Engaged audiences in the mediated disaster of Mount Merapi in Indonesia 2010.

This thesis examines the audiences' involvement in the citizens' initiative of disaster relief efforts during the Mt. Merapi disaster in 2010. It focuses on the audiences' collective attention to different media outlets across platforms, their engagements with different forms of mediated collective action, and the processes that took place between the two. This study employs different methods, namely case study, process tracing, and network analysis, to analyse data gathered through a survey of 539 audience members, in-depth interviews with 64 audience members and 10 media persons, and various media archives. It was found that audiences' collective attention to media outlets was fragmented across platforms. Nevertheless, the audiences could collectively concentrate their attention on the Mt. Merapi disaster, possibly because the structure and content of Indonesian mass media were biased toward Java - the island where Mt. Merapi was located - and because of the existence of Jalin Merapi, the people's crisis information network. The complexity of audiences' collective attention could be seen through their selection of objects of attention, their intentions in using the media, norms of paying attention, and competition between mainstream media and people's media. The collective actions performed by audiences were constituted through their interaction with the media, other audiences, and other related parties in their efforts to transcend private-public boundaries. From the audiences' viewpoints, the trajectory from collective attention to collective action consisted of efforts to overcome barriers to concentration of their attention, formulate the problem, imagine others, build resources, and cross private-public boundaries. Focusing on audiences' engagement with disaster relief efforts is an attempt to go beyond 'contact with media' as the privileged moment to be investigated by audience study. In preference to a contact approach, the people's engagements with the others and the social world through media have been demonstrated to be a productive lens to understand media uses in disaster times.