Niche Worlds

A collaborative book project with Tom Lamarre (UChicago), Richard Jean So (Duke), and Aarthi Vadde (Duke).

Traversing the space where new economies of cultural attention intersect with new practices of audience reception, Niche Worlds brings to the twenty-first century world of television a critical and computational approach designed to meet the moment. Critically, our guiding concept, “niche worlds”, complicates the conflation of niches with small pockets of attention or hyper-specialized, personalized tastes. Niches, in our view, are best understood through the concepts of magnitude and system, rather than size and scale. A niche world is a nexus of attention and affective repurposing, the intensities of both ebbing and flowing over time. It is simultaneously a nodal point in the wider networked, transnational systems that now govern televisual attention and reception.

By appending niche to world, we aim to describe and analyze the media ecology in which industry executives, producers, and audiences all play a role without falling back on binary logics of power in which audiences are construed as either dupes of the culture industry or as subversive agents who recontextualize dominant ideologies and messages. Further, the concept of niche worlds makes a significant intervention in the entrenched tendency to take national television, that is, U.S. television, as the paradigm for understanding global transformations in television. Niche worlds demarcate a site, moreover, where contemporary streaming services tap into the vast domain of transnational fandoms.