Small acts of engagement: Reconnecting productive audience practices with everyday agency

In this article, we develop the concept of small acts of engagement (SAOE) in a networked media environment as a conceptual framework to study specific audience practices and as an agenda for research on these practices. We define SAOE, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, as productive audience practices that require little investment and are intentionally more casual than the structural and laborious practices examined as types of produsage and convergence culture. We further elaborate on the interpretive and productive aspects of SAOE, which allow us to reconnect the notions of a participatory culture and a culture of everyday agency. Our central argument is that the audience studies perspective allows viewing productive practices like sharing thoughts on today’s menu through Instagram or liking a friend’s charity on Facebook, as practices of everyday audience agency, which, on an aggregate level, have the potential to become powerful acts of resistance.