Fuller’s Boundaries of Participation

I didn’t quite get what the final message of Fuller’s article was.  In her piece, “Boundaries of Participation…” she seems to give a pretty basic history of audience participation at the beginning of the 20th century, filled with important cultural and technological shifts, as well as colloquial stories that give us an idea of what she is describing.  That said, I was unclear as to how important she thinks audience participation is.  She mentions the works of other film historians and their fear that audience members were turning into comatose blobs in their seats, simply taking in the images on the screen.  What I would have liked from her was whether or not she thought this was true or false and whether or not it was a major problem.  I guess what she was trying to do was show little ways in which participation was still very active even after the shift towards taming audiences, thus proving those historians wrong. Again, though I would have liked her to make some bolder statements, and maybe to have addressed the fact that the audience has experience has definitely evolved to that of a tame and quiet one during screenings (despite all the obvious participation that is still possible).

What I found interesting about Fuller’s historical description of audience evolution, was the way in which individual participation became a mass produced commodity.  Instead of things like intimate screenings with a live musician that only a small group could find themselves participating with, the studios found ways like star promoting and the appeal of screenplay writing to essentially sell everyone the same feeling of participation.  To me this is a strange and almost contradictory concept.  The idea of connecting individuals to your art through a mass-produced corporate creation is definitely something present in so much of our media today, and it was sad to read about its beginnings considering the wholesome (and probably really entertaining, in my opinion) ways in which audience participation started.