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The second point also concerns the computational form of the analyses
presented here. It has often been the case that audience studies have been for-
mulated and written in a specialist's language (e.g., the vocabulary of academic
media studies) and presented in a medium unlike the medium of the story
andunlikethemediausedbytheaudience members to communicate amongst
themselves. For example, studies of television audiences are oftentimes writ-
ten up as academic topics. For Internet-based audiences, it is now possible to
build technologies that are designed to be accessible to the audience members
and specialists alike. The Conversation Map system has been designed to be
available online.
My second preliminary point is this: audience-accessible, networked, me-
dia studies cannot - as previous work repeatedly has - treat audiences as com-
modities or scientific objects because thenetworkprovidesameansfortheau-
dience members to dispute the interpretations offered by the specialists. Con-
sequently, what is presented below can best be understood as one place to begin
an examination of the audiences' understandings of the two X-files episodes. It
is not a definite, final discovery of those understandings.
Two conversation maps
In what follows, the social networks, themes, and semantic networks dis-
played in the Conversation Maps of the two message archives will be more
closely examined.
Social networks
Figures 3 and 4 are enlargements of the social networks visible in Figures 1 and
2 respectively. In Figures 3 and 4 the names of the newsgroup participants have
been turned off to allow one to see the topology of the networks more clearly.
What should be clear in Figures 3 and 4 is that participants are grouped
into many small networks. The small networks are not connected to one an-
other although it can be seen that the social networks shown in Figure 3 are
more highly connected than the networks shown in Figure 4. In Figure 3, for
example, the circled participant is a “lynchpin” of sorts holding together several
smaller networks.
The lack of connections in the social networks makes it immediately appar-
ent that the newsgroup is a space in which many different, probably unrelated,
