Audience

This term is something of a misnomer as ‘audience’ strictly-speaking refers to hearing (Latin-’audio’), but there seems no better term available. Also it can be argued that ‘audience’ is used too loosely and bandied about without precise
care. So problems beset this term even before embarking upon the still live issue of whether an audience needs the protection of censorship and certification.

What audience theory was formulated in the earlier part of the twentieth century seems to view texts as being highly-manipulative, audiences as being unquestioning in their consumption of whatever they viewed, instantly open to whatever political or economic messages came their way via the mass media. To illustrate this viewpoint, cultural theorists would cite propaganda films produced by the State in Communist USSR and Nazi Germany, or Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds wireless broadcast. All of these are deemed to have had significant impact upon audiences. Moving into the 1960s sociologists and media theorists maintained the view of audiences as empty vessels susceptible to adult influences and the urgings of advertisers (I am thinking here of the so called Bobo doll experiment and Vance Packard’s anxieties about consumerism).

Then come the counter theories. The French ‘Cahier’ writers such as Truffaut and Godard had radically altered film theory, re-evaluating and redefining film, raising it to high cultural and artistic status rather than a generator of sleazy low social and sexual standards. Some commentators had even argued that TV watching produced a trance-like effect akin to taking drugs, now media theorists like Marie Davies conversely put forward that TV was an educating medium that stimulated sophisticated textual understanding. ‘Media literacy’ came to be used and is arguably still a contentious issue. Audiences were discussed as being complex, in need of detailed analysis and explanation. Rather than vacant consumers, audience members became active participants in forming meanings and it was recognised that individuals bring all sorts of knowledge and awareness to media products. Hartley in 1982 listed a number of ’subjectivities’ that help to define an individual:

This list was added to by John Fiske thus:

Members of an audience bring some or all of these to their consumption of a media text perhaps besides others such as experience and enjoyment of other
media texts. This enables them to form their own responses to texts. Theory now focuses much more on how audiences use texts, often referred to as ‘uses and gratifications’. According to earlier thinking, audiences were considered too susceptible to ‘preferred’ readings, interpretations in line with the producers’ intentions. Now there is plenty of theoretical room for ‘negotiated’ readings when part only of an intended meaning is accepted and ‘oppositional’ readings when a counter-interpretation (sometimes called an ‘abberant’ reading) is formed.

It is advisable to see audience as a problematic and complex concept. We form audiences for different products. Any one group of people forming an audience is going to have a diverse mixture of media interests and consumption patterns. In a sense there is such potential for a wealth of different understandings (in the widest possible sense of the word) in a given audience for a product, so that a body of people may come away from viewing a film with markedly differing attitudes to what they have seen, that perhaps talk of audience as a unified body of consumers is far too simplistic. Because of this it is possible to argue that in a sense audience does not exist. However, producers of media texts will continue creating markets, i.e. audiences, for their products regardless of our theoretical uncertainty.