Audiences

Abstract

The notion of the audience is a central one in understanding media. The concept has its source in the Latin root aud , suggesting the processing of auditory messages or spoken language. Indeed, in the feudal period, monarchs and hereditary rulers would often grant an “audience” to their constituents, which indicated the disparity in social station between the two. The modern parlance of the term has shifted away from face‐to‐face communication to refer to a mass audience, or a collection of anonymous individuals who receive a message transmitted via a particular medium. Contemporary scholars have noted that the audience is a fungible concept that is imagined in different contexts to suit different needs. For example, media programmers and advertisers utilize statistical agglomerations of individual viewers to help shape decisions about media content, while public opinion survey data are regularly used to shape public policy. Increasingly, thanks to the interactive nature of online media, particularly social media, the formerly clear distinctions between media producers and audiences are blurring, causing some conceptual murkiness about the nature of an audience versus media users.