ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the discursive construction of participant identity, and a critical examination of the use and scope of the term 'ordinary people' to refer to participating members of the public in audience participation programming on television and radio. It explores how the introduction of email and web-based questions and contributions to a traditional broadcast participation framework of direct interaction produces a different type of discussion and a different set of speaker roles and identities. In the context of television, this restricted the live, studio-based interactions and produced fragmented, monologic expressions of feeling rather than grounded, dialogic interaction and debate. The chapter presents some examples from calls to the radio phone-in programme Election Call, and then to contributions to the television panel debate show Question Time. The chapter introduces a different kind of participant, located in the interactive web-based audience rather than a member of the interacting studio audience or a phone-in caller.
