Edinburgh Napier University

  This chapter explores the premise that the nature of audiencehood itself has changed within the contemporary digital environment, in ways that has both conceptual and methodological implications for audience research design. It discusses some general qualities of software culture, in particular how cultural logics embedded within computer programming, the ways in people increasingly rely on these for everyday communication and how creative practices potentially reshape notions of literacy and agency. The chapter suggests the significance of software at the level of content generation by users, using digital video as the example to illustrate the need for software studies-informed audience research into a variety of aspects of user engagement within the contemporary media environment. Software studies, however, is currently preoccupied with software at the level of code and interface and has comparatively little to say about the entanglement of users with software at a variety of levels within the digital ecology.