plus belle la vie, Virginie Spies (2016) observed how viewers become “involved Internet users” or a “committed public” (see p. 493). When they write tweets, individuals speak out in a situation of interpersonal communication between themselves and the various protagonists of the program they are watching (scriptwriter, channel, etc.), either to confront fiction (what happens in the series) with reality (their personal lives), or to position themselves as fans in the public space of the social network (expressing their enthusiasm, presenting themselves as specialists, etc.).7 But, “interactions between Internet users and viewers are quite rare” (see p. 494). Indeed, the researcher did not observe the development of conversations between the participants in these live tweets. Nevertheless, she noted traces of the expression of a community of interpretation: television viewers who speak out on the Internet are led to mobilize and implement certain communication rituals that allow them to self-identify as fans of the series they are watching, as well as to differenti- ate themselves from other audiences. Belonging to the community depends on watching the same program “together” and “at the same time”. 118 C. SÉGUR

The issue of commitment is the focus of Nathalie Nadaud-Albertini’s (2013) analysis of online discussion forums on reality TV programs.8 But, here too, involvement is more a tactic designed to create, through online writing, a relationship of interpersonal communication between oneself and a program protagonist. Indeed, the involvement is expressed through the close relationship that Internet users try to build with the protagonists of reality TV programs (mainly the candidates). This proximity, which is emphasized, may be based on points of similarity (family experience, common origins, etc.) or on shared feelings. The individuals observed do not appear to be aware of belonging to an audience that would feel the same way. The exchanges observed by the sociologist seem to take place as part of a prolonged television experience (television viewing), but not by “being publics”, in the sense of Daniel Dayan. The author thus defines a typology of postures, which have in common that they allow the expression of varying degrees of involvement. One example is the posture described as “mistrust”, based on a denigration of television and/or some of its programs, even though the authors of the statements do not watch the programs in question. The “analytical” posture, on the other hand, seems at first to reflect a distancing with the program, when in reality it reveals a real involvement. Indeed, the television viewers who are most critical of television or a particular broadcasting system appear to engage strongly with the media. This involvement manifests itself over time and in the energy deployed to produce a critical commentary on the program, and is evidence of frequent and regular television practice.

Conclusion The digital social systems set up by television channels around programs are a favorable environment for the study of audience experiences; researchers observe how television practices are being transformed, or even take on their full meaning, through the prism of online expression. These mechanisms are based on participation, which is almost obligatory in many of the television programs currently broadcast. The changing focus of research on television audiences is emblematic of the shift from a reception to a participation paradigm, initiated in the 1990s by some researchers, such as Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt (1994), who concluded: “Politically and socially, the study of reception therefore leads to study of the concept of participation”. Nevertheless, one should remember that the adoption and appropriation of the participation mechanisms 6 TELEVISION AUDIENCES AND DIGITAL SOCIAL NETWORKS: IN BETWEEN… 119 proposed by the channels is mainly done by a predominantly “young” audience, but it does not (yet?) concern all television viewers: only a minority of the population is particularly active on the Internet (Donnat 2017). The authors of the contributions to the study on “Television Practices in the Digital Age” (Kredens and Rio 2015) highlight the per- manence of traditional television viewing practices while attendance and participation in discussion forums and other systems designed to enable viewers to interact with programs are still limited. On the other hand, the reception of television as an experience of sociability (in the sense of the “television conversations” studied by Dominique Boullier 1987) is still a reality, despite the increasing independence of the audience. With the proliferation of screens (computer, tablet, smartphone), individuals tend to watch television alone, each on their own screen. However, Amandine Kervalla and Marlène Loicq (2015) observed an attachment to the pleasure provided by collective viewing, also experienced as an audience experience. Similarly, the “desynchronization of audiences”, that is, the development of replay TV, does not seem to lead to individualized consumption of television content, on the contrary: “This possibility of catch- ing up thus also allows individuals who cannot watch a television program at the time of its broadcast to participate in the sociability existing around this content” (see pp. 91–93 in Kervalla and Loicq 2015). But it is clear that changing digital practices lead us to consider the issue of audiences differently. Olivier Donnat (2017) plans to talk about “users” rather than “audiences”. As he explains, individuals are now invited not only to attend a cultural performance, relayed by media or not, but also to be the actors during the practice (the interactive visit, the sending of a tweet, etc.) and/or a posteriori (e.g. by leaving a comment on ad hoc social networks), which would fall more within the paradigm of uses. Furthermore, the technique of the algorithms used by the main Web players (search engines, social networks) leads our online reading along paths within relatively compartmentalized spaces, corresponding to what we already know and appreciate. While the realm of possibilities may seem infinite on the Internet, the different audiences would not meet much there.

Notes 1. The audience measurements calculated by the Médiamétrie Institute in France are mainly based on the results delivered by “push-button audimeters”: that is, devices connected to the television set, which automatically 120 C. SÉGUR

record channel changes when selected with a remote, as soon as at least one member of the household reports his/her presence in the room by pressing a button on the audimeter where the set is located (and the fact that he/she selected the program) (see Ségur 2016). 2. We examined how Daniel Dayan’s professional career and the attention paid to his French publications, particularly the article “Les mystères de la récep- tion” [The mysteries of reception], contributed to him being considered to be the theoretician of television audiences for the period 1990–2000 (Ségur 2010). 3. Daniel Dayan explains that when a researcher asks an individual to react to a television program, this leads to an act of interpretation that the individual might not have performed naturally. 4. In the book Talk on television, audience participation and public debate (Livingstone and Lunt 1994), the researchers show how public opinion is formed by a TV debate (the talk show), through the disinterested participation of individuals. 5. The social audience is the number of messages on a television program that are published on social networks. In 2015, the official institute for measuring media audience in France, Médiamétrie, joined forces with the social network Twitter to set up a tool to measure tweets sent and seen concerning a program: the “Médiamétrie Twitter TV Ratings” (see the press release issued by Médiamétrie when the tool was launched: http://www.mediametrie.fr/television/communiques/mediametrie-et-twitter-s-associent-pour- lancer-mediametrie-twitter-tv-ratings.php?id=1050#.V-O3fTv2lGg). 6. Going beyond the case of television audiences, Olivier Thévenin (2015) describes how the study of audiences in information and communication sciences has developed around an approach that consists in thinking about cultural practices in terms of social and socializing experiences. It involves observing practices generated by the prescription of a circle of sociability. It is thus understood that the practice makes sense, not so much through the relationship to the work, but through the social experience that it produces. This leads us to see the connection with the research program on “media cultures” proposed by Éric Maigret and Éric Macé (2005), based on a definition of the media audience according to the experience of its members. From this perspective, media practices should not be considered separately, because they are constitutive elements of social relations. In this sense, audiences are no longer research objects to focus on as such: audience members are individuals who can express their sensitivity to a cause, event and so on that is being aired at a given time. The audience is a manifestation of social relations, it is an element of the construction of reality: “Whether we are interested in public controversies, media representations or the experience of ‘audiences’, it is basically the same thing that we are studying: the way in 6 TELEVISION AUDIENCES AND DIGITAL SOCIAL NETWORKS: IN BETWEEN… 121

which cultural movements (whether conservative, reactionary or transgres- sive) conflictualise reality through this specific form of media mediation” (see p. 42 in Macé 2005). 7. Here we find characteristics similar to those of the spontaneous expression of young teenage girls who wrote letters to the production company of the sitcom Hélène et les garçons, studied by Dominique Pasquier (1999). 8. Reality TV programs have been the subject of numerous and virulent moral criticisms since their emergence, which has an effect on the spectator postures observed in discussion forums.

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Online Communication of African Francophone Women Dealing with Infertility: Practices in the Face of Different Asymmetric Relationships

Emmanuelle Simon

Introduction The ways that online communities use social networks to discuss health issues are still under-documented in African countries. While work is now being published on the links between Information and Communication

This chapter presents the results of an interdisciplinary research project (anthropology and ICT) financed by the French National Research Agency (ANR) between 2010 and 2014. French Original Publication: Les échanges en ligne de femmes africaines francophones confrontées à l’infertilité. In L. Ballarini & C. Ségur (Eds.). (2018). Devenir public. Modalités et enjeux. Paris: Mare & Martin. Translation: Stephen Ward Butler

E. Simon (*) Centre de recherche sur les mediations (CREM), Université de Lorraine, Metz, France e-mail: [email protected]

Technologies (ICT) and health in southern countries (in particular how health and sanitation apps are used on mobile telephones, Al Dahdah 2014; Hampshire 2014), the available literature is primarily focused on North American and European countries. A review of this literature shows that one of the key issues is the link that can be found between ICT and the empowerment of ill people (Heaton 2011) with a focus on the asymmetric relationship between patient and doctor. Expertise gained on the Internet by patients tends to reconfigure this clinical relationship (Shaw and Baker 2004; Ziebland 2004). The available literature fluctuates between two points of view. One emphasizing the growing independence of patients who are calling into question this asymmetric relationship thanks to their developing expertise while the second is more critical and describes the Internet as a new space for imposing biomedical normative behavior. For instance, studies describe how by searching for information online, the patient experiences a greater sense of personal responsibility, which subsequently leads to the medical authority and unique expertise of the doctor on the illness being called into question (Lemire 2010). Some studies that investigated those forums on practices that are not recommended from a medical point of view, such as weight loss, promotion of anorexia, or misuse of medication, or on those practices rarely handled by the medical profession, such as postpartum sexuality, have described the emergence of critical opinions on the part of patients thus contributing to radical criticism of medical expertise. In a more general way, the new knowledge available online is presented as being more likely to rebalance the patient/doctor relationship, which ultimately contributes to bringing these actors closer together (Romeyer 2008; Thoër 2012). It may even represent a new medical era, that of “participative medicine” and “patient experts” whose online exchanges might “enrich biomedical knowledge” (see p. 1484 in Akrich and Méadel 2009) drawn from patients’ experiences (Eysenbach 2008). Furthermore, sociologists who have adopted a critical perspective suggest that, even in situations where it calls into question medical authority, Internet use does not limit the dependency of patients on medical professionals. They describe a form of “digital assimilation by medical research” (see p. 188 in Casilli 2009). Patient exchanges online could represent a new mechanism for the medicalization of society (Backer 2008; Conrad 2005). Medicalization is the process whereby medicine plays a leading role in the daily life of people. Through this process it expands its sphere of application to include social problems that initially fell under other “jurisdictions” (family, religion, law, etc.). Expanding 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 127 medical authority and expertise would henceforth play a secondary role in this on-going process of medicalization in society. Contemporary analyses of (bio)medicalization cover a range of issues. These include the commoditization of healthcare, the emphasis placed on risk, the central role that biomedical artifacts now play, including assisted reproductive technology (ART), and the increasing coverage of health issues in digital spaces (Clarke et al. 2010). According to these researchers, patients actively participate in the medicalization of society through online discussions. This is particularly evident in the way previously unknown illnesses have been brought to the attention of the medical profession as has been seen with hyperactivity and Gulf War PTSD, and so on. In this chapter, I propose to go beyond this dichotomy (i.e. empowerment vs. medicalization) by examining not only the patient/doctor relationship but also other asymmetric relationships, which may contribute to differentiation mechanisms and affect the social experience of ill people. The basic premise is that the patient/doctor relationship is only one of the asymmetrical relationships, which emerge through online exchanges. In 1969, Georges Balandier proposed that anthropology should be just as interested in examining those personal dependency relationships found within segmented societies as in researching kinship relationships. Today anthropology can help us not to ignore the importance of other dependency relationships. This is particularly true for those issues related to lineage and parenthood. So, by analyzing the instrumented online conversations of women facing fertility problems we shall see the concomitant emergence not only of the patient/doctor relationship but also of other social relationships linked to unequal access to healthcare between North and South, to local representations of marriage, of the family, and the gender relationships that they entail.

Method Online discussion forums are unique in that they do not fall within a classic definition of public media spaces constructed around the idea of “the simultaneous belief [of members of the public as defined by Gabriel Tarde. An example of this public would be newspaper readers] or their enthusiasm, meaning they are all consciously aware that this idea or desire is simultaneously shared by a large number of people” (see p. 70 in Joseph 2007). The concept of copresence (as in the case of urban public spaces) is just as important on the Internet and online exchanges are an actual place where 128 E. SIMON people can converse with others. These conversations reveal current social representations of internauts and are a place for reciprocal adjustments to these representations during the interaction (both in a synchronous and asynchronous way). And while this study may investigate the way people use ICT (here we focus on African audiences(s) through a French discussion forum), it is because it focuses on the diversity of the experiences analyzed, and on the way people interact, by attempting to describe the “ways of being” and the “ways of doing” as they appear in the online conversations produced (Maigret 2014). This work is the result of a qualitative analysis of the digital messages found on the discussion thread entitled “Who knows the Procréa or Fatima clinics in Abidjan?”, from www. enceinte.com1 (the analysis of exchanges from its creation in July 2011 until 2015). For this I have combined a theoretical approach to the sociotechnical systems, as developed within the ICT sciences, with an empirical process specific to anthropology. Online exchanges were analyzed without neglecting the surrounding sociotechnical system (Appel et al. 2010; Monnoyer-Smith 2013) since “the technical aspect and the social aspect cannot be completely separated as they feed into each other” (see p. 149 in Jouët and Le Caroff 2013). Observations made about the online discussions take into consideration the form of the forum and the discussion threads, the personalization tools (signatures) and any methods used for moderating the content (the “recaps”). Merely describing the importance of the online system should not lead us to believe that everything is predetermined. It is important to question the asymmetric relationships and interplay of social assignments induced by the online site, in the light of the actual practices that might or might not modify them. While the mechanisms themselves have power (Jeanneret 2014), it is also important to consider the abilities of the subjects to act and the uniqueness of the world they experience. Since this investigation attempts to analyze online discussions in relation to medical technology that is used off line, it appeared relevant to shed more light through a small anthropological investigation that was conducted off line. It would then be possible to restore the online actors to their full social context. It was not possible to make observations at the Procréa or Fatima clinics. But the Internet users who contribute to the discussion thread also attend other clinics including the Biasa clinic (Lomé). A one-month investigation was conducted there in 2013.2 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 129

Characteristics of the Public Using the Discussion Thread “Who Knows the Procréa and Fatima Clinics?” The discussion thread “Who knows the Procréa and Fatima clinics?” is one of eight discussion threads in the only Africa section (entitled “Ivory Coast”) of the www.enceinte.com forum. It was started in July 2011 and stands out from the others because participants regularly make contributions to it. The forum involves a little more than 50 internauts. The period of time that internauts use the forum varies between one and four years (based on observations carried out on around 30 Internet users). There are 12 very active participants who have published between 200 and 800 messages since they first registered on the forum. There are however far more people who simply check and read the thread. As of 24 October 2014, the thread contained a little more than 2500 messages for 39,568 views. This discussion thread only accounts for a very small part of the exchanges and views expressed on www.enceinte.com. Clearly, there is an uneven distribution around the world of those able to adapt to the social strategies specific to the Internet, or to use its functions and tools. For some of the participants in whom we are interested, posting a message online, leaving a signature, or sending a private message are not acts that are performed spontaneously. However at ease Internet users are online, in order to analyze the exchanges of the discussion forums of French- speaking African women on infertility, we are required to take a fresh look at this technical mechanism. We must distance ourselves from those Western practices of hyperconnectivity, of constant, simultaneous copresence, of the crowd, of Internet gadgets or even of the race for new product designs. Internet users who contribute to the thread are between 25 and 42 years old (when the age of the participant has been identified). For the most part, they come from the Ivory Coast (in keeping with the title of the discussion thread) but there are also other nationalities. These fairly frequently include Cameroonian, Togolese, and Senegalese people. Different indices of social assignment (language skills, profession, home Internet connection, holiday locations, international mobility) show that some of them, or at least those who are most active online, come from middle or upper middle-class backgrounds. It should be noted that it was very difficult, sometimes impossible, to analyze the traces left by those Internet users who were not very active or simply read the thread. The characteristics 130 E. SIMON of the public described here really only apply to a particular fringe of those involved in the discussion thread. Nevertheless, these roles assumed online are not fixed, and an Internet user who usually only reads can easily become an active one. Additionally, the possibilities offered by the site allow us to formulate a hypothesis as to the transversal nature of the public on this thread. While we can hardly formulate a hypothesis about the social background of the readers or the infrequent thread participants, the title of the website www.enceinte.com undoubtedly limits the participation of men. Similarly, the geographic origin of participants can be extrapolated for most of those contributing to the discussion thread, since the structure of the forum guides users to the relevant geographic areas. By observing the online forum, it is possible to describe some identifying markers that characterize this online community. The layout of the forum and the positioning of the thread within it, as well as its title are all factors determining its attractiveness and the way in which its audiences are created (Jouët and Le Caroff 2013). The two clinics mentioned in the title of the discussion thread are private Ivory Coast clinics, each of which has an assisted reproductive technology department. The Internet users who contributed to the site are either existing patients or future patients who are looking for treatment for their infertility problems. Significantly, the participants in the thread already know about the option of turning to biomedicine to treat infertility whereas in the wider, local population this technology is little known. The personal introduction, which all new participations are encouraged to do, involves them explaining their biomedical background and the most thorough among them create a kind of “signature” at the bottom of each post, which summarizes their medical journey. These signatures follow a basic structure that is found in all of the French-speaking and English-speaking forums and discussion threads dedicated to ART,3 whether they are general health forums or those specific to reproduction. The signatures thus help to structure forum audiences that are discussing reproductive health. These signatures give the medical profile of the Internet users. They also include the age of the internaut or the partner as well (it should be noted that the success of an ART procedure is strongly correlated to the age of the patient), a medical diagnosis (the biomedical causes of the infertility) and finally the medical treatment already used (the techniques used: stimulation, artificial in vitro fertilization, intracytoplasmic sperm injec- tions also known as ICSI) and sometimes the period of time (these techniques often involve repeated attempts but within certain time frames). 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 131

Internet users thus learn how to explain their identity as a patient (or future patient) of the ART clinic. The anthropological literature distin- guishes three aspects in construction of an illness4: disease (biological change), illness (personal experience of the ill person) and sickness (socialization of the illness). The medical profession plays a fundamental part in the construction of sickness as it legitimizes the complaint and participates in delineating the role of the “sick person” by giving them the status of patient. The online personal presentation methods observed tend to strengthen the socialization of infertile women. These signatures are thus the basis of “recaps” that summaries members’ medical backgrounds and are copy-pasted from existing signatures. The “recaps” are created by active Internet users for the purpose of galvanizing/relaunching the discussion thread. They can also be used in moments when it is necessary to summaries previous content. These have been described by Angélique Dimitracopoulou (2006) as being central to strengthening the group awareness. Beyond that, the fact that participants in the discussion forum accept their identity as patients, affects their relationships. This medical profile can lead some Internet users to post messages on discussion threads on www.enceinte.com that are outside of their geographic section. For example, Sophie, whose signature is in Fig. 7.1, regularly posts on the discussion threads “BB attempt after myomectomy” or “a baby after 35”. We also see micronetworks of social behavior emerge inside the discussion thread (but some that also go beyond it) depending on the medical profile of the Internet user. We can therefore assume that we are dealing with a unique public, which on the one hand is very precarious, since an Internet user can disengage at any time, thus putting the social life of the discussion thread in danger given the limited number of users. Yet, on the other hand, the public has a form of group identity with strong social links built simultaneously on gender identity, a shared medical history, and a particular geographic location.

me: 38 years old: trying for baby 1 myomectomy (02/08/2013) and laparoscopy (05/11/2013) hysteroscopy: fallopian tubes correct: uterus ok (02/06/2015) him: 40 years old: trying for baby 2. Sperm count and quality correct IVF for 2015

Fig. 7.1 Sophie, just before starting her ART treatment 132 E. SIMON

When Wanting to Become a Mother Becomes a Desire for Technology The discussion thread is dedicated to healthcare treatments and keeps pace with the “ART time frames”. Internet users share their schedules with others and expect to get their news of appointments with gynecologists, the results of blood tests, and so on in return. They often comment, “Let’s stay in touch”, “Come and give us some news”. They encourage each other not to give up and to continue the ART process. Every failure and obstacle must be overcome. If artificial inseminations with the sperm of the partner (IAC) fails, then they should try IVF 1, 2, 3, and so on. It would be interesting to check whether this encouragement to continue treatment at all costs is found with the same fervor in the other discussion threads on www.enceinte.com. In the discussion thread analyzed, it is clear that in stark contrast to what may have been described in a Western context (Tain 2004), biomedical confirmation of infertility does not lead to a broader acceptance of the infertility itself. This means that just because the medical impossibility of having children has been proven through the repeated failure of treatment, the infertile woman is still not “allowed” to exist socially. In the societies where these Internet users come from (mainly Senegal, Ivory Coast, Togo), the ultimate goal of a marriage alliance is still the conception of a child. The anthropological literature has shown that infertility becomes problematic in different ways depending on the culture. Issues surrounding infertility can appear just months after marriage, after a ceremony linked to a miscarriage, when a sister has been declared infertile, or even when a couple are not able to have a sufficient number of children. The issue of infertility goes far beyond the definition given in biomedicine. Of course various authors have described a change in African models of marriage and parenthood, and this is particularly the case within the urban middle and upper classes. There has been a process of moving away from traditional concepts of multi-parenthood (as described by Esther Goody 1982). Similarly, family-organized alliances have progres- sively given way to unions chosen by the individuals concerned and based on shared values and romantic feelings (Vimard 1991; Attané 2009; Broqua and Deschamps 2014). Despite this, ethnographic investigations carried out in urban environments have shown how secondary infertility (i.e. where infertility occurs despite the woman already having had one or more children), especially if the first child was a daughter, can still jeopardize a marriage (Bonnet and Duchesne 2014). More generally, infertility 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 133 within a couple can lead the man to turn back to more traditional models of marriage, to renounce his wife or even to take a second wife. In fact, as has been described in studies on representations of ART in other non-Western countries, online exchanges show how “the quest for infertility therapy is rarely if ever viewed as optional” (see p. 17 in Inhorn 2003). The forum as a communication tool supports women in their desire to be mothers, whatever the obstacles may be. Through a content analysis, it is therefore clear that for these Internet users it is essential to get access to treatment (Tymstra 2007). ART techniques are perceived as “bringing hope” (Inhorn 1994). Furthermore, the forum reveals no moral judgments on the use of ART techniques as described by Inhorn. In our research work, produced in a non-Western, Muslim context, there were almost no exchanges on the risks (hyperstimulation5 and multiple pregnancies) nor on the invasive nature of ART. The potential side effects of the medication (stimulation hormones in particular) are also not discussed. However, anthropological works on medication have shown to what extent, in several socio-cultural contexts, these globalized scientific products are considered in an ambivalent way, with a mixture of popularity and skepticism (Van Der Geest and Whyte 2003). Additionally, analysis of the online discussions of South African Internet users on other forums shows how women there do question the impact the medication and technologies will have on their own bodies. Here we can hypothesize that the difficulties in accessing treatment for women in West Africa makes ART all the more desirable and this tends to limit discussions on the benefits/risks intrinsic to them. In fact, there is a significant difference in the ease with which patients can access treatments in South Africa and in French- speaking African countries. In South Africa, ART was developed much earlier than in French-speaking countries. South African patients have access to treatment both in the public and private sectors. In French- speaking African countries, ART is a techno-scientific commodity. It can only be practiced in the private sector and costs on average 2 million CFA francs (or around €3000/$3385), with variations depending on the technique employed. This technology has also been available for varying lengths of time depending on the countries. It has been available for 20 years in Cameroon but only for a few years in other countries. So, through the discussions produced by Internet users, we see a local form of biomedical expansion emerging (Simon 2016). It is one in which biotechnologies are adopted by users without any negotiation as to the role imposed on them. This is almost certainly due to the limited local 134 E. SIMON accessibility of these techno-scientific commodities. Yet the participants link the biomedical approach to procreation with more traditional cultural frameworks. For these women, communicating online is about reconciling the requirement of being a mother with biomedical requirements.

Boosting Confidence in the Local Offer of a Globalized Technology This complete acceptance without negotiation of ART techniques is all the more evident since the online communication reveals a surprising lack of information on infertility and the ways of getting medical treatment. Various works that discuss Internet and health issues have nevertheless shown that the expectations of Internet users can, for the most part, be divided into three groups: getting/giving information on health, searching for/providing emotional support, getting/giving practical information to resolve personal health difficulties (Berg2011 ). In our case, the discussions found on the “Who knows Procréa and Fatima clinics in Abidjan?” thread include very little (or no) sharing and commenting on ART news from other media sources. There was no discussion on the thread after the announcement in the media of the first uterus transplant in October 2014. Similarly, when the Ivory Coast website www.lebabi.net published articles in July of the same year on the latest IVF innovations, this was not relayed in the discussion thread. This digital space does not appear to be used as a space for producing alternative knowledge or simply for facilitating the furthering of local biomedical knowledge. By exchanging on their ART experiences, Internet users are more focused on finding out more about current practices from their peers so that they can evaluate the treatment being offered locally. Numerous internauts use the Internet to identify the right service and to reassure themselves throughout their treatment. Thus, Philly, when speaking about a Doctor after her first course of “artificial insemination by husband” (AIH) states: “the AIH that I did with X was nothing like what I had read about in the forums” (24 August 2011). This idea of “better assessing” the experience has nothing to do with maintaining a critical perspective on biomedicine, but is rather about better integrating and understanding biomedical protocols. One question that is at the core of many discussions is the transfer of this technology in Africa and its local reliability. Those Internet users needing to be reassured rely on the experiences of others: 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 135

“I want to believe it, I need your accounts”. More specifically, the founder of the discussion thread, who would eventually have a child, is living proof that “it works”. And until the end of 2013, all new subscribers read all of the messages posted on the thread and would refer to the experience of the founder. We can thus see participants personalizing ART success in terms of both the medical professional encountered and that of the women who underwent treatment. When, in 2014, several of the other Internet users also become pregnant, the question of personalizing the experience turned more toward the doctors. They explained how it works at such- and-such clinic with such-and-such a doctor. They said that it is good to turn to an experienced medical professional for treatment since “in the Ivory Coast, [it’s] still in an experimental phase” (Sophie). And if there are experienced medical professionals then there have to be those who are not. These are medical professionals who participants doubt are able to accurately diagnose and select the right choice of treatment. They are considered to be more salesmen for ART than medical professionals. So, the questions that came up most often were: “where to do my IVF?” “With whom?” “How much does it cost?” In short, “who knows the Procréa and Fatima clinics in Abidjan?” It is important to remember that in comparison with other techno- scientific commodities (e.g. an insulin pump for diabetes), ART techniques require a specialized medical team (gynecologist and biologist) if they are to be successful. The relationship between patients and doctors mentioned in the introduction often appears in the online discussions. An important aspect of discussion on the thread aims to strengthen the trust placed in medical professionals by Internet users. This might involve rational trust (based on the skill of the professionals, their scientific rigor) or affective trust (based on the human qualities of the medical professional such as, being an attentive expert, always available, one who knows how to listen) (Sarradon-Eck et al. 2008). Once the Internet users have chosen their medical professional and their clinic, the discussion turns to improv- ing the patient/doctor relationship so that medical information is effec- tively exchanged. On reading the online exchanges, we see that patients feel they have the right to request explanations and to receive answers. They discuss with their peers beforehand so that they can ask their doctors the right questions at the proper time. When faced with an unexpected event, Internet users answer the questions of their peers but always encourage the woman concerned to see a gynecologist as soon as possible. The women more often than not have the number of a gynecologist ready. We 136 E. SIMON may assume that allowing oneself to ask questions of a medical professional clearly rebalances the patient/doctor relationship in countries where it is still so often patriarchal and one-sided. It should be noted that the wealthy social status of the Internet users can in itself lead to a “rebalancing” of the asymmetric relationship between the patient and the doctor. For wealthy patients, the interviews carried out at the Biasa clinic show how the Internet (usually by searching for information via search engines) has become part of the patient/doctor relationship. Most of the people interviewed, from a wealthy background, explained that they searched for information to understand the difficult terms that came up during a consultation: “Yes, when we get to some terms that I don’t understand, I use Google to find out what it means”. Going even further, one of the men treated at the Biasa clinic for severe secretory azoospermia explained that he did not understand his infertility problem. His doctor had not taken the time to explain it to him and he did not dare ask:

It was thus through online research that I understood that there is excretory and secretory azoospermia, I did research to understand my case, to see what azoospermia was, because often what is written on the analysis is just azoospermia. They don’t explain […]. When I copied these things afterwards, I had this information in my phone, I gave it to my partner when we saw each other on the weekend. She read it too because what blocked me more than anything else was that we didn’t understand”. He went on to explain how this enabled him “to go and ask him [his doctor] specifically if he suffered from excretory or secretory azoospermia?

This kind of observation leads us to hypothesize that searching for information online is part of the strategic rebalancing of the patient/doctor relationship and is used by at least an African social elite looking for local infertility treatment. This rebalancing effect is nevertheless marginal both in terms of its content (allowing oneself to ask questions of the person treating us to better understand the biomedical information) and its actors (potentially limited to a wealthy population with sufficient social acumen). 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 137

Creating an Online Space for Social Support The unique make-up of the public in the discussion thread, as previously mentioned, is reminiscent of those patient communities built around a “biosocial organization” as described by Paul Rabinow. Along the same lines as his works, numerous researchers have studied the contribution of these kinds of communities to the production of biomedical knowledge, thus leading to a new point of view. I would qualify this analysis as being more optimistic (compared with the critical approach) about the impact of digital spaces on healthcare (empowerment of patients and enriching knowledge). The discussion thread in our study does not however attempt to be either a form of alternative medical knowledge or to serve as a starting point for political/militant action (e.g. stating it is a choice to be a mother or not, fighting against inequalities in access to healthcare between North and South, or even challenging differences when compared with other countries in the South or between patients in the same country) as has been identified by literature on northern nations (Akrich and Méadel 2007; Thoër 2012). In such a context, what might it mean to belong to this kind of biosocial community? Given the weight of the social stigma associated with infertility and despite changes underway in the societies where the Internet users come from, infertility continues to be “swept under the rug”. Of course the online conversations studied are visible to all on www.enceinte.com without any form of prior registration. Yet, these conversations cannot really be considered as public, if we accept the idea that just because it is visible does not mean it is public. If the women accept to discuss infertility on the net, it is because they do it in a confined arena under the veil of anonymity, as this extract from a post demonstrates:

You must not isolate yourself! Here is it easier to confide given that we are in a virtual world and we are not meant to know each other. So, free yourself my dear. It will do you good. Do not brood over your suffering all alone, we are here to support people who have already tried, those about to try, mothers. I am sending you a big hug and don’t forget to come back and talk to us. (October 2014)

How participants manage their digital identity provides proof of this desire for anonymity. While some French Internet users use their own photo as an avatar, African Internet users prefer images that evoke a 138 E. SIMON

personality trait, a feeling, or a mood (Pereny and Amato 2010). Additionally, none of them think consider it useful to fill in their profile (in contrast with French Internet users). Finally, while several of them are in Abidjan and get treatment from the same clinic, almost none of them have envisaged meeting up physically. They try to keep a certain distance to maintain this anonymity. Other studies handling stigmatized communities have shown how this desire for anonymity could be a determining factor in people’s use of online spaces (Lévy et al. 2009). The risk that breaking anonymity represents was also mentioned by healthcare professionals at the Biasa clinic to explain their failure to create support groups at the hospital:

Many of them do not like to speak about it. This is the big problem, even here when I treat them… I have recommended that we create support groups, but I have never seen anyone. No one comes. They tell me ‘we are sorry, we don’t want people to know’. (Interview with a psychologist at the Biasa clinic, 2013)

Additionally, it should be mentioned that there is a certain reserve among Internet users who only implicitly discuss the social stigma that they suffer from family: “You know how it is with the family-in-law”; “Here in Africa, you know what I mean”. This reserve is undoubtedly an expression of their desire not to lose face, by avoiding a sensitive subject. Ethnographic investigations carried out by Marcia Inhorn (2003) show that fear of appearing pathetic or depressed is one motive for refusing to participate in face-to-face discussion groups. Generally, online exchanges undoubtedly make it easier to avoid revealing oneself in this emotional state since if you are feeling very discouraged you simply don’t post. Those Internet users who are absent for extended periods of time often excuse themselves to their peers mentioning that they were too depressed. But beyond that, by keeping their family and relatives out of their discussions, Internet users can forget social stigma. They interact in a place where social stigma cannot affect them, where they are shielded from it. The fact that social stigma is almost hidden online may suggest that the forum is a refuge for this biosocial community (the terms “home” and “family”6 are used by Internet users to describe the discussion thread and its members) whose members cannot what they are looking for in their own actual families. 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 139

So while speaking groups seem to have difficulty existing off line, the discussion observed online helps to create support spaces that cut through the feelings of isolation and allow participants to express their emotions. Nevertheless the community is still structured around the two imperatives (reproductive/medical) mentioned earlier. The form of the emotional support provided thus has a relatively constant format. At each step or event that Internet users experience, they encourage each other and build each other’s confidence. When they discuss feelings of despair, other participants respond with messages of encouragement. To these messages a positive reaction is expected and users should mention their desire to continue. During this succession of trials and tribulations, Internet users frequently refer to an off line social institution that pre-dates the digital community. Turning to faith (with different monotheistic religions represented such as Christianity, neo-Christianity, and Islam) allows many Internet users to accept the successive failures. They consider that God wanted it to happen. This vision according to which success or failure of ART is in the hands of God is one of the specificities of this discussion thread. Biomedical procedures and turning to prayer are intertwined. Internet users who visit other spaces of the forum also play with different social codes. As in other threads on the website, Internet users most often share their emotions through an excessive use of emojis. This is the case both when celebrating a happy event (emojis that represent smiling faces, dancing woman who dance…) or when supporting an Internet user after a sad event (sand or angry faces). For example, when posting a message in the general discussion threads of the www.enceinte.com forum, the founder of the thread explained to African Internet users that she burns alter can- dles while undergoing IVF and that she “crossed her fingers” and she add three pictures of fingers crossed. The members of the thread therefore show an ability to adapt their way of interacting according to the readership and its presumed values. Using faith as a resource to provide support during the difficulties of ART highlights the local reasoning (of re-territorialization?) that permeates this online support space founded around a biosocial cosmopolitan community. 140 E. SIMON

Contributing to Social Change Off Line: Revamping Local Matrimonial Relationships? The objective of the thread is to discuss technology that helps respond to fertility issues that can subject women to social exclusion. To clearly grasp how this online exchange can help strengthen the social status of women facing infertility, it is useful to take a step back and analyze the exchanges within the couple about the management of an ART project. To do this we should consider the issue of social support. Margaret and Wolfgang Stroebe (1996) distinguish between four mechanisms of online social support: emotional, informational, evaluative (helping in decision making) and tangible (e.g. providing financial support). We have previously described different online practices that involve emotional support, informational support and evaluative support (asking for testimonies and searching for practical information to enable the internaut to identify local healthcare services and reduce uncertainty). Similarly to the works of other authors, we may hypothesize that tangible support only represents a minor element in online discussions (Gauducheau 2012). The cost of ART and the difficulties faced by Internet users is a recurrent subject in the discussion thread. Internet users often advise each other to negotiate with their clinic or even to get different treatments at a lower cost (in such-and-such a pharmacy, etc.). Here it involves other forms of informational and evaluative support, but occasionally; based on the affinities that have been created through online exchanges, this may lead to actual material aid. Sometimes an Internet user offers a participant in the thread the possibility of using their foreign supply network or even of using what remains of their medication. While one might assume that, in contrast to a physical off line group, an online group cannot provide financial support, accompany someone to the clinic or even step in as mediator to resolve couple conflicts, the fact remains that many exchanges also aim to resolve tense family situations caused by a couple’s infertility and thus provide a unique form of tangible support. The ART project is obviously the subject of discussions and negotiations within any couple. The forum encourages talking about it and plays a genuine role as mediator. First, it is useful to remember that the issue of infertility does not always affect both members of the couple in the same way. Internet users regularly mention their husbands’ lack of involvement. They discuss ways of encouraging them to be more assiduous in taking their medication. Second the unique configuration of local ART makes 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 141 this particular healthcare service a considerable financial burden for couples. The women mention the disagreements that can emerge within a couple when faced with the need to continue their ART project following a failure. Together the participants of the thread try to find solutions (conflict mediation within a couple) to avoid the reproduction project becoming the sole objective of the wife. This is all the more important since researchers investigating African women going through a process of reproductive migration in Douala or in Paris, have established that one risk of an ART project is that it stops being a joint project within the couple. This then becomes an issue that “creates difficulties for the initial construction of a couple based around shared values and solidarity in the face of trials” (see p. 57 in Bonnet and Duchesne 2014). Internet users regularly advise using their female seduction powers to negotiate more courses of ART. This refers to the concept of “transac- tional sexuality” as described in feminist African literature (Broqua and Deschamps 2014). It falls within an analysis of gender relationships, which suggests that there is a continuum from prostitution to service exchange that can include the giving of gifts within a marriage. Marriage is understood here within the Claude Lévi-Strauss definition since it is a form of exchange between families in which the woman is not a partner but rather an object in the exchange. Sexuality appears as the only element that still depends on the goodwill of the woman and must thus be traded. To fully interpret the use of sexual services as a commodity within a marriage so that women can continue their reproductive treatment would require extensive interviews with the Internet users themselves. It is nevertheless possible to suggest that this commoditization clearly attempts to boost the woman’s social capital that has been threatened by the issue of infertility. Even more than that, the way that sexuality is discussed online seems to introduce a kind of rupture in the aforementioned continuum. While online discussions constantly refer to the fact that women are there to have children, they are also an opportunity to highlight how they can be the subject of their sexuality and not just the object. It should be remembered that ART involves prohibiting sexual relations (at a given moment), if it doesn’t just separate reproduction and sexuality. In order to re- establish a sexual relationship between those in the couple and especially to maintain sexual desire, Internet users regularly discuss the “little tips” to avoid the medical process completely extinguishing the couple’s sexuality: 142 E. SIMON

For the sexy thing this weekend: […] after the bath: massage + grapes that you put in his mouth from your mouth. After this, session of caresses + touching + fellatio (sorry) with ice cubes if the man isn’t too sensitive to cold + he can then do the same to you… after that if you are not excited like rabbits we can’t do anything for you lol. (Belle, June 2014)

This sexuality initiated by women (and not just as a service based solely on a man’s request) is obviously described with varying levels of confidence and reserve: “I should have sent that in a private message. People are going to think I am depraved” wrote Belle after the aforementioned message. The fact remains that ART can now be integrated into the “couple” project alongside concepts of sexual pleasure, love, and mutual trust. ART can, for example, become a gift that the couple celebrates for Saint Valentine’s day:

The clinic called me to remind me that I had my blood tests scheduled for tomorrow. […] I had asked for it as my birthday present […]. We had planned to do the insemination on the 14th February, my birthday and Saint Valentine’s day, but in the end it will be on the 15th. (February 2012)

By focusing on the couple, these online exchanges undoubtedly contributed to jointly forming a conception of the couple that has not yet been established in the local community. This new form of relationship allows women to detach themselves from certain social pressures, as “they live outside of social norms which continue to define the gendered positions of men and women in marital relationships” (see p. 164 in Grange Omokaro 2013). Also when certain Internet users finally do speak about the issue of the wider family and the in-laws, it is immediately noticeable that the exchanges on this subject focus on protecting the couple. They encourage creating a distanced relationship with the family, which is characteristic of new marital and parental relationships:

My husband does not want to hear any more about attempts (to get pregnant) and my couple is in danger, but my mother-in-law calls him every day to ask if he has good news for her. My parents do not know that it is my husband who has a problem and cannot even imagine it, because he already has a child. They are always sending me traditional medication so that I can purge myself. They cart me around to various traditional healers so you can imagine how I have had enough of this secret that is weighing me down. 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 143

Stay strong my dear. Love is stronger than everything and this love which binds you will help your husband to come around to a better state of mind. (Sophie et Rose, January 2012)

Through the analysis of online exchanges, we thus see the emergence of a new form of storytelling that incorporates newly emerging models of marriage and parenthood that are specific to contemporary urban environments. The aim is to move away from the stigmatizing identity linked to infertility and as a result allow Internet users to imagine a different future.

Conclusion The approach developed in this text has gone beyond those analyses that oscillate between a critical perspective of the Internet (development of instantaneity, tools of biopolitics, etc.) and an apologetic perspective (Internet seen as a vector for individualization, strengthening autonomy). It has involved seriously investigating the technological mechanisms of the website and attempting to describe how the uniqueness of the unfortunate event (infertility and related social stigma), the specificity of access to local healthcare, and different asymmetric social relationships (particularly patient/doctor, men/women) are expressed by participants. It then investigated how these aspects are conceptualized or even redefined by “capable actors” from the public using the discussion thread. Documenting the diversity of public experiences of ICT in a context of globalization thus helps highlight certain gaps in literature that is primarily based on observations conducted in the North and focused on patient/doctor relationships. This study is thus part of the work that I conducted previously on the processes of globalization which are characterized by a dual movement of de-territorialization and re-territorialization. In these research works, conducted in areas likely to provide a heuristic matrix for grasping the globalization phenomenon (dynamic of traditional healthcare systems: Simon and Egrot 2012; hybrid therapeutic objects: Baxerres and Simon 2012; and now digital healthcare spaces), the focus was on “enriching the palette of contemporary moral experiences” (see p. 293 in Cefaï 2010). Observations of different social relationships of African women on a French-speaking forum on infertility highlighted the diversity of asymmetric relationships, the variety of local forms of differentiation, and the different ways of constructing identity. 144 E. SIMON

After analyzing the way in which domination/submission relationships evolve and are thus not stable and permanently-coherent phenomena and noting that they vary according to societies (Nash 2011), I tried to think to distinguish how these women, through their digital practices, negotiate and rethink the various restricted relationships that shape their unique experience of infertility. Grappling with the issue of health, which incorporates numerous institutions (family, religion, medical), these women create new configurations online that encompass together the various power relationships at play. These power relationships can just as easily enclose women in their desire for reproductive technology based on restrictive gender relationships and the obligation to be a mother and reinforce the medicalization of their bodies as they can provide an opportunity of empowerment. This would be achieved using online cosmopolitan forms of sociability (without being de-territorialized) and by experimenting with new models of marriage, which resonate with the social changes underway in the societies they come from.

Notes 1. In order to respect the anonymity of the Internet users, user names in this text have all been made up and any quotations have been slightly shortened (without changing the meaning, the style etc.). The objective was to make it impossible to use the information to help find the context and trace the actors involved (through search engines). 2. This ethnographic investigation was carried out by Francesca Mininel, a Master 2 graduate student in anthropology. She conducted 12 interviews and consultation observations. I would like to thank her for the data col- lected and her contribution to this study. 3. This study used online discussions in French and English. Three South African forums were also analyzed. 4. This typology can be applied to a variety of other disorders including infertility problems. 5. Women observe their own bodies and are attentive to symptoms of hyperstimulation yet the possibility of this occurring is never put forward as being a reason for refusing ART treatment. 6. The word family is used 75 times throughout the whole discussion thread. Half of these references refer to the foster family that the online community represents. 7 ONLINE COMMUNICATION OF AFRICAN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN… 145

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Not All Fans Leave a Trace: The Case of a Digital Comic Serial Inspired by Television Series

Julien Falgas

Introduction A “lurker” is a term used to refer to anyone who regularly reads conversations on an online discussion space such as a forum, discussion list and comments area or on digital media and who does not visibly contribute to conversations. If fans are considered to be creators, producers, contributors or participants of an observable digital trace relating to a story they feel passionate about, a lurker appears to be the exact opposite of a fan. I began studying the media practices of readers of the digital comic serial Les Autres Gens (LAG)1 at a time when I felt very enthusiastic about

French Original Publication: Et si tous les fans ne laissaient pas de trace: le cas d’un feuilleton de bande dessinée numérique inspiré par les séries télévisées. Études de communication, 47, 151–166 (2016). Translation: Beth Varley

J. Falgas (*) Centre de recherche sur les mediations (CREM), Université de Lorraine, Metz, France

© The Author(s) 2020 149 C. Ségur (ed.), French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33346-1_8 150 J. FALGAS it (Falgas 2012). Reading Henry Jenkins and being a fan myself strengthened my conviction that a fan was a producer since I was going to devote considerable effort to produce work about my fandom. My study began with an analysis of the traces left by readers on the serial’s official forum and Facebook page and on the social media platform Twitter. There were then no other discussion spaces dedicated to the serial, which had an audience of approximately 2000 subscribers at the most. A questionnaire approved by the authors and distributed to all readers using the regular communication channels of the comic serial elicited more than 200 responses: messages were published on the official website’s home page, official forum, Facebook page and Twitter account and were transmitted to the electronic newsletter subscribers; an insert was also included in an episode. After analyzing the answers to the questionnaire, I identified and interviewed half a dozen readers, introducing myself as a regular LAG reader (Falgas 2016). LAG is in many ways an innovative narrative form. Between March 2010 and June 2012, more than 100 comic artists and a handful of comic writers contributed to the episodes published daily. The structure implemented by the story creator made the most of available digital tools while keeping the traditional form used by authors of comics (Falgas 2013). In the world of comics, LAG marked an important stage in the conflict that broke out in the spring of 2010 between comic book authors and publishers over the future of copyright in the face of emerging digital distribution (Baudry 2012). But, more importantly, it also set an example that proved that it was possible to end the supremacy of the free-of-charge comic blog model (ibid.). The study of LAG readers’ media practices sought to understand how and why the comic serial had managed to win readers over and had convinced them to subscribe to it. The study found that readers of this comic serial adopted it because they shared with the authors the current frames of reference when it was created (Falgas 2014). While its business model was conditioned by the influence of the independent online news media and the way in which it was accessed depended on converging uses across digital communication platforms, the frame of the television series contributed the most to the sharing of the story’s narrative dimensions (ibid.). The fan figure to which authors and readers referred to during our discussions was itself modeled on the television series fan. The LAG comic thus turned out to be an unexpectedly fertile ground for questioning the academic representation of the fan as it has emerged from research on 8 NOT ALL FANS LEAVE A TRACE: THE CASE OF A DIGITAL COMIC SERIAL… 151 contemporary television series, a field in which it is impossible to collect data from such a large proportion of viewers. My findings have led me to claim that having a contribution practice is not the only characteristic of a fan. As I will explain, such findings clash with a current representation in our discipline today, whose latest expression is developed by the “Emergences” section of the Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication, which focused in Issue 7 published in 2015 on the theme of “Fan studies: challenges and outlooks of fan research in France”. I elaborate here on the reasons that compelled me to suggest that a significant proportion of fans are made up of individuals who do not partake in any observable online contribution practices whatsoever about what they feel passionate about. I will show that fans with non-contributing practices should not be considered to be passive or lunatics. In my concluding remarks, I will describe the factors that should encourage us as part of our work on fandom to investigate further the dynamics of circulation and mediation at play at the intersection between the visible expressions of hardcore fans (fans who create, produce, participate and contribute), the invisible participation of other fans and the reception experiences of other audiences.

The Increasing Prevalence of Positive Fan Representations In one of his pioneering studies, Henry Jenkins claimed that “media fans are consumers who produce, readers who write and spectators who participate” (see p. 212 in Jenkins 2008). Fan studies have been strongly influenced by this representation, and Jenkins’ definition has served as a foundation for the work of Mélanie Bourdaa (2012, 2015a, b), who was invited to participate in a call for papers in 2011 by the organization committee of the one-day conference “Fan culture, towards a new audience sociology”,2 while the call for papers for the November 2013 conference on “Audience participation, practices and representations” referred to “the more obvious forms of participation, in particular those embodied by the ‘fan’ figure”.3 While in the past, fans have sometimes been described as misfits, lunatics or slaves to their adoration of the popular productions of creative industries, Philippe Le Guern has observed that “many authors have developed a much more appreciative vision of fans in line with a research 152 J. FALGAS tradition portraying fans as an active audience that coproduces the meaning of works, is engaged in an active process of appropriation and participates in social relationships and interactions beyond the moment of reception” (see p. 38 in Le Guern 2009). Sociologist Olivier Donnat draws attention to the fact that “until the arrival of the Internet”, fans were described “as admirers who longed to identify with something/ someone and consumed the products of celebrity culture” (see p. 11 in Donnat 2009). Philippe Le Guern agrees with this, suggesting that Internet has allowed “new fan behaviors” and ushered in “a ‘modern’ era for practices and analysis” (see p. 24 in Le Guern 2009). So does Clément Combes, who observes that the Internet has facilitated the establishment of links between communities and “generally, has renewed the ways and means of fandom” (see p. 140 in Combes 2011). There appears to be a consensus around the idea that digital communication platforms have changed the boundaries and visibility of creative practices amongst fans as well as the methods applied by academics to assess them. The analysis of traces has enabled a renewal of the definition of a fan, who can no longer be viewed narrowly as an insane victim. Alongside this more positive perspective, a critical current remains, which recognizes the creative industries’ influence over audience creativity. And so, as Martial Martin has observed in a study of the Lost TV series, consumers may be even more controlled when they operate within the participatory structures imagined by designers in the creative industries, but they may still be seen to exercise creative freedom when engaging with more conventional marketing campaigns (see p. 178 in Martin 2011). Here, the analysis of negotiations between creators and audiences remains within boundaries that are similar to many of the approaches that view fans in a positive light, in that it focuses exclusively on contribution practices. However, there are signs in more recent publications that other practices should be considered beyond those that contribute to or participate in the production of digital traces around a passion for something. In this way, Mélanie Bourdaa (2015b) points out:

The pioneering ethnographic study by Dominique Pasquier (1999), an analysis of the reception of the Hélène et les Garçons TV series by a teenager audience, paved the way to several other studies. This research showed how the series played a socializing role for its audience of young female television viewers. She described how the ‘family is the first sociability circle centered around television. Television then becomes a conversation topic in many 8 NOT ALL FANS LEAVE A TRACE: THE CASE OF A DIGITAL COMIC SERIAL… 153

other social communities, including at school or work, between neighbors, or at places of entertainment or holiday. It also leads to many collective practices, such as role playing, exchanging objects, toys, clothes or images’. (See p. 177 in Pasquier 1999)

A distinctive feature of the activities noted by Dominique Pasquier is that they lend themselves to circulation in the social world, much more so than participation or contribution via a structure created by other fans or the series producers. Henry Jenkins (2015) himself highlighted that “there is an urgent need to develop a more nuanced analysis of what it means to participate in fandoms”: while it may have seemed important to focus on participatory practices, this was dictated by a context in which fans were generally portrayed as being passive. This is no longer the case. Besides, Henry Jenkins suggests that the study of fan communities is an excellent field for exploring contemporary participatory culture, as for him, participation is not the prerogative of fan communities. In addition, we do not know for sure that fans are all organized into communities. Therefore, studying fan communities is arguably a good way to understand what constitutes a community in the digital age, but by no means an effective method of conceptualizing fandom. Given these reservations, aca-fans— academics whose research work converges with their own fan objects— who are included in a fan community (Cristofari and Guitton 2015) may no longer be in a better position to understand the discussions between the members of their fan communities and other social actors, such as other fans, other communities, other audiences and producers and so on.

Not All Fans Leave a Trace Mélanie Bourdaa (2015c) has observed that the study of digital traces tends to be recognized as “an increasingly relevant research tool”. For aca- fans, digital communication systems are promising on two levels: they enable aca-fans to immerse themselves in what they are passionate about as well as to conduct research on this using the abundant material available. The emergence of platforms such as forums, discussion lists and digital social media has renewed existing communication forms, compared to those offered by fanzines (see p. 140 in Combes 2011). Amongst the 216 respondents to my questionnaire, almost a third merely used such platforms as a means of information, without actually contributing to them. Even in the limited sample of 98 respondents who 154 J. FALGAS said that they “completely agreed” with the statement “upon reading the comic serial Les Autres Gens, I became a fan”, more than one in four fans said that they did not use the functionalities offered at all and one out of three used them exclusively for information purposes. They did not want to use other blogs or forums either. The use of these was found to be infrequent given the limited and centralized nature of an audience consisting of around 2000 subscribers. Given the way in which the survey was disseminated and the response rate in relation to the number of subscribers to the serial (10%), it appears that less than two-thirds of LAG fans who described themselves as such, engaged in contribution practices. It should be noted that the focus of the survey that led to such an observation was not to study fans: the statement in question was one of 80 questions primarily designed to identify readers’ digital uses. The comic serial Les Autres Gens could only be accessed by subscription. Amongst the questionnaire respondents, fewer than one out of three fans said that they shared access to the comic serial with someone else, namely their partners for one in five fans, or, for a smaller number of fans, friends or other family members, or even colleagues for 1 of the 98 respondents. Even though they did not especially try to convert other people to their interest, three out of four fans said that they spoke of the serial with friends or family at least “sometimes”, but those who declared doing so often were also those who shared their subscription with their partners. Out of the 44 fans who had no contribution practices on either the forum, Facebook or Twitter, 29 said that they talked about the serial with other readers (friends or family) in the course of their private lives, and 4 of these said that they discussed it with other readers by email. The 15 other fans said that they discussed the comic serial with other readers in the course of their professional lives (the two groups were heterogeneous). All fans were thus involved in discussions with other readers, if only occasionally. While for many this was through the digital communication tools that are relevant for the development of trace analysis practices, there was still a high proportion of fans—much more than a third in this case—for whom such interactions took place outside the spectrum covered by such a trace analysis, even though the serial in question was published on the Internet. Finally, it is worth noting that both online and offline interactions were not the prerogative of the respondents in the fan group who claimed to be “complete” fans of the serial. Amongst the 118 respondents who did not report being “complete” fans of the serial, only 25 said that they never spoke about it with other readers, be it in their private lives or at work. 8 NOT ALL FANS LEAVE A TRACE: THE CASE OF A DIGITAL COMIC SERIAL… 155

Whether they were fans of the serial or not, most of the respondents thus discussed it with other readers, at least sometimes. The difference lay in how much they did: out of 98 respondents who claimed to be fans, only 15 reported discussing the serial “often” on the forum (8), on Twitter (9) or on Facebook (4). Amongst the other 118 respondents, only 10 reported a similar level of engagement with the forum (2), Twitter (6) or Facebook (5); the latter were all “moderate” fans of the serial. It is clear that very few of the readers who reported being “complete” fans of the serial engaged in contribution practices, while conversely, a few readers with intensive contribution activities did not consider themselves to be real fans of the fan object discussed. During the interviews, the most committed fan—identified as the “first fan” by the creator and writer of the serial—felt the need to apologize for being “too fanatical” (a male executive aged 30 years, living in Paris). We may therefore consider that there are degrees of perceived fandom and that participatory or contribution activities are often acknowledged to be an over-indulgence by the fans who engage in them. This perception of degrees of fandom was confirmed by a female reader who considered herself a “complete fan” of the serial. She said: “I am not fanatical to the extent that I follow comments, share on the forum or go to meet authors at autograph sessions” (a female librarian aged 32 years, living in Toulouse, France). For another reader, to have subscribed and to read the daily episode was enough in terms of the time and money spent, for him to report being a “complete fan” of the series, the storyline of which he found fas- cinating (a male academic aged 44 years, living in the USA). These testimonies confirm the analysis of questionnaire responses: not all fans leave a digital trace. Many of them seem to have been driven by the sole desire to consume what they feel passionate about as it is shown to them. The times when they discussed the serial with other readers outside digital communication spaces were few and far between. “I don’t really discuss it off-line. I talked about it once with a female friend because we were chatting about this and that and we got to discussing comics” (a male executive aged 36 years, living in a small commune in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in France). 156 J. FALGAS

Discretion Does Not Mean a Fan Is Dominated by an Evil and Powerful Industry Like young Philippe Le Guern in the seventies, it is still possible in the age of the Internet to be a “quiet” fan, who is “not involved in any fan clubs and rarely [comments] on his or her passion for something” (see p. 22 in Le Guern 2009). The LAG serial was published online on the sidelines of existing creative industries in what was then a novel form for the comics industry, with a business model inspired by that of digital news pure play- ers4 and without an advertising budget. Therefore, the quiet fans of this serial cannot be defined by their supposed fascination with a powerful creative industry. Indeed, they were fans of a marginal, innovative product self-produced by its authors. While most fans do not share the traits of hardcore fans who produce, the critical angle also has its limits. By revealing that many fans did not have any contribution practices while a minority of hardcore fans were responsible for the bulk of contributions, the analysis of questionnaire responses has shown the limits of studying the traces left by assumed fans on digital communication platforms. Interviews conducted with several quiet fans have yielded a number of clues about how to define the distinctive nature of their passion if it is not the ambition to produce content nor an allegiance to mass culture. When one of the interviewees (a male academic aged 44 years living in the USA) said to explain his point of view that “other readers say that too”, I asked him where he had got that information from, thinking that he had got it from reading the forum (which he had said he did not contribute to). He confirmed this but also went on to mention the special comedy episodes that were not part of the ongoing serial. In these, the authors parody the TV press and television entertainment magazines. These episodes depict readers of the serial who are being interviewed in street polls or who participate in fan club meet-ups. The serial’s authors have thus staged representations of their readership with which the readers have identified. In the same way, conversations by a handful of readers who participate in Twitter discussions were retweeted to the 800 followers of the official account of the serial. The serial’s forum played a similar role for the readers who were not Twitter users in that they could read the discussions of those readers who were more inclined to share, and identify with what was being said. For a person who is a “devotee or enthusiastic follower of some sport or hobby or public figure” according to theChambers dictionary definition 8 NOT ALL FANS LEAVE A TRACE: THE CASE OF A DIGITAL COMIC SERIAL… 157 of a fan, it is thus possible and often sufficient to recognize oneself in the mirror provided by one’s peers through their traces on digital social media and their representations in media. Through their forum contributions and interactions on digital social media, they could be fulfilling other aspi- rations than the desire to be accomplished fans.

The Place of Fans in the Dynamics of Mediated Relationships Between Audiences Anthony Galluzzo and Jean-Philippe Galan, by drawing on Henry Jenkins and Philippe Le Guern’s work to inform their own research in management sciences, have observed that the consumption experiences of fans are by nature community experiences, arguing that “by reading fanzines, fan- sites and blogs, even isolated fans become part of a community” (see p. 140 in Galluzzo and Galan 2013). In his philosophy thesis, Blair Nonnecke (2000) has studied lurking practices on electronic discussion lists. Lurking consists of reading messages shared on a discussion list, a digital social network or an online forum, but without publishing any. He has established that reading a community publication regularly without contributing to it is an actual form of engagement with that community on the part of lurkers. He states: “ignoring, dismissing or misunderstanding lurking distorts our knowledge of life on-line and may lead to inap- propriate design of online environments.” These propositions echo Daniel Dayan’s assertion that “an audience can only exist in a reflexive form. Its existence depends on its ability to imagine itself through different ways of representing the group and of approving group affiliation” (see p. 433 in Dayan 2000). When readers or viewers imagine other audience members through the activities of hardcore fans or their representations in media, and identify with such representations, they become members of that audience themselves. They can then identify with being fans or not. Some contributors are not fans. Seven out of 30 respondents to my questionnaire who had said that they were “not at all” or “not real” fans of the series said they had contribution practices. Their traces contribute to the existence of an audience as used by Dayan, as do those of the respondents who reported being “moderate” fans. While the likelihood of sharing on digital publishing facilities probably increases with the level of interest in a subject, it also depends on whether there can be identification with existing traces, which are accessible to all. It thus depends primarily 158 J. FALGAS on whether people feel inclined to look at what is being published. Before leaving traces, people must first look at the traces left by peers and decide whether they have something to contribute. There are thus multiple postures from which audience members interact with each other.

1. Contributor readers share on all or part of the communication facilities provided around the serial. They portray themselves as true fans of the serial, but also sometimes as moderately passionate supporters of it. More than half of the fans belong to this group, but the hardcore fans who reported that they often contributed to at least one platform accounted for less than one in six fans amongst the respondents. There was also a small number of readers who participated by expressing varying levels of criticism of what was on offer. The main finding to note is that the audience of contributors was variable in terms of its enthusiasm, engagement and choice of engagement platform. Even though the two are undeniably linked, coming out as a fan is not the same thing as actually belonging to this section of the audience. 2. Some readers are interested in what was published on the facilities offered around the series, but who did not contribute. The mirror provided by their peers’ public voices influenced their ability to imagine themselves as audience members. This ability was supported by the awareness that they could contribute if they wanted to. The funny depictions of LAG audiences in the supplements to the regular story episodes helped reinforce the feeling that they belonged to a community of readers. In my study, one in three fans was found to belong to this group along with other readers who shared varying levels of interest in the series. 3. Other readers did not leave any traces on digital communication facilities. We have seen that most of them did discuss the serial with other people, whether they read the serial or not, in their professional or private lives, but that such discussions were often very infrequent. More than one in four fans were part of this group, which demonstrates that all who claim to be fans are not members of an audience in the fullest meaning of the term as used by Daniel Dayan. 8 NOT ALL FANS LEAVE A TRACE: THE CASE OF A DIGITAL COMIC SERIAL… 159

More importantly, beyond observations about fan segmentation into types, readers were observed to move from one posture to another. Fans thus may switch from being mere readers to being interested readers, and even to having contributor status. I have observed this in readers faced with the death of a main story character, to whom they had grown attached. In this kind of situation, I noted that activity on the serial’s forum increased. The traces left by this exceptional audience involvement may have enabled some readers to feel silently reassured that their feelings were shared by others, even if they did not disclose such feelings themselves. Such communication dynamics have enriched the authors’ representation, as illustrated by the author of the funny supplements to the serial, who said: “I often check out the forum to see how they [the readers] have reacted (…); I draw my inspiration from their anger or their suggestions” (interview on 20 February 2012). The serial creator and writer reported that he had received emails from readers after a character had been made to die, or when readers wanted to share very personal feelings. There is no evidence to suggest that the readers who came out of their shells were also contributors on the serial’s digital communication platforms. Many readers experienced feelings and identified with the feelings expressed by their peers, but did not go so far as to contribute on digital platforms or provide feedback to the authors; some of them said that they were “complete” fans of the serial. Amongst the 44 respondents who reported being “complete” fans of the serial but who said at that they did not contribute on any of the platforms provided, 39 said that they “completely agreed” with the statement: “I have become attached to the serial’s characters,” while only four said that they had “sometimes” or “rarely” emailed the serial’s authors. The fragmentation of contributing or observing audiences between various digital communication platforms also promotes sharing between platforms. Twitter is in a particular position in this respect in that the serial’s creator and writer became a Twitter enthusiast shortly after the serial began. The way in which he integrated Twitter in his communication about the serial may have been instrumental in the development of a small group of half a dozen readers who actively interacted on the platform although they had not contributed until then, despite having registered with the service. The serial’s creator explained that “I retweeted some of the readers’ comments and I realized that this is how some of them recognized each other and began to follow each other and that this sparked discussions” (interview on 23 April 2012). As for the creator’s 160 J. FALGAS

“first fan” (his words), when I interviewed him, he said that he had got his “Twitter culture” because of the serial (a male executive aged 30 years, living in Paris). He explained that before reading the serial he had a Twitter account, which he used to follow about ten people, “mostly friends and it was not very interesting because these people were not very active”. He “started actively tweeting” with the serial, and he even concluded: “I wonder what I’m going to do on Twitter afterwards [after the serial ends].”

To Be a Fan, One Only Needs the Ability to Access and Communicate Information Even though fan practices have been influenced by the development of digital communication facilities, such practices should not be exclusively interpreted in the light of the traces left by some fans on these platforms. Despite the rich body of results obtained through such methods, they should not be used to attempt to define more than what the studies undertaken to get to such results set out to explore, that is, the practices of fans involved in contribution activities through the facilities provided—or not—by the producers of their fan objects. Driven by an approach to shed a more positive light on fan representations and rehabilitate fans as producers and creators themselves, a section of fan studies has emphasized research into the contribution and creative practices of hardcore fans. The analysis of digital traces and participatory observation on digital communication facilities have become one of the main methodological instruments of this trend. This qualitative and quantitative study of LAG authors and readers suggests other research avenues. The serial used as an example was self-produced on the sidelines of established creative industries. Its form, inspired by comics, was innovative. Given these characteristics, the temptation to cast fans as consumers whose personality has been altered in some way by the crushing power of industrial marketing can be avoided. It can be observed that fans, like other audiences, have fragmented practices and change from one practice to another. There are degrees in the perception of fan postures. While contributing participation is not unrelated to the perception of being defined as having a high degree of fandom, it is not enough and does not explain why some people claim to be “complete” fans even though they show no inclination toward such participation. Other factors come into play such as fan participation through communication outside the range of digital communication plat- 8 NOT ALL FANS LEAVE A TRACE: THE CASE OF A DIGITAL COMIC SERIAL… 161 forms. On an even less visible level, there is the participation, for information only, of lurkers who enrich their experience by accessing the testimonies of other fans on a regular basis. Since no single type of engagement is sufficient—on its own or combined with others—to cover the practices of all fans who describe themselves as such, this means that fans can claim that they are fans without ever contributing, communicating about their passion or searching for information about it. The significant part played by the imagination in the formation of an audience in the sense used by Dayan, justifies the hypothesis that to be fans, fans only need to know that they can contribute, communicate or even only access information about their fan object. In one of Henry Jenkins more recent works, in which he draws on the work of Van Dijk and Nieborg, he suggests: “We think audiences do important work beyond what is being narrowly defined as ‘production’ here—that some of these processes marked as ‘less active’ involve substantial labor that potentially provides value in both commercial and non- commercial logic” (see pp. 148–149 in Jenkins 2013). The author adds: “we believe that there are still people who are primarily just ‘listening to’ and ‘watching’ media produced by others. […] We argue that even those who are ‘just’ reading, listening, or watching, do so differently in a world where they recognize their potential to contribute to broader conversations about that content than in a world where they are locked out of meaningful participation” (ibid.). Henry Jenkins proposes the concept of “spreadability” which should be understood as the potential for audiences to circulate content rather than in the narrow definition of virality in which the contributor fan figure is associated with the impacts of viral content dissemination. While the ethnological and methodological approach and the study of self-reported data cannot be considered sufficient for future studies, they do uncover new perspectives for stretching the boundaries of trace analysis. Fan studies could be deployed in our discipline through the analysis of the dynamics of circulation, which lead or may not lead to audience participation, and the ability of audiences to imagine themselves as such, as well as by furthering our understanding of the influence of such dynamics on the enthusiasm of fans for a cultural or creative production. Fan studies in information and communication sciences could also help take into account the fragmented, circulating practices of users and non-users of different platforms and media to shed light on the trade-offs of engaging or not in observation, contribution or creative production on these facilities. 162 J. FALGAS

Notes 1. http://www.lesautresgens.com. 2. One-day conference organized on 27 April 2012 at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord by Maxime Cervulle (University of Panthéon- Sorbonne [Paris 1], LETA-CRICC), Nelly Quemener (King’s College London, CIM) and Florian Voros (EHESS, IRIS). http://calenda. org/206604. Accessed on 22 May 2015. 3. Conference organized by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord, the joint research center (UMR) 8218 of CNRS and the ACTE Institute of the University of Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), and the higher education and research host team (EA) 1484 on communication, information and media (CIM) of the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord on 28 and 29 November 2013. https://colloqueparticipation.wordpress.com/appel-a-communication. Accessed on 22 May 2015. 4. The comic artist and writer explicitly boasts being influenced by Mediapart and @rrêt sur image, two independent media exclusively accessible on the Web and whose business models are based on subscriptions (interview on 23 April 2012).

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The Contingencies of Becoming Public: Lessons from an Unachieved Revolution

Smaïn Laacher and Cédric Terzi

Form is only a snapshot view of a transition Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907)

Introduction The title of the original collection where this chapter was published, Becoming Public, aims to tackle the notion of the “public” not only as an established phenomenon but also as a historical process.1 We will therefore

Original French Publication: Les contingences du devenir public. In L. Ballarini & C. Ségur C. (Eds) (2018), Devenir public. Modalités et enjeux. Paris: Mare & Martin. Translation: Bianca Ng & Teri Jones-Villeneuve

S. Laacher DynamE, Dynamiques Européennes, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

C. Terzi (*) Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux (CNRS-EHESS), Université de Lille, Lille, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 165 C. Ségur (ed.), French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33346-1_9 166 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI treat the public as a specific form and way of organizing an experience (Quéré 2003) that we will then attempt to characterize in the context of Tunisia’s political transition. In the first section, we will take a pragmatist approach to qualify as “public” the type of experience that takes place when people perceive that they are indirectly affected by transactions carried out by some of their peers; they then develop ways to try and remotely control these transactions despite not being directly involved in them (Dewey 1927). This perspective will allow us to show that the established and stabilized forms are only one aspect of the public, and its evolution is destined to remain a potential that will never be fully realized.2 In the second section, we will attempt to illustrate this aspect of becoming public by drawing on certain ethnographic scenes related to the contingencies of the Tunisian political transition. This perspective of becoming public began to take shape when protesters managed to appropriate national symbols to rise up against their tyrannical leader and demand that he “get out” (dégage!). The fall of Ben Ali and his regime raised hopes that the Tunisian people would be able to take control of their political community and thus their own destiny more than half a century after their declaration of independence. The emergence of this “Tunisian public” has been reflected by new, experimental regulations that challenge routine habits of daily life. This shake-up of the founding principles of the country’s political, legal and social order has led to various questions, concerns and clashes. The result was a series of controversies (confrontations following the television broadcast of the movie Persepolis, the occupation of Manouba University, the flags controversy) that turned into identity clashes that polarized the political, judicial and media arenas, as well as urban spaces and social media. These sometimes violent clashes created an atmosphere of suspicion that undermined the very possibility of vocalizing the criticism required to create any public experience. We will draw on these events to argue that an analysis of the public in terms of its evolution cannot be reduced to the opposition between the hagiographies of struggles and the fantasy of a pacified civil society. It prompts us to consider the public as a potential that is fulfilled through the institutionalization of conflict.3 The public experience, which is organized around disputes, comes to a halt once these disputes become polemical.4 The events that sparked the Tunisian transition reveal the ambivalent nature of becoming public. As we will see, the transition has proven to be a source of hope as long as its potential for emancipation remains realisti- cally achievable. However, it can also turn into cruel disillusionment as 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 167 soon as its experimental dynamic is hampered by the dogmatic restoration of certainties and the affirmation of identities. Our observations will dampen the optimism of the pragmatist approach used to develop our ideas. Driven by the conviction that any public experience brings hope of emancipation, John Dewey’s political philosophy tends to undermine the irremediably contingent nature of the public’s organization and the objections that could hinder it. We will draw a more cautious characterization of the public from our observations, which will highlight the fact that its evolution is destined to remain unfinished and that the organization of public experience is always at risk of breaking down.

Becoming Public Is an Invitation to Explore the Other Side of Established Publics Common usage tends to reify the notion of a “public” in a way that is not conducive to understanding it in terms of its evolution. When the word “public” is used as a noun, it usually describes an audience, that is, a group of people attending an event, connected to an artistic or cultural production, or following an ongoing issue. When considered as audiences, “publics” appear as groups that are sufficiently structured and identifiable to be characterized and counted. This term also serves as a resource for many social science research projects dedicated to media and cultural audiences in particular (Esquenazi 2003; Donnat 2009). When using the word as an adjective, we usually adopt the liberal distinction defining what is “public” as opposed to what is “private.” For instance, anyone can walk freely around a public park. Similarly, when certain information is considered public, we immediately understand that it is openly accessible to anyone and that it can be shared without restrictions. This adjectival usage has had great success in the scientific community, especially with the popularization of the concept of a “public sphere.”5 These ordinary perspectives on the concept of public converge to give it a generally positive meaning. In contrast to what is secret, hidden and inaccessible, it is associated with democratic virtues. The growth and diversification of museum-going publics are thus commonly understood as an indication of “cultural democratization.” Similarly, actions aiming to make information or online data public are generally viewed positively.6 In contrast, complaints related to the “privatization of public spaces” are usually designed to warn of undue appropriation of common goods.7 168 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

Furthermore, common usage leads us to attribute a performative value to the notion. In doing so, we tend to not only consider that all urban areas are public, but, ipso facto, everything within them too. We allow ourselves to describe as public all types of behavior we see on the streets or in the squares of our towns and cities. The same therefore applies when we consider the media to be a public sphere—we act as though any information immediately becomes public as soon as it has been published in the mass media. This usage can also be observed in the scientific world. Many ethnographical and other analyses of media data are presented as research on the “public sphere.”

The Reification of the Public Within Our Natural Attitude As is the case in all fields of study, when considering the notion of what is public, our natural attitude leads us to reify the world as a set of states. Our everyday activities cause us to subconsciously relate the public to the realm of being, of the objects we acquire and of established institutions or to consider it to be a characteristic of certain spaces, institutions, functions or individuals responsible for carrying out these functions. Our tendency to reify public life is appropriate for most practical purposes in our everyday lives. Our usage of the word “public” as both a noun and an adjective enables us to get our bearings in the world, to adjust our behavior to meet the needs of urban life and to modulate our language for a particular situation, such as when writing an academic article, speaking on national radio or chatting around the family dinner table. In these relatively stable situations, public life is organized into established groups and specific qualities whose existence and durability are rarely questioned. We can refer to it on a daily basis as a set of reliable resources, attributing to our “lifeworld” (as we experience it) all the qualities of a stable and sustainable state we can rely on to lead our lives. In doing so, we have learned to go out in public without seeing this as a particularly adventurous way to expose ourselves to potentially hostile strangers. Similarly, we have also learned how to anticipate the attention or interest that could be generated by an artistic, cultural or scientific project. The same processes apply when we intend to debate the results of an upcoming election in order to develop voting strategies according to the power relations at play. 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 169

The Public as a Historical and Practical Phenomenon As we already know, this stability is only one aspect of our public life, which has been shaped and organized over the course of a chaotic history of violent conflict, the outcome of which was uncertain. That said, this is usually background knowledge that we do not take into account in order to organize our practical lives. We wish to show here that this configura- tion8 is inverted during times of political or historical transition. Finding oneself in the midst of a revolution means confronting a sort of uncertainty, which is likely to affect even the most basic aspects of everyday life. Under these circumstances, the dynamic and uncertain nature of public life grabs our attention, while the more stable and established aspects take a back seat. The inhabitants of a city going through a revolution are generally aware that public life can be peaceful and serene. In some cases, they may even hope that the overthrowing of their political regime will lead to the creation of a new form of public life that will embody these qualities. However, such background knowledge is of little relevance in terms of orienting oneself, for all intents and purposes, in a troubled environment where the public takes on multiple forms, all in favor of continuous rupture, thus spurring on a host of initiatives for which the outcomes are uncertain. Identifying these contrasting aspects of public life is inextricably linked to perspectives associated with divergent timelines. Political transitions are often geared toward the organization and institution of a future public life. That said, it is precisely the constituted and instituted public resulting from this dynamic that our regular perceptions tend to retrospectively reify using nouns and adjectives. In the observations that follow, we will use the Tunisian political transition as a concrete example to highlight aspects of public life that usually remain in the background of our daily experiences as well as the concep- tualizations within them. We will thus see that phenomena we usually consider to be determined states may appear to be unspecified processes under other circumstances. We do not intend to create an epistemological break. In no way will we be disputing the relevance of common meanings of “public” that lead us to reify public phenomena and refer to them as nouns and adjectives highlighting their stable boundaries. We will base our ethnographic fieldwork more modestly on a transitional situation to reassess the pitfalls of scholasticism that, when coupled with the definition of nominal concepts, would lead us to consider the stabilized aspects of 170 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI public life independently of the uncertain and contingent dynamics that produce them.9 Just as it would be absurd to attempt to determine if water is a solid, a liquid or a gas, we will not attempt to contrast public dynamics and established publics. On the contrary, we will aim to broaden our conceptualization of the public so that we can consider its stability and dynamic together as moments or aspects of a socio-historical transition or transformation, showing that even the most well-established publics are the result of a contingent evolution. This, in turn, will argue in favor of an adverbial approach to “public” that, unlike its nominal and adjectival meanings, shows it to be a form and a way of organizing the human experience that characterizes “possible joint action” (Kaufmann and Quéré 2001). Our point of view invites the reader to consider the public as a historical and practical phenomenon that is restructured according to the activities that shape it and the habits that maintain it. For example, an adverbial perception of the public serves as a reminder that, even though we take for granted that the streets in our cities are public, this has not always been the case, and nothing can guarantee that they will stay this way.10 It also enables us to understand that publishing information in the media does not in itself guarantee that it will become public. Many activities are required, especially in reception, for it to capture the attention or the interest necessary to gather a public—that is, a group indirectly concerned by the matter at hand (Dewey 1927).

Becoming Public as a Potentiality: The Case of the Tunisian Transition The title Becoming Public may be perceived as an invitation to consider the public in terms of its contingent evolution, and thus to analyze it as a potential that could be realized under certain circumstances. Such a theoretical standpoint poses a real methodological and descriptive challenge. How can we report on a situation in such a way so as to reveal its potential for becoming public without assigning it a sense of durability that it does not have? How can we observe and describe the public experience in its infancy? How can we do justice to the contingent process whereby a public emerges, takes shape, becomes established and incarnate, sometimes to the point of enabling us to naturally confirm that the situation is public and to count separate “audiences”? To address these challenges, our descriptions will pay particular attention to the actions undertaken by the 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 171 protagonists of a transitional situation and to the way in which they relate to one another. This will enable us to highlight the existential, historical and political horizons in which the topic of becoming public can be discussed.

Experiencing the Potentiality of Emancipation The uprising that overthrew the regime of former President Zine el- Abidine Ben Ali is highly memorable. From December 2010 to January 2011, tens of thousands of Tunisians took to the streets of their towns and cities to demand better living conditions. Most accounts begin on December 17, 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a young street vendor selling fruit and vegetables, set himself on fire in front of the Sidi Bouzid Governorate after municipal police officers confiscated his cart and scales. During the days that followed, various inland cities were shaken by riots that the police attempted to control using violence. Images of young protesters who were severely injured or even killed by the police caused outrage among the Tunisian population. The protests took on a political tone and eventually began to affect the entire country. Rallying around the famous slogan “Get out” (Dégage!), countless protesters rushed to Tunis’ main thoroughfare, Avenue Bourguiba, in front of the Ministry of the Interior, the symbol of a repressive regime and police brutality. Demonstrations such as this were inconceivable under Ben Ali’s regime. They have since taken on a revolutionary significance, not only because of the sheer number of protesters but especially because of the calm determination with which the Tunisian people reclaimed their national symbols. Thousands of protesters brandishing the Tunisian flag or bearing the national colors called for the fall of their oppressive regime. By singing the national anthem, many of them discovered that the emancipatory force of its lyrics bore remarkable political significance under these particular circumstances:

No place for traitors in Tunisia. Only for those who defend her! […] When one day the people aspire to live, Destiny must surely respond! Oppression shall then vanish! And chains will break! 172 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

Many aspects of this revolution are relevant when analyzing the process of becoming public. First is the importance of the reappropriation of national symbols. By bearing the national colors during their demonstrations, and by interpreting the national anthem as a chant, protesters emphasized that their movement was eminently Tunisian. They invoked the name of their country to denounce the Ben Ali regime and the living conditions to which they had been reduced. In doing so, they expressed their unity, became a national people and created the possibility of overthrowing the “legitimate order.” In the name of their national identity, they challenged the authority of the regime, which until then had silenced them in order to speak on their behalf. By brandishing national symbols, they also showed their awareness of and interest in Tunisia’s future. They showed that they were concerned by the way their country was being run and equipped themselves with the means to indirectly control the consequences of this governance. To employ John Dewey’s terminology, they projected themselves as a possible Tunisian “public”. They discovered citizenship as a horizon from which they had always been excluded and thus experienced the “public” as an actual potentiality. Apart from the temptation to celebrate the performative function of language, these events indicate that to assert oneself as a public is not enough to become one. Witnesses of the protests in December 2010 and January 2011 agree on how uncertain the consequences of their demonstrations were. This is evidenced by the disbelief with which protesters welcomed the departure of Ben Ali on the evening of January 14, 2011. They needed a whole week to realize what they had achieved.11 This suggests that claiming to become a public means drawing on a potentiality to project its accomplishment into an irremediably contingent future. The random nature of the process of becoming public also applies to urban areas. Just as they did with their national symbols, the protesters took over their cities’ streets and squares. By going out in public on the streets and squares, they managed to demonstrate their shared indignation, which had been largely stifled until then. They turned urban areas into a stage to make their protests and resentment visible. By presenting themselves to one another, protesters each showed their distrust of the regime, so that any glances exchanged could become a signal of complicity. Conversely, by taking to the streets, protesters were able to see that their own indignation was shared by other Tunisians, thus acknowledging the potential power of such a mutual experience.12 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 173

The streets require those who walk them to act publicly. As such, they provide settings in which images of everything that happens on them can be recorded. Many protesters drew on the ordinary “accountability” of urban life to record and share photographs and video documents of their own revolt. The dissemination of these images played a decisive role in sustaining their indignation, mobilizing fellow demonstrators, organizing their experience and boosting its potential for becoming public. This observation could well be applied to the work of traditional mass media as well. By building on this visibility provided by urban spaces, television channels and press photographers were able to capture and share images of the uprising. This undoubtedly played a key role in organizing international public attention. Urban spaces gave the demonstrators and their indignation visibility, which helped boost its emancipatory momentum. However, this was not without its risks. At that time, demonstrating on the streets of Tunisia enabled them to stage their demands, but it also exposed them to the watchful eye of the oppressive regime and they became a target for the police.13 Between December 17, 2010, and January 14, 2011, internal security forces took advantage of this very visibility to shoot at protesters, killing 130 and injuring 1458.14 These circumstances highlight that the visibility of the protesters and their demands afforded by urban spaces was not the only factor at play in making them become public. Rather than guaranteeing the formation and organization of a public experience, this visibility can instead be used for control and repression. In other words, it is not enough for the inhabitants of a city to take to the streets and squares for them to become public. Once again, public gatherings in urban spaces in Tunisia are merely a potential step with an uncertain future, and the Tunisian people know this better than anyone. They have learned that one must not be too hasty in considering the streets and squares of their cities as public spaces.

Exploring the Public Potential of Urban Spaces and Media Spheres Examining the public in terms of its development helps us to understand how, under certain circumstances, a potential for becoming public can be achieved or fulfilled. The overthrow of the Ben Ali regime did not keep all its promises, and many disagree as to whether it deserves to be described as a “revolution.”15 Nevertheless, it remains undisputed that the fall of the 174 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI regime allowed public experiences to emerge, to be organized and to be deployed in Tunisia. From 2011 onward, the people of Tunisia experienced an unprecedented social and political upheaval. The fall of the regime sparked countless citizen initiatives, which led to the creation of various community organizations and political parties. This dynamic energy was confirmed in the run-up to the National Constituent Assembly elections. The candida- tures of 1662 political groups were accepted, half of which were independent.16 These figures are a clear indication of the political turmoil in Tunisia in 2011. In the daily lives of many Tunisians, these initiatives, which were driven by the ambition to contribute to the political transition, resulted in a huge increase in requests to participate in often improvised meetings to launch community organizations, humanitarian work, political demands and a host of other endeavors whose objectives were not always very well defined. Under these circumstances, the elections were held in relative confusion, resulting in an equally relative scattering of votes in the polls. This proved paradoxically detrimental to the independent and progressive groups that had been instrumental in the country’s political renewal. This political turmoil was particularly visible in urban spaces. Under the former regime, the streets were heavily policed and were the setting in which police exercised control and repression. When the regime fell, the coercive mesh that stifled urban life began to unravel. The people of Tunisia became free to talk in the streets, on café terraces and in taxis without fear of being reported to or followed by the authorities. Streets and squares were open to experiences that had previously been repressed. Citizens could now show themselves in public to express their disapproval of political decisions or to voice their opinions. The police, who had become a symbol of the despised regime, were discredited, and the fear hindering the creativity of urban life was lifted. A space thus opened up for inventive uses of streets and sidewalks in domains as varied as road traffic, informal trade or construction, calling into question the rules in force and bringing about a certain amount of disorder. The desire to utilize the urban space as an environment for political demands can be dated back to the evening that Ben Ali fled the country. Amidst the confusion and disbelief caused by his departure, certain members of the fallen regime stated that they would remain in power. This announcement outraged young insurgents in mainland cities. They organized a march to express their anger on the Prime Minister’s doorstep, on 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 175

Kasbah Square, a symbol of political power in Tunis. Upon their arrival, protesters pitched tents, put up banners and tagged walls as a call for the installation of a revolutionary government. The scale of this protest forced Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi to announce a government reshuffle on January 27, 2011. Spurred on by this initial victory, protesters faced off with the police to take over the square again a few weeks later, until March 3, the day on which they finally managed to oust Ben Ali’s former prime minister. These spontaneous and self-managed demonstrations soon came to be known as “Kasbah 1” and “Kasbah 2,” after the name of the square they occupied. This method of identifying and focusing on intangible agitation by naming it after a square undoubtedly alleviated the growing concern regarding these movements that had escaped all authority. It must be pointed out that, as a response to the protests, some condemned the aforementioned actions as “chaos” that was detrimental to Tunisia’s future. Moreover, as if to admit to their inability to cope with these uncontrollable eruptions of protests on government premises, the authorities blocked off the square, reserving access only to members of the government and their official guests. In the months following the fall of the regime, the city of Tunis was driven by an alternating dynamic of opening up and closing off. In the summer of 2011, urban spaces were taken over by groups with a wide range of demands. Some set up camps in parks in which fellow activists or curious passers-by could meet the protesters and speak with them under their signs and banners. Other groups opted for the more temporary and provocative method of silent sit-ins in the streets and squares surrounding government buildings to show their disapproval of the transitional government. Others organized more conventional demonstrations through marches or rallies. Walking through the streets at that time meant discovering a hectic urban life that seemed to be out of control. In the very organization of daily life, this turmoil marked the end of the order established by the regime before its fall. The police, who had already been heavily discredited, were unable to enforce any regulations whatsoever. The occupation of urban spaces was carried out in the midst of confusion, which many inhabitants of the city experienced as unrest or disorder. The “chaos” was denounced, whether through calls for conditions to be established that would be conducive to the organization of a new form of society, or to express a certain conservative nostalgia for the order and peace found under the former regime. Successive transitional governments, 176 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI unable to support or supervise the reappropriation of the urban space, simply asserted their authority over certain parts of the territory. The city was fenced off with barriers, rolls of barbed wire, sand bags, guard houses and armed guards near official buildings and around squares considered to be at risk.17 The closing off of these vulnerable urban areas curbed neither the buzzing momentum of the protests nor the associated sense of disor- ganization. The tension between the alternate opening up and closing off called into question the regulations of urban life right down to its most banal aspects. In December 2010, the revolt against Ben Ali highlighted the deplor- able socioeconomic conditions of the country’s inland populations. After the fall of the regime, the inequalities that had silently divided the Tunisian population until that point came to light in the streets of the center of Tunis in the form of haphazard street markets set up by poor people, spread out over miles of sidewalks. Street vendors set up makeshift stalls hindering passing pedestrians and even traffic, causing annoyance among traders who suddenly found themselves facing unruly competition on their own doorsteps. From the summer of 2011 onward, this situation led to uncountable verbal and physical clashes overseen by a powerless police force. The disorder and methods of law enforcement also became an issue with the first concerns being expressed by residents about the cleanliness of their streets. In a situation where police no longer enforced the way urban spaces were used, local authorities proved incapable of correct waste management, nor were they able to ensure proper land use and planning. With the urban space having been taken over, city dwellers were faced with increased construction of buildings and housing that transformed the landscape of their streets and encroached on sidewalks and even traffic lanes. The revolutionary turmoil even affected road traffic rules. As of early 2011, a prominent member of the transitional government enthusi- astically remarked that the end of the police regime was evident in that traffic police were unable to enforce the traffic regulations. On the main roads of central Tunis, traffic lights were switched off, giving way to random and chaotic self-regulation. The excitement of this process of opening up and experimentation not only took over urban spaces but was also apparent in media interactions. Just a few months after Ben Ali’s departure, Tunisian cyber-activists were already describing the poignant collective experience they had just been through as the unifying moment of a community that quickly disintegrated. 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 177

The fall of the regime may have been celebrated in a wave of unity, but it also marked the return of clashes and polemics. Social media—which had been established as an exclusive space in which to express shared indignation, discover a collective capacity for mobilization and experience a sense of national unity—suddenly became a place of confrontation, undermined by rivalries, mutual suspicion, defamation and even hate speech. To com- prehend the extent of the disarray experienced by users of these sites, one should consider what Lina Ben Mhenni, one of the bloggers most widely known in the Western world, had to say on the matter: “It is no longer clear who the enemy is. We are divided now. Some bloggers support each other, others do not.”18 Against this backdrop marked by the end of a long-lasting experience of cooperation and solidarity, Tunisian cyber-activists expressed their disillusionment with a hint of nostalgia: “Since January 14, the internet has become a general hubbub in which we can no longer think clearly. It’s difficult to make our voices heard in the midst of partisan disputes.” With these disenchanted remarks, Sofiéne Bel Haj19 acknowledged that the world of cyber-activism had taken in a plethora of new users, including many twenty-fifth-hour dissidents who were spreading false information and tampering with videos and photographs. What resulted was an inde- scribable cacophony in which it had become difficult to discern what was actually true. Faced with this new situation, Sofiéne Bel Haj reminisced about the past. “Under Ben Ali, there were around 100 or 200 of us cyber-dissidents. We stood alone, against everyone else. The cyber-police did everything they could to discredit us, and this constant threat ended up helping us a lot. It led us to taking great care to confirm the information we produced and disseminated. Since January 14, this careful prepa- ration has disappeared, and everyone is chattering carelessly. Our playing field has been ruined and it is no longer ours.”20 For the Tunisian people, the fall of Ben Ali and his regime manifested itself in the opening up of urban spaces and media spheres to previously unimaginable activities. They were now allowed to voice their opinions, assert their rights and condemn the injustices to which they were falling victim without fear of being penalized. The exploration of these new horizons generated an unprecedented political and social upheaval. This experimental and inventive dynamic tested the validity and relevance of the social, moral and legal norms in force in even the most ordinary areas of everyday life. 178 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

This resulted in disorder and confusion, which some used as justification to call for the restoration of the order that the fallen regime had always ensured. However, this unrest was not exclusively felt by conserva- tives. Even the protesters who were most committed to the revolutionary cause experienced this blurring of boundaries, finding themselves unable to understand what was happening, to gather their bearings in even their most familiar environments, and to form judgments that fit the requirements of the new state of affairs. Even though the fall of the regime opened up an extraordinary potential for visibility in urban spaces and media spheres, the exploration of that potential resulted in a loss of clarity.

A Public Experience Thwarted by Clashing Identity-Based Demands On October 23, 2011, the first free elections in the history of Tunisia were held with no major dispute. The results marked the victory of the Islamic Ennahda party and served as a foundation for the establishment of a coali- tion government.21 From the outset, the launch of the Parliament’s sessions attracted a lot of attention and vehement reactions in the form of demonstrations outside the gates of the Bardo Palace, where elected representatives convened. This interaction between the parliamentary arena and the urban space increased from December 2011 onward. Negotiations on the establishment of a provisional constitution had only just begun when protesters condemned the “Islamic” nature of the initial draft. They set up a protest camp to dispute the hegemony of the Ennahda deputies over the Assembly, in which they saw the potential threat of a new dictatorship. Bloggers who were disgruntled at this disruption of the legislative process organized a counterdemonstration to remind people that the Islamic tone of the constitution simply reflected the will of the Tunisian people as shown in the polls. On December 3, 2011, the areas surrounding the Bardo Palace became the stage for the first face-to-face meeting between two opposing groups in Tunisian society. Thousands of activists set up camp on either side of the street to show their respective standpoints. With police cordons holding them back, they attacked each other verbally for the entire day. The street had become a border, exposing the division of a people that had previously believed that it was united, even in its opposition to the former regime. Photographer Hamideddine Bouali took advantage of the urban setting of this confrontation to capture a striking image, which he entitled Les deux 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 179 rives de la Constituante (“The two banks of the Constituent”).22 This widely shared photograph became a symbol of the growing controversy during a democratic transition haunted by the specter of a civil war. The visibility afforded by the urban space during these events was not used to enable Tunisians to meet and express their diversity. Instead, it simply revealed the image of a deeply divided society. In Tunisia, this was almost inconceivable, as it broke away from the stereotypical ideal of a people destined to remain united and peaceful (see pp. 17–39 in Dakhlia 2011). It suggested that the transition had the potential for violent clashes capable of destroying an emerging public experience. The fears inherent in this perspective fueled a sense of mistrust that could be felt in the most basic everyday interactions. By January 2012, the transition’s potential for conflict was being taken for granted, and the two camps in this confrontation were strongly linked to identity-based claims that could be applied to the simplest urban interactions. On the first anniversary of Ben Ali’s departure, a well-known blogger was shocked to discover that she was capable of verbally assaulting a female passer-by simply because she was wearing a niqab.23 During that same time, one of our female informants was spat at by an elderly man who was dressed in traditional clothing at a pedestrian crossing in the center of Tunis. It took her a moment to realize that this gesture had been aimed at her because she was wearing a tank top. The actress in her fifties, who was usually gifted with a remarkable sense of repartee, was left speechless. She had just discovered an aspect of Tunisian urban life that she had never before experienced. During that time, even a simple stroll through the city provided the opportunity to overhear comments on the future of Tunisia’s identity. Some could not stop themselves from making derogatory remarks when bearded men passed by in kameez or women in niqabs. Others could not help but lament the country’s moral decline upon seeing a woman wearing make-up, revealing clothes or with bare arms. Both sides had become accustomed to addressing each other in an indignant tone: “Is this really Tunisia?” This rhetorical question never went unanswered for long. The first group would blame those they called “Afghans” or “Saudis” with disdain. The second were concerned by the hegemony of the “Westerners” or the “French.” These accusations of foreign affiliations in urban environments had a counterpart in the media and political spheres. Meanwhile, the number of accusations increased against the most prominent actors in the democratic transition. Most of the time, suspicions consisted in 180 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

revealing a “reality” that did not match the facts. On the one hand, this meant revealing that, far from being independent, the protesters who had stood up against the Ben Ali regime were supporters of Western powers, namely the United States and Israel. On the other hand, those denouncing the trend wanted to demonstrate that Islamists in general, and Ennahda’s representatives in particular, were serving foreign interests (especially the Gulf countries). In both cases, the aim here once again was to show that behind the independent Tunisian activists’ masks hid con- spirators acting against the country’s best interests. These attitudes, which were adopted and reinforced every day, gradually constructed a polarized urban space. In less than a year the slightest physical feature or item of clothing could be used to assign passers-by to one of the sides of the division around which two antagonistic conceptions of Tunisian identity were coming to a head. This suspicion, which could be observed in the most basic everyday urban interactions as well as on social media, in the press or in books, gradually created an atmosphere of distrust. This manifested itself in the daily identification and denouncing of traitors to the revolution and the country.

Discovering What One Is Capable of: The Urban Space as a Stage for Violence The emergence of antagonistic identity-based demands and the way they came to clash in the urban space were both initially met with a sort of disbelief. For a long time, when faced with these altercations, passers-by, journalists, researchers and politicians replied, “We are a united people.” This frequently heard response enabled those using it to assert their attachment to an idea of cohesion among Tunisians, which stopped them from believing what they saw (“It’s not possible!”) or from seeing what was right before their eyes (“It’s not true!”).24 On January 14, 2012, on Avenue Bourguiba, during the first anniversary celebrations of Ben Ali’s departure, a group of angry young men waving the black flag of Tawhid25 tried to infiltrate the Marxist activists’ march. We were trying to understand what spectators of this scene thought about what was going on, so we asked a passer-by what he thought of how close the two groups were to one another. He replied that he found it normal that both sides were demonstrating together, since they were all Tunisian and they were there that day to celebrate the departure of Ben Ali. During our conversation, and much to our interlocutor’s amazement, the situation took a violent 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 181 turn: verbal attacks became physical, until the Marxist activists managed to get rid of the young Salafists. The spectator with whom we were speaking watched the scuffle with both disbelief and disapproval. He was unable to admit or understand what he had just witnessed. The election of the National Constituent Assembly and its first session were marked by increasingly visible and violent disputes and clashes. Two incidents in particular are worthy of mention, as they have shown that even the most insignificant event could degenerate into sometimes extremely violent altercations capable of dividing the urban space, the media sphere, political institutions and judicial arenas. They split national public opinion to such an extent and attracted so much attention in the international media that it had become impossible to conceal or deny the transition’s potential for confrontation and violence.

Clashes Following the Television Broadcast of the Movie Persepolis The first confrontation took place following the broadcast of the animated movie Persepolis by the satellite television channel Nessma two weeks before the elections in October 2011.26 Protesters marched from the El Fath mosque27 after the movie was shown, as they considered it an affront to the Arab-Muslim identity of the Tunisian people. Their demonstrations became violent on multiple occasions: protesters tried to set fire to the television channel’s offices and trashed its owner’s house. A group of 144 plaintiffs, led by 131 lawyers under the banner of Tunisia’s Young Lawyers Association, relayed the protest in the form of a criminal complaint. The proceedings resulted in three people involved in the production and broadcast of the movie being sent to court in Tunis. The criminal trial took place in an extremely tense atmosphere. The hearings in January and April 2012 became scenes of sometimes violent confrontations dividing spectators between those who supported the complainants and those who defended the accused. The ruling, announced in May 2012, did nothing to ease this tension. The fines given to the defendants outraged both the defense and the plaintiffs. For the former, who supported civil liberties, any decision other than an acquittal was incomprehensible. The latter, whose most vindictive pleadings called for capital punishment, could not be satisfied with such a lenient punishment for blasphemy. 182 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

The Occupation of the Manouba University Campus In the month following the polarized confrontations regarding the television broadcast of Persepolis, new clashes broke out in the region of Tunis. At the end of November 2011, demonstrators claiming to be Salafists raided the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities at the Manouba campus in protest of the decision to deny two students wearing niqabs access to classes and exams.28 Starting that day, the protesters staged a sit-in linked to a Facebook page entitled Talaba Révolution (from tâlib, meaning “student”). Their main demands were focused on the Islamization of student life: authorizing the wearing of niqabs during classes and exams, suspending classes during prayer hours and setting up a place of worship on university premises. The occupation of the university lasted for months and was accompanied by demonstrations, rallies, attempted barricades, police interventions and sometimes violent clashes that seriously disrupted the academic year. There was a major turn of events during the occupation on March 6 and 7, 2012. The Faculty’s Scientific Council was informed of the case of two students who were facing expulsion because they had refused to remove their niqabs before going into class. Outside the dean’s office, Salafist activists who had come to support them violently clashed with students who were trying to disrupt their demonstration. Inside the building, the two young women in question forced their way into Dean Habib Kazdaghli’s office. A scuffle followed during which the office was -ran sacked. Kazdaghli was then escorted to press charges for damage to public property. As for the two young women, they were also escorted by their supporters to press charges for assault. At 9.30 am the next day, Talaba Révolution militants blocked the entrances to the campus, sparking clashes with the students who found themselves trapped inside. A few hours later, one Salafist activist climbed onto the roof of the university’s entrance to remove the Tunisian flag and replace it with the Tawhid flag. He violently shoved a young female student who came to try and stop him. In the end, the Tawhid flag was taken down by students while the Salafist protester tore up the national one. In response to this situation, activists from the Tunisian General Student Union (UGET) decided to leave the university where they were gathered and march to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in protest against the violence they had experienced at the university and to condemn the disrespect to the flag. As the student unionists made their 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 183 way through the entrance manned by Salafist militants, violent brawls with knives broke out. Several people were injured, with five of them receiving serious injuries. These events led to widespread disapproval of the Salafist movement. The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, which had paid little attention to the teachers until then, came forward to support them. Negotiations were held in April, which helped calm the situation and enabled normal academic activities to resume. The battleground was moved into the legal arena for the investigation and adjudication of the dean’s and the students’ respective cases. These legal proceedings proved highly controversial, involving a large number of lawyers and generating exceptional media coverage both in Tunisia and internationally. Having already been marked by countless incidents, the case was finally closed on May 2, 2013. Dean Habib Kazdaghli was acquitted, and the two female students received a suspended sentence of two months’ imprisonment for “damage to the property of others and preventing a civil servant from carrying out his duties.” After this incident, Salafists lost credibility in the eyes of moderate students and the political world due to their use of physical violence and affront to the national flag (Le Pape 2014). On social media, the man who had torn up the flag was called a “traitor to his country.” Regarding this subject, Loïc Le Pape notes that this man attacked the very symbol of unity that the Tunisian people had used against Ben Ali during the protests of December 2010 and January 2011. He adds that “by committing this ‘affront,’ the Salafist militant was not aware of the historic importance represented by the flag” (ibid.). This interpretation of the events suggests that the destruction of the flag was essentially a strategic error. However, what occurred in the following weeks leads us to believe that this was not actually the case.

The Flag Controversy: Two Visions of Unity in Tunisia On March 25, 2012, less than three weeks after the events that took place at the Manouba campus, thousands of people responded to the call of the Tunisian Islamic Front requesting the adoption of Sharia law as the sole source of legislation in the new Tunisian constitution. Protesters gathered at January 14 Square, next to the Ministry of the Interior, to hang up signs and posters. A few Salafists then climbed the clock tower to wave the black Tawhid flag. In order to carry out thiscoup d’éclat, the demonstrators had 184 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI chosen a symbolic location. They took over the square whose name com- memorates the fall of Ben Ali, where the demonstrations of January 2011 had also taken place. The clock tower, which overlooks the main avenue of Tunis, is regularly decorated with the national colors. As such, the Salafists’ actions were far from a strategic error. They deliberately chose the new Tunisian society’s very birthplace, in order to make known their vision of the unity that needed to be restored. They demanded that the Ummah (the community of practicing Muslims) replace national citizenship, and that the new constitution be subject to Sharia law. The Persepolis case and the occupation of the Manouba campus were eye-opening. In light of these events, it had become difficult to ignore or deny the tensions dividing the Tunisian population and the potential for violence generated by the transition. Both of these cases have shown that the same conflict can manifest itself in different ways depending on the setting in which it takes place. It can take the form of fighting in the street, media controversies, conflicting interpretations of the law by the courts and the drafting of diametrically opposed legislative bills in the political arena. By making the divergent opinions regarding the transition’s evolution tangible, these clashes raised the question of what actually unites the Tunisian people. This makes the flag controversy far from anecdotal—it provided the context in which two opposing visions of unity came to a head. Those who rallied under the national flag were trying to maintain the emancipatory momentum of the revolution. The unity for which they were demonstrating was that of a people who have discovered that they shared a common destiny in the face of oppression. During the first few months of the transition, this unification of the population proved extremely vulnerable to the threat of political conflict, which it had helped to bring about in the first place. Those who had come together to oust the tyrant and open up the perspective of a shared future soon discovered that they did not envisage this future in the same way, and that their differing standpoints could end up making them sworn enemies. Those who wave the black flag of Tawhid do so in the aim of reconciliation with/in/by the Muslim community regardless of politics and its concomitant struggles. They claim that Tunisians are united based on a shared Arab-Muslim identity that goes beyond national borders, in an Islamic Ummah that transcends space and time. During the Tunisian transition, several groups used flags to symbolize the unity of a group undermined by division and haunted by the specter of civil war. There is a great difference between the call for a united people under the national flag and 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 185 that of a community based upon a religious identity. However, what these different ways of viewing the unity of the people have in common is that they both combine the sharing of an experience with a fictitious subject (the People and the Ummah, respectively29), which do not constitute ideal conditions for diversity, pluralism and foreigners. The Tunisian protesters’ experience has shown that a population can unite against the power that oppresses it and that, within the resulting confrontations and clashes, any disapproval may appear to be a sign of betrayal. This shows extent to which the popular unity achieved during a struggle is threatened by the emergence of a public life that in turn can only be established during a conflict that guarantees the indispensable pluralism required for democracy (Lefort 1986). As for religious unity, it is fundamentally resistant to confrontation and thus to politics30—it is structured by revealed law (Sharia), which establishes the distinction between what is lawful (halal) and unlawful (haram). This distinction governs the structure of a community of believers (Ummah) that ensures its unity against infidels or unbelievers kuffar( ) who are symbolically or physically excluded from it.

Exposing Traitors, or the Destruction of Public Experience In 2011, Tunisia’s urban spaces opened up to civil debate and the expression of opposing opinions. In a short period of time, the once heavily policed and regulated squares and streets of Tunis became a stage that, having seen demonstrations, marches and sit-ins, revealed the contours of a new political landscape. As the chaotic developments unfolded, this landscape soon became the setting for a clash of identities, in which others were scrutinized suspiciously, that was radically opposed to the formation and organization of any public experience. One could even state that the urban activities taking place in Tunis during the democratic transition constitute, in many respects, the exact opposite of the hopes that the first urban sociologists of the Chicago School had expressed. They had been committed to the ideal of turning cohabi- tating people of varying origins into a community of citizens. They emphasized that urban life led those who did not know each other to modify their respective behaviors and to experiment with possible joint actions to ensure they could live together peacefully. By focusing their investigation on the details of necessary behaviors, they noted that urban cohabitation is characterized by such close proximity that it requires people to ostensibly 186 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI restrain their perception of their environment and treat strangers with “civil inattention.” They thus showed that living in a city means learning to live among strangers, acting toward them in such a way that shows that their presence has been taken into consideration, while at the same time displaying a relative detachment from what others say and do.31 For all the above reasons, they predicted that the city would become a laboratory of a pluralistic social life regulated by public opinion (Park et al. 1967) or, in other words, that the requirements of urban living were naturally conducive to the organization of a public experience.32 The development of the Tunisian transition shows that urban life does not necessarily lead to the organization of a public experience. The urban space, which had been used as the setting for a confrontation between two irreconcilable visions of Tunisian identity, did not become the environment that they had hoped would be an experimentation of open, peaceful and pluralistic cohabitation. Instead, it became a place where anything that appeared to be unknown or unfamiliar was rejected as a possible threat. This concern went hand in hand with a scrutinizing attitude, even going so far as to subject strangers to inquisitorial surveillance and eaves- dropping in order to expose traitors to each side’s respective cause. Such practices were the exact opposite to becoming familiar with the “civil inattention” based on the sense of trust that makes up any public experience.33

Occupying the Urban Space and Building Institutions: Two Aspects of Becoming Public In the wake of the conflicts that overtook both urban spaces and media spheres, clashes intensified and became widespread. By early 2012, the rhetoric of the “united people” had been exhausted and it was widely acknowledged that national unity had become problematic and the threat of potentially violent division was tangible. In recognition of the disputes dividing the country to the point of tem- porarily shutting down the National Constituent Assembly, ten or so prominent figures led by the former Transitional Prime Minister Béji Caïd Essebsi launched Nidaa Tounes (“Call for Tunisia”) in April 2012. This process of unification, which had been put under immense pressure by the fear of division, aimed to call on the opposition to unite34 and negotiate with Ennahda in order to establish the necessary conditions to draft a Constitution. This “appeal,” launched in the name of the country’s best interests, proved indicative of a turning point. It showed that, 15 months 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 187 after the fall of the regime, the disputes had become so heated that leading political figures had to accept that the unity of the Tunisian people was at stake. Through their actions, they called for this unity to be considered an asset, and that for it to be maintained and preserved all Tunisians had to be indirectly involved and contribute to the efforts.35 Just two months after its launch, this initiative was institutionalized in the form of a political party calling on all opponents of the government formed after the elections of October 2011 to unite. This ambition became a reality following the attack on the US Embassy.36 This attack, which was largely covered by the international media, showed that Tunisia was at risk of no longer being considered the peaceful safe haven for tourists that it once had been, but now as the country of origin of Ansar al-Charia (“Sharia supporters”), a Jihadist Salafist group created by Abou Iyadh. This event proved very telling. It showed both the severity of the Jihadist threat and the fragility of the security measures in place. In keeping with the confrontational atmosphere at the time, the US Embassy attack quickly raised suspicions about the Nahdhaoui government’s relative complacency—or even complicity— with protesters. For some activists, these developments marked the death of partisan logic. Left-wing, secular and modernist militants who had, until then, been reluctant to respond to the “Call for Tunisia” and to rally alongside their former adversaries, took the leap and joined Nidaa Tounes. By September 2012, Béji Caïd Essebsi’s party had become the second largest party in Tunisia and the only one capable of running against Ennahda during the legislative and general elections that were to be held once the constitution had been drafted. However, not all of the opposition rallied under the banner of the “Call for Tunisia.” Some activists would not put their political differences aside in the pursuit of unity. In addition, the success of Nidaa Tounes suggested that the Tunisian political landscape could be reduced to a simple confrontation between two major conservative political parties. In the hope of finding an alternative, a wide range of political parties, community organizations and independent academics joined forces in October 2012 to found the “Popular Front for the Fulfillment of the Revolution’s Objectives.” This initiative was soon faced with deadly violence. Just four months later, on February 6, 2012, one of its leaders, Chokri Belaïd, was shot dead outside his home. On July 25, Mohamed Brahmi, a second member of the Popular Front who was a representative of the National Constituent Assembly, was killed under similar circumstances. 188 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

These tragic events marked a dramatic change in the situation. On the same day of the assassination of Mohamed Brahmi, the Popular Front called for civil resistance and announced the creation of the “National Salvation Front” along with a sit-in that was organized as a campsite set up near the Bardo Palace. Two days later, 42 opposition representatives announced that they were leaving the Assembly to join the protesters until the Assembly’s dissolution and the fall of the government. On July 28 and 29, 2013, members of the “League for the Protection of the Revolution”37 and government supporters held a counterdemonstration right next to the protesters holding the sit-in. Clashes broke out between the two sides and the police responded with violence against protesters and the members of parliament. The streets and squares near the Bardo Palace became violent battlegrounds. This obstacle to the transitional process, far from prompting reflection to elucidate the problematic situation as a crucial step toward the organization of a public experience, had once again confirmed an irrevocable clash of identities. From October 2011 to July 2013, the urban space was the stage upon which the problematic make-up of Tunisian society became apparent.38 The protagonists and spectators of the transition had taken note of the stakes involved; they could no longer exclude the possibility that July 28 and 29 could be the beginning of a civil war. In the face of this division, the governmental troika broke apart. On July 29, one of its component parties, Ettakatol, called for the dissolution of the government and one of its representatives stated that there was no way the National Constituent Assembly would continue its work as long as some of its members were absent. Assembly President Mustapha Ben Jaafar, founder and leader of Ettakatol, announced the suspension of the Assembly’s activities until negotiations began between the government and the opposition. In addition, on July 29, the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT), the country’s main syndicate, called for a national dialogue between the ruling parties and the opposition.39 To avoid exacerbating the situation, most parties agreed to start negotiations. On September 17, 2013, the “Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet” was formed by four non-governmental organizations.40 Some 21 parties joined this initiative based on a consensual procedure, aiming to open up an informal space for pluralist discussion in order to resolve the conflict between the government and the opposition. These negotiations were marked by several incidents. They did, however, enable the National Constituent Assembly to resume its activities, which led to the drafting of a constitutional text that was adopted 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 189 by a large majority on January 26, 2014. This outcome made it possible to hold the legislative (October 2014) and general (November and December 2014) elections. Faced with the conflicts that were feeding the fear of a civil war, the consensual procedure promoted by the “National Dialogue Congress” opened up a space for pluralist debate within a legal framework. It helped to loosen the grip of the polemics hindering the National Constituent Assembly’s work and provided a way out from the dead end in which the transition was at risk of finding itself. It marked an important institutional step forward enabling the Tunisian people to try out the citizenship for which they had protested in December 2010 and January 2011. While this consensual procedure made it possible to symbolically establish national unity around a constitution that was acceptable to all, it came at the cost of drafting a deliberately ambiguous text that, far from resolving the most bitter clashes, allows for interpretations to be made based on the most antagonistic identity-based demands. Courts will likely have to deal with a multitude of disputes that will only fuel the tension, which has caused judicial arenas to become the main settings for the clashes dividing Tunisian society.41

Conclusion The fall of the Ben Ali regime opened up an unprecedented potential for the population to fulfill its own destiny by becoming public. Many Tunisians took it upon themselves to launch this process; they took over the streets and squares of their cities to assert their newly acquired civil liberties. They became involved in many causes and voiced their opinions in the urban space, in judicial arenas, and in traditional media and social media. This political upheaval went hand in hand with a significant transformation of urban life. Previously heavily policed areas became places of expression and discussion, where conflicting opinions were formed. This momentum stimulated a quest for public life. The Tunisian people had a first-hand experience of what becoming public meant. They discovered along the way that they were affected by transactions in which they were not directly involved as well as the consequences of such transactions. They shed light on several aspects of political and social life that until that point had been hidden and managed out of the public eye. They considered reforms worthy of being applied to these fields of activity and adjusted to the requirements of the growing democratic experience. 190 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

However, instead of helping to structure and organize a shared public experience and allow the exploration of possible joint actions, this momentum highlighted a deeply rooted division within Tunisian society. Rather than being articulated in the form of public problems, the challenges of the transition were viewed as a clash of identities.42 Instead of prompting reflection, the identification of questionable situations served only to rekindle the confrontation between two totally opposed ways of dealing with them. As the antagonism sharpened, the rift dividing the Tunisian people took on a spatial, tangible and sometimes violent form in the urban spaces. This bipolarization hindered the development of the emerging public experience. Once the two camps had been identified and staked out their front lines, any event in the transitional process became an opportunity to fuel the controversy. On either side, the belligerents in the confrontations became accustomed to expressing their opinions and making assumptions before knowing all the facts. This tendency grew to become a form of objection to inquiry and a catalyst of suspicion. These observations show how ill-advised it is to consider the public as a fixed state (referred to as a noun or an adjective) when trying to identify the modalities of its experience and organization. In some ways, the Tunisian transition has paved the way for the process of becoming public, which is experienced when people reclaim the streets and squares of their cities to exercise their free- doms of opinion, expression and demonstration. These spectacular advances should not obscure the other side of the process—the urban space has been used in such a way that is has become the setting for a clash of identities, and the rise of suspicion that, as history has taught us, go against the organization of any public experience.43 In Tunisian urban spaces, mistrust and the tyranny of suspicion replaced police repression. These observations remind us how cautious one should be when considering the dynamics of a people becoming public. They show that it is not enough to loosen the grip of police control to guarantee the emergence and organization of a public experience. The above observations show that the public experience is shaped and stabilized around the characteristics of a way of living made up of and by practices that involve how one should behave around others, especially strangers. Becoming public is a potential experience that can only be fulfilled through a process of acclimatization, habituation and practical application that can require a considerable amount of time. It becomes established through a lengthy process of experimenting with new ways in 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 191 which to relate to the world, others and oneself and to form new habits, which can irrigate the political, judicial, media and urban arenas, among others. The duration of this process is particularly apparent when considering how the urban space is organized in practice. More than five years after Ben Ali’s departure, the inhabitants of Tunis have learned that the public nature of the squares and streets in their city is not stable. They continue to remain vigilant in order to oppose all governmental measures likely to usher in the return of a heavily policed state.44 The exploration of the Tunisian situation reveals that the analysis of the process of becoming public has two limitations. First, a public experience cannot be formed in a peaceful civil society; its organization requires the institutionalization of conflict, ensuring that it opens up to pluralism and diversity. Its momentum stops as soon as the developing public is para- lyzed by the fanciful idea of unifying entities such as a people, an Ummah (community of believers) or a State free from division.45 Second, we have noted that while the public experience is threatened by the fantasy of peaceful unity and substantial identity, conflict implies a polemical potential haunted by the specter of civil war. We have seen that any public experience is hindered as soon as that conflict turns into a direct clash opposing two irremediably opposed camps. The warring factions are called upon to organize a united front that leaves no room for outside observers and does not tolerate any critical distance. The rise of a polemic goes hand in hand with the exercise of suspicion, which leads to the stance that any dissent is a form of betrayal, and that any criticism or inquiry is a threat to the unity of the collective group fighting for its cause. The issue of becoming public is of particular interest when subjected to ethnographic study. It enables us to overcome the contradictions of our ordinary categories of understanding. It shows that the analyses that treat the transition as the move from one state to another do not take its fundamentally indeterminate nature into consideration. The observations in this chapter indicate that Tunisia did not switch from a “dictatorship” to a “democracy”. Instead, they suggest that the dynamic of the transition was driven by its inherent tensions and that to describe it means considering together what we are used to seeing as polar opposites. The analysis of the process of becoming public is faced here with a difficulty that François Jullien 2009( ) traces back to the foundations of Greek philosophy and its tendency to focus on the boundaries between specific forms or identities. The result is a conceptualization of reality in terms of 192 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

“being” or “substance,” which forces us to consider its transformations from the opposing poles that constitute its terms. The Greek school of thought fails to capture the dynamic of “melting snow.” It can only envisage it as an intermediary state between water and ice. The Chinese way of thinking can better address this challenge because it allows for transition as something that is indeterminate: “Isn’t melting snow both hard and the opposite at the same time? Both soft and not soft, melted and unmelted?” (see p. 53 in Jullien 2009). The situation in Tunisia suggests that an analysis of the process of becoming public requires developing a way of thinking that deals with the irremediably indeterminate nature of reality, in order to consider the potentialities it involves. Was it not in the heavily policed streets during Ben Ali’s regime that protesters perceived a potential for becoming public that raised hopes that a new world was possible? Conversely, just as emancipation became a reality at the time of the first free elections and the drafting of a new constitution, the same streets had become arenas for violent clashes over identity, abandoning revolutionaries to their disillusionment. To do justice to the nuances of these experiences, our descriptions need to allow for the irremediable indetermination of a reality consisting of dynamic polarities: “For the ‘deployment’ of a polarity necessarily leads to the ‘contraction of the other,’ and they also spill over into each other and can only be renewed through each other” (ibid.: 50). Let us refer back to François Jullien’s metaphor. Melting snow is neither hard nor soft. More specifically, should we not consider rather that the tension between these opposing sides characterizes snow as such? Similarly, the experience of becoming public in Tunisia is torn between a “field of experience” of subjugation by the tyranny of the fallen regime and the “horizon of expectation” of democratic emancipation opened up by its collapse. This tension and the resulting indetermination constitute the transition in itself and organize its own historical experience.46 These observations could have a more general importance. The goal of analyzing the public in terms of its evolution means considering the transition as a characteristic of the public in and of itself. Which space can we truly call “public” without ignoring the contingent struggles that made it so, or forgetting the potential threats bearing down on its development? Which country, society or group of people can we call truly democratic without ignoring the contingencies of history? Should we not admit instead that any form of political life is structured by the tension between tyranny and democracy, which can be its field of experience for the former and its horizon of expectation for the latter? 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 193

Notes 1. We would like to thank A. Bovet, V. Milliot and an anonymous proof- reader for having read the previous drafts of this article. Their remarks and suggestions enabled us to improve it. 2. This article can be considered as a proposal for a perceptive experience similar to that described by L. Wittgenstein (2001) when discussing “noticing an aspect.” When we see a small scar on a friend’s cheek that we had never previously noticed, the whole configuration of his face changes and we are no longer able to see the person in the same way. Similarly, we suggest that observing the process of becoming public during a time of transition enables us to discover certain aspects of the public that enable us to better understand this historical phenomenon. 3. We refer to C. Lefort’s (1986) oxymoron that defines democracy as “the institutionalization of conflict,” that is, the organization of various forms of struggles that are open to criticism. 4. In this article, we use the word “polemic” in its Greek etymological sense: “of war, warlike.” R. Aron’s political philosophy was haunted by the specter of a civil war: “I’ve always been obsessed with avoiding civil war and I lived during a time when France was constantly on the brink of civil war. So, if you like, I reacted to the events, on the one hand with my statements of position, which were always categorical and, intellectu- ally, with the commitment to show to those who wanted the same thing as me that the others, who were on the other side, were not necessarily traitors. I’ve been doing this my whole life. It was, let’s say, a mission I took on for myself” (see p. 90 in Aron 1981). There is also a legal facet to this issue. Y. Thomas highlighted the fundamentally agnostic nature of conventional adversarial procedure based on Roman law. This led him to dispute the legal metaphysics that present the magistrate as a “third party guarantor”: “The third party guarantor’s sleight of hand simply provides the illusion of a way out of these clashes from above, but the law is nothing other than the very setting for these clashes—just as the battlefield is the setting for war” (see p. 22 in Thomas 2001). This observation allows us to better understand how legal proceedings can contribute to clashes becoming polemical. We will come back to this point when discussing the Persepolis case. Situations that are becoming polemical question the practice of social science itself. During her investigation on witchcraft in the Bocage, J. Favret-Saada uncovered a way of living that was resistant to the organization of any public experience: “That is, words have no neutral position. In witchcraft, words are weap- ons of war. Anyone who speaks of it is a belligerent and the ethnogra- pher is like everyone else. Neutral onlookers do not belong here” (see p. 27 in Favret-Saada 1977). 194 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

5. This meaning of “public” is discussed in Tonnelat and Terzi (2013). 6. French MPs who tried to oppose the compulsory publishing of their assets discovered how difficult it was not to appear to be defending undue privi- leges. Repressive measures implemented by authorities in the United States in response to the publishing of classified data by WikiLeaks have also been subjected to widespread international disapproval. 7. This is also the case when tasks for which the government is responsible are delegated to commercial companies, or when the management of urban areas is entrusted to multinationals, who then exclude all sections of the population and activities that could hinder distribution and consumption. 8. The notion of configuration is drawn from the Theory of Form (Gestalttheorie) and the phenomenology of perception. It shows that the organization of our experience is intrinsically linked to that of a whole (a Gestalt), whose internal organization follows a law, which is most easily perceived as a figure-ground correlation. 9. The criticism of the analyses based on nominal concepts is at the heart of J. Dewey’s seminal work, The Public and Its Problems: “The concept of the state, like most concepts that are introduced by ‘The,’ is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to be of ready use. It is a concept that can be approached by a flanking movement more easily than by a frontal attack. The moment we utter the words ‘The State’ a score of intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision. Without our intention and without our noticing, the notion of ‘The State’ draws us imperceptibly into a consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one another, and away from facts of human activity. It is better, if possible, to start from the latter and see if we are not led thereby into an idea of something that will turn out to involve the marks and signs that characterize political behavior” (see p. 87 in Dewey 1927). 10. The very assertion that the streets and squares of our towns and cities are public is worth questioning. They are not all public in the same way, and the public nature of a given place can vary considerably over the course of the same day. Some streets can be dangerous after dark, whereas anyone can walk, idle or play on them during the day. 11. In order to fully appreciate the disbelief with which Ben Ali’s departure was met, one simply needs to see the incredible images of lawyer A. Aouini shouting, in vain, for his fellow compatriots to take to the streets in cel- ebration of the tyrant fleeing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=( TNzC4O1Qh1c, accessed on 08/18/2016). On the evening of January 14, 2011, he stood alone, a stone’s throw away from the Ministry of the Interior, in the middle of Avenue Bourguiba, which even the most militant protesters had abandoned. 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 195

12. C. Taylor gives an evocative account of the way in which sharing an exchange can play a part in the process of becoming public: “Let us say that you and I are strangers travelling together through some southern country. It is terribly hot, the atmosphere is stifling. I turn to you and say: ‘Whew, it’s hot.’ This does not tell you anything you did not know; neither that it is hot, nor that I suffer from the heat. Both these facts were plain to you before. Nor were they beyond your power to formulate; you probably already had formulated them. What the expression has done here is to create a rapport between us, the kind of thing that comes about when we do what we call ‘striking up a conversation.’ Previously I knew that you were hot, and you knew that I was hot and I knew that you must know that I knew that, etc.: up to about any level that you care to chase it. But now, it is out there as a fact between us that it is stifling in here. Language creates what one might call a public sphere, or a common vantage point from which we survey the world together” (see pp. 259–260 in Taylor 1985). Contrary to C. Taylor’s conceptualization, the example of Tunisia shows us that a fact can be established and form the basis of a relationship between its protagonists without them necessarily needing to verbally express it. In this particular case, the simple act of leaving one’s house and going out in public in the street was enough to express a relationship with the situation, the sharing of which had a political impact. 13. Michel Foucault stressed that the visibility provided by urban spaces should be considered to be part of the disciplinary arsenal of power. On the other hand, he did not account for the conditions under which this same visibility can also be used to organize a public, emancipatory and democratic experience. 14. These figures were calculated based on the report sent by the National Commission to investigate abuse recorded since December 17, 2010, until the accomplishment of its mandate to the President of Tunisia on May 2, 2012. 15. This can be seen simply by taking a look at the shelves of Tunisian book shops. After the fall of the regime, they were soon filled with eye-witness accounts, biographies and essays all confirming the people’s victory over its tyrant. Four years later, the titles of these same publications point toward a general sense of disillusionment. At the end of 2014, G. Vanderpooten published his interviews with Y. Seddik with Éditions de l’Aube entitled Tunisie, la révolution inachevée (“Tunisia, the unfinished revolution”). In January 2015, S. Ben Abderrazak independently published a collection of his articles entitled Journal d’une défaite: Chroniques de Tunisie 2011– 2013. Comprendre l’échec révolutionnaire Tunisien (“Diary of a Defeat: Chronicles of Tunisia 2011–2013. Understanding the failure of the 196 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

Tunisian revolution”). A similar tone can be found in the works of S. Charat, who published a novel entitled Triste Jasmin (“Sad Jasmine”). 16. The Tunisian transition was marked by the emergence and organization of this type of public experience, leaning toward an independent, if not apolitical engagement. The list count given here was officially provided by the Independent High Authority for Elections in its “Report on electoral proceedings for the National Constituent Assembly,” Tunis, February 2012. 17. The case of the Ministry of the Interior is worthy of particular mention. The demonstrations of January 2011 turned its imposing building, as well as Avenue Bourguiba where it is located, into symbols for the takeover of the urban space and strategic government places by the Tunisian population. The transitional governments, rather than supporting or prolonging this movement, kept access to the Ministry firmly closed off. Over time, these protective measures were extended and strengthened. They were initially limited to barriers blocking access to adjacent sidewalks and side streets under the supervision of armed soldiers with Jeeps and a tank. A double barbed wire fence was then erected as a permanent barrier stretching up to the middle of the avenue, cutting off one of the traffic lanes. The adjacent streets then led to guard houses, manned by armed soldiers, who systematically checked the identity of anyone trying to enter the restricted area and turn away those who do not pass this security clearance. 18. Interview conducted in Tunisia in January 2012. 19. S. Bel Haj earned his reputation among the Tunisian cyber-activist community under the pseudonym Hamadi Kaloutcha. After having long escaped the government’s repression, he was finally arrested on January 6, 2011. This retrospectively added to his reputation as a prominent actor in the revolution. 20. Interview conducted in Tunisia in January 2012. 21. After the Assembly elections, three out of the four parties with the most votes came together to form a “governmental troika.” Ennahda (Renaissance Party, 37%), CPR (Congress for the Republic, 8.7%) and Ettakatol (Democratic Forum for Labor and Liberties, 7%) together had a large majority of the Assembly. They shared the respective transitional powers of Prime Minister, President of the Republic and President of the Constituent Assembly. Having been boosted by its newfound electoral legitimacy, the Islamist Ennahda party played a leading governmental role: in addition to the Head of Government, it held 16 of 31 ministerial posts in the first government to emerge from the elections. 22. See https://www.facebook.com/monmagcom/photos/a.18220663182 1996/284874994888492/?type=1&theater, accessed June 1, 2019. 23. For a more detailed description of this day of commemoration, see Laacher and Terzi (2012). 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 197

24. To employ the terminology used by A. Cottereau (1999), these observations suggest that the transition put the Tunisian people’s “sense of justice” and “sense of reality” to the test. As he has clearly shown, restoring these is a key element in the constitution and organization of a public experience. 25. The Tawhid flag (meaning oneness) is black and bears the Shahada (the profession of the Muslim faith, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is the messenger of Allah”) in white. The flag thus represents both the uniqueness of God and the uniqueness of the Ummah (meaning the Muslim community), transcending national borders. After having become strongly linked to radical Islamists’ actions and demands, it is now commonly known as the Salafist flag. 26. For a detailed presentation of this controversy, particularly regarding the legal case, see Laacher and Terzi (2020). 27. After the fall of the regime, this mosque in the heart of the capital became the centerpiece of a previously unimaginable phenomenon—the existence of Jihadist Salafism in Tunisia. The courtyard and footpath running alongside the mosque were home to traveling merchants who established a small market where all Salafist accessories were available, from religious literature to niqabs and Afghan kameez. Imams known for their aggressive preaching were regularly welcomed onto the grounds of the mosque. 28. Here we are drawing on the report given by L. Le Pape (2014). A protagonist’s perspective of these events is available in the Chronicles of Manoubistan, based on the daily blog by French literature professor H. Mellakh (2013). 29. Here, the Tunisian transition highlights the relevance of the warning given by A. Cottereau (1999), who called for a clear distinction to be made between the formation of the “public spirit” and its attribution to fictitious groups or points of view. 30. Religious unity activists are very firm in stating the apolitical nature of their demands. We intend to do justice to this statement while still highlighting its fundamentally anti-democratic nature. 31. E. Goffman (1963) strongly emphasized what he called “civil inattention.” H. Sacks (1995) extended this approach to the matter of strangers “exchanging glances” in public. The issue of “overhearing” strangers has been developed in depth by P. Szendy (2007). 32. The reference to the “laboratory” metaphor is a good opportunity to stress that a public experience involves, by definition, an experimental process of trial and error. In this sense, considering the public as a potential to be fulfilled allows us to acknowledge that this notion has a normative scope, while stating that it can be embodied in extremely variable forms according to the circumstances in which it is achieved. 198 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

33. L. Quéré (2001) highlights the social and institutional conditions for trust in democratic societies. 34. The opening of this unification process to former Destourian militants, and thus to former members of Ben Ali’s RCD party was particularly controversial. B. Caïd Essebsi has always maintained this position—according to him, to shun them was anti-democratic. 35. Once again, J. Dewey traces the origins of the processes of becoming public to when people perceive that they are indirectly affected by transactions in which they play no part, and carry out the inquiry necessary to be able to remotely control the development of this situation. This reflection shows that Nidaa Tounes envisaged, from April 2012, the possibility of making national unity a public asset, that is, the possibility of setting up an organization dedicated to maintaining and preserving it. 36. On September 14, 2012, a demonstration was organized to protest against the movie entitled Innocence of Muslims, the trailer for which, considered to be blasphemous, was uploaded to YouTube. The march started at the El Fath mosque, located in the center of Tunis, and finished at the US Embassy next to the lake a few miles away. On the day, protesters raided the American school in Tunis before setting it on fire and attacking the embassy itself. The clashes were violent and shots were fired, killing two and injuring around forty. 37. The Leagues for the Protection of the Tunisian Revolution were militias, created in January 2011 from neighborhood committees, and self-defense groups. Having joined forces to form a National League in early 2012, their aim was to preserve the achievements of the revolution, promote the Arab-Muslim identity and fight corruption. As they were closely linked to the government, they were regularly accused of acting violently toward the opposition. 38. The urban space is one of several stages upon which this division became apparent. Similar types of confrontations could be observed in the traditional media or on social media. However, urban clashes were of particular importance because passers-by and the broadcast media alike could see and access images of the physical violence that put the physical integrity of the key actors involved at risk. 39. The UGTT had already launched a “National Dialogue Congress” on October 16, 2012, one month after the US Embassy attack. This initiative intended to explore an informal way of resolving crises and easing tensions through the participation of political parties and key actors in civil society. 40. Three other non-governmental organizations of national importance rallied alongside the UGTT: the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Crafts (UTICA, the employers’ union), the Tunisian Human Rights League and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers. This Tunisian National 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 199

Dialogue Quartet and those who carried it out were rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize on October 9, 2015. 41. For more on the polemical dimension of legal proceedings, see Y. Thomas (2001) and supra endnote 4. 42. J. Widmer’s (1999) analyses of the Swiss political disputes show that the formulating of collective issues in terms of identity regularly goes hand in hand with a polemical bipolarization of two irreducible approaches to national interests. J. Gusfield (1981) argued that there is a “culture of public problems” symbolized by particular ways of considering and formulating troubled situations. 43. Drawing on H. Arendt’s essay On Revolution in which she highlights the radical divergence between generalized suspicion and the public space, Alain Cottereau (1992) characterizes Terror during the French Revolution as an “escalation of suspicion” and analyzes how a democratic reaction was established to deal with it. By drawing on a variety of examples, he demonstrates how a presumption of innocence has emerged, of which judicial acceptance is a major form, but whose model has been generelized to include the conditions of public initiative. “The logic of presumption plays a part in symbolizes [a boundary between what must remain preserved and what can or must be revealed in public] in the sense of an a priori openness to accepting an unknown fellow citizen, which is thus the exact opposite of suspicion. More generally, this presumption of innocence is a kind of bias towards fellow citizens, incorporated into public customs, making public trust or public esteem no longer the consequence of a duly verified affiliation, but a recognition of respect, subject to the possibility of being verified in a State governed by the rule of law. This system of prejudice, in all public judgement systems, is intrinsically linked to cultural and institutional aspects. It illustrates a negative correlation to the possibility of citizens’ initiatives” (ibid.: 255). 44. On September 7, 2015, the Ministry of the Interior announced its decision to close Avenue Bourguiba to all road traffic from September 9 to 14 due to threats of attacks “using car bombs and explosive belts.” Shocked residents, passers-by and customers of the café terraces in the area watched in amazement as an impressive system of road blocks was erected and placed under high police surveillance. An insurmountable contrast suddenly formed between the relaxed onlookers strolling through the streets with their families and the force used by police officers in charge of their safety when controlling their movements. These measures were met with both disbelief and violent protests. The closure of the city center took place on the same weekend that the opposition called for a demonstration against the so-called economic reconciliation bill, which included an amnesty for acts of corruption committed under Ben Ali’s regime on the condition that 200 S. LAACHER AND C. TERZI

the perpetrators reimburse the embezzled money. Under these circumstances, all signs were showing that the government was only referring to the state of emergency declared in June 2015, following the Jihadist attack in Sousse, in order to prevent a demonstration. Many commentators, observers and passers-by saw this as a serious violation of the “freedom of assembly and peaceful demonstration” guaranteed by Article 37 of the new constitution. They acknowledged that this way of invoking a security threat to prohibit political expression was a governmental practice to which they had become accustomed under the fallen regime. “The old ways haven’t changed!” they remarked, disheartened. 45. In A. Cottereau’s analysis of the process of becoming public during times of Terror in revolutionary France, he notes the extent to which the process of becoming public is threatened by populism and statocentrism, which consist of overlaying it respectively by the notions of “people” and “the State.” He first shows how the exploration of a “public spirit” brought the reign of Terror to its end. He specifically highlights the role of the municipal revolution that opened up clubs, town assemblies and neighborhood assemblies to public participation. These inter-class meetings enabled new methods of evaluation: “Tests of universalization, in public debate and citizen reflection, are opportunities for the public spirit to conceive points of view without having to attribute them to any fictitious collective subject” (see p. 259 in Cottereau 1992). The author then notes that this public spirit can be maintained when citizens are provided with these new markers for possible actions. However, it shows that the development of the French Revolution changed direction when the public spirit started being viewed as a set of unified markers for the enforcement of State’s policies on a national scale. He identifies this shift in the written accounts that were entirely subject to “an ideal point of view from which the general interest is derived—in other words, the point of view of the State, facing a civil society with guaranteed rights. Such a historical shift symbolizes a possible contradiction between public life for citizens and public life for the State, even if it is a State governed by the rule of law, since taking care of the general interest is then reserved for specialists, while the citizens are considered to be preoccupied with the particular interests of “civil society.” When this occurs, statocentrism (used in the same way as “ethnocentrism”) usurps democratic publicity (ibid.: 265). 46. According to Reinhart Koselleck (1990) the tension between a “field of experience” and a “horizon of expectation” drives any historical experience. 9 THE CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING PUBLIC… 201

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A Commitment, 109–119, 193n4 Aca-fans, 153 Communities, 3, 5, 64, 112, 125, Alternative media, 25–27 137, 138, 152, 153 Audience(s), 1–12, 13n5, 20–25, 27, Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel 28, 33, 39, 40, 45, 46, 49, 70–86, (CSA), 13n3, 103, 104 92–95, 103, 109–119, 119n1, Conversations, 9, 12, 21–24, 28, 29, 120n2, 120n5, 120n6, 128, 130, 32–40, 57, 102, 116, 117, 119, 150–154, 157–161, 167, 170 127, 128, 137, 149, 152, 156, Audience measurement, 13n5, 161, 180, 195n12 109, 119n1 Austin, John, 72 D Dayan, Daniel, 2, 11, 72, 75, 87n3, B 110–114, 118, 120n2, 120n3, Barthes, Roland, 78, 87n3 157, 158, 161 BFM TV, 10, 71–73, 75, 77–79, 82, Democracy, 5, 6, 47, 58, 65, 85, 87n4 70, 76, 83, 85, 185, 191, 192, 193n3 Dewey, John, 2, 166, 167, 170, 172, C 194n9, 198n35 Ça se discute, 92, 97 Digital comic serial, 149–161 C’est mon choix, 97–99, 104n1, 110 Digital practices, 119, 144

1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Digital social network(s), 5, J 109–119, 157 Jenkins, Henry, 3, 110, 150, 151, Discussion thread, 128–132, 134, 153, 157, 161 135, 137–140, 143, 144n6

L E Les Autres Gens, 149, 154 Elias, Norbert, 7 Listeners, 3, 6, 8, 9, 20–22, 31–33, Experience, 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13n3, 36, 37, 40n1 37, 46, 53, 55, 58, 61, 62, 93, Lurker(s) & lurking, 7, 11, 149, 109–119, 120n6, 126–128, 131, 157, 161 134, 135, 139, 143, 144, 151, 157, 161, 166–170, 172–174, 176–180, 185–186, 188–192, M 193n2, 193n4, 194n8, 195n13, Mainstream media, 25, 100 196n16, 197n24, 197n32, 200n46 Media sphere, 173–178, 181, 186

F N Facebook, 8, 51, 85, 114, 150, 154, News media, 25–28, 30–32, 39, 155, 182 103, 150 Fan(s), fandom, 11, 12, 22, 37, 110, Newspaper(s), 26, 27, 30, 51, 78, 114–117, 149–161 99, 127 Foucault, Michel, 24, 25, 195n13 Non-users, 161

G O Globalization, 143 Occupation and socio-professional categories (OSCs), 93–95 Online forum, 7, 8, 130, 157 H Ordinary people (& lay people), 3, 8, Habermas, Jürgen, 11, 70 9, 23, 37, 46–48, 51, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 66, 70, 91–104, 110 I Identity, 7, 9, 11, 12, 23, 39, 110, 131, 137, 143, 166, 172, P 178–181, 184–186, 189, 191, Parole de candidat (PDC), 45–66 192, 196n17, 198n37, 199n42 Participation, 1–12, 19–40, 45–48, Infotainment, 26 60–62, 66, 66n2, 76, 91, 96, Internet, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 49, 50, 82, 100–102, 111, 115, 117–119, 85, 91–104, 114–119, 126–143, 120n4, 130, 151, 153, 160, 161, 144n1, 152, 154, 156, 177 198n39, 200n45 INDEX 205

People, The, 7, 10, 47–49, 51, 54, 65, T 66, 70–86, 87n6, 87n9, 102, Talk show(s), 6, 9, 20, 99, 112, 120n4 136, 174, 185, 195n15 Television, 2–6, 8–11, 13n3, 13n4, Practices, 2, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13n5, 20, 30, 45, 46, 51, 59, 70–75, 85, 26, 30, 39, 63, 92, 103, 87n3, 92, 94, 95, 99, 103, 104, 109–119, 120n6, 125–144, 109–119, 119n1, 120n2, 120n3, 149–157, 160, 161, 186, 190, 120n5, 120n6, 149–161, 166, 191, 193n4, 200n44 173, 181, 182 Public (as adjective), 167–169, 190 TF1, 9, 10, 45–66, 66n2, 71–81, Public (as noun), 167–169, 190 83, 87n4, 87n5, 87n9, Public sphere, 6, 7, 10–12, 167, 168, 87n10, 88n13 195n12 Transmedia, 4, 7, 11, 111, 114, 116 Tunisian revolution, 6, 12, 166, 196n15, 198n37 R Turner, Graeme, 6, 9, 23, 39 Radio, 6, 8, 9, 20–30, 39, 40, 95, TV programme (& TV show), 47, 71, 103, 168 112, 115, 118, 121n8 Readers, 2, 100, 113, 127, 130, TV viewers, 48, 74, 75, 109 149–151, 154–160, 170 Twitter, 4, 8, 11, 13n3, 51, 85, 114, Rush Limbaugh Show, The, 9, 22, 24, 116, 117, 120n5, 150, 154–156, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 36, 37 159, 160

S U Sean Hannity Show, The, 22, 24, 27, Users, 3, 85, 99–102, 104, 29, 36, 38 115–119, 128–143, 144n1, Sociability(ies), 110, 112, 114, 119, 156, 161, 177 120n6, 144, 152 Street(s), 4, 5, 10, 73, 85, 86, 156, 168, 170–176, 178, 184, 185, V 188–192, 194n10, 194n11, Visibility, 5, 11, 23, 25, 26, 32, 97, 195n12, 196n17, 199n44 104, 152, 173, 178, 179, 195n13