The co-option of audiences in the attention economy: introduction

The motivation for this special issue was born of the two-day conference ‘Audiences 2030: Imagining a future for audiences’, in late September 2017, in Lisbon, sponsored by the Consortium on Emerging Di-rections of Audience Research (CEDAR) which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, in association with Universidade Católica Portuguesa, as well as the Audience and Reception Studies section of ECREA and YECREA. The event was the public culmination of the three-year work of CEDAR, directed by Ranjana Das (University of Surrey) and Brita Ytre-Arne (University of Bergen). The network identified as one of the major trends in audience and audience research that audience participation is being co-opted by large, global players, partly as a consequence of the technological capabilities devel-oped by digital media (Das & Ytre-Arne, 2017).