Audience
confl icts’. He goes on, ‘Th e problems surround-
ing the concept [of audience] stem mainly from
the fact that a single and simple word is being
applied to an increasingly diverse and complex
reality.’
McQuail’s book addresses these problems
in an interesting and illuminating manner. We
know that audiences exist; the trouble is that
without rigorous and sustained monitoring
through research in one form or another, they
are liable to ‘escape’, that is from agencies of
control, whether these are governments, institu-
tions, advertisers or organizations that exist to
place audiences under surveillance and produce
the data on which decision-making is based.
McQuail does not go as far as agreeing with
some commentators that the audience for mass
media is verging on the extinct. In his chapter
on ‘Th e future of the audience concept’ there is a
subhead, ‘Th e audience lives on’, suggesting that
the determination of communicators to hold
on to mass audiences along with that of those
who measure and monitor responses, has been
suffi ciently successful to rescue audience from
escape.
In other words, fragmentation has been
checked if not halted. Audiences for mass
media have been slower to switch allegiance –
from public-service broadcasting services, for
example – than some have predicted; and a look
at the popularity of many programmes off ered in
the UK by the BBC and independent television
would give substance to that argument. We may
still, in the words of the title of Ian Ang’s 1991
publication, be Desperately Seeking the Audience
(Routledge & Kegan Paul), but research indi-
cates, as McQuail points out, that the ‘dispersion
of [audience] attention among channels has been
marked by moderation and gradualness’.
Current defi nitions and evaluations of audi-
ence, however, take in the enormous expansion
of internet communication which, with the
advance of easy-to-use digital technology, allows
audiences also to be creators of media texts in
all their forms. In an online post to Press Th ink
(2006), Jay Rosen writes of ‘people formerly
known as the audience’. Th at ‘humble device’ the
blog ‘has given the press to us’, while podcast-
ing ‘gives radio to us’. Rosen celebrates the fact
that now ‘the horizontal fl ow, citizen to citizen,
is as real and consequential as the vertical one’. In
other words, people are fast turning the ‘one-to-
many’ media experience to a ‘many to many’ one.
Graeme Turner in Ordinary People and the
Media: Th e Demotic Turn (Sage, 2010) writes,
‘In a context within which media outlets andiour, but are more likely to recognise the infl u-
ence of situational factors on our own behaviour.
Carole Wade and Carol Tavris in Psychology
(HarperCollins, 1993) note that ‘when it comes
to explaining their own behaviour, most West-
erners tend to choose attributes that are favour-
able to them ... Th is self-serving bias means that
people like to take credit for their good actions
and let the situation account for their bad ones’.
Dispositional attribution can be difficult to
change as evidence suggests that we are unwill-
ing to discard dispositional attributions even
when they are discredited. Th is may help explain
the persistence of stereotypes and prejudice.
Several studies have, however, noted cross-
cultural diff erences in the attribution process.
For example, J.G. Miller conducted a study
comparing subjects from the US with Hindus
in India as regards the use of dispositional
and situational attribution. In ‘Culture and the
development of everyday social explanation’ in
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(1984, issue 46) Miller reported his discovery
that the subjects in the US were more likely than
the Hindu subjects in India to employ disposi-
tional rather than situational explanations for
behaviour.
▶William Gudykunst and Young Yun Kim, Commu-
nicating with Strangers: An Approach to Intercultural
Communication (McGraw-Hill, 1997).
Audience Students of media communication
recognize the term audience as overarching all
the reception processes of message sending.
Th us there is the audience for theatre, televi-
sion and cinema; there is the radio listener.
Th ere is the audience for a pop concert or at a
public meeting. Communicators shape their
messages to fi t the perceived needs of their audi-
ence: they calculate the level of receptiveness,
the degree of readiness to accept the message
and the mode of delivery.
Audience is readership too, and the success
in meeting audience/readership needs relies
extensively on feedback; also, perhaps more
signifi cantly of late, identifi cation of what audi-
ence actually is. Does it in any meaningful sense
actually exist, bearing in mind the inevitable
fragmentation of the traditional audience for
media as a result of the diversifi cation of the
modes and channels of mass communication
on the one hand, and the accelerating growth of
network communication on the other?
Denis McQuail in Audience Analysis (Sage,
1997) writes of the ‘audience problem’, acknowl-
edging that ‘there is much room for diff erences
of meaning, misunderstandings, and theoretical