Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

persons appearing on documentaries, reality TV programmes, and the

high visibility of members of a ‘live’ audience.

• Broadcast is indirectly dialogical via the ratings system. Media pro-
  ducers may shape audience tastes, but, equally, audiences react to
  trends in broadcast as a whole and may withdraw their patronage,
  leading to changes in programming.


• At an individual level, media consumers do not simply comprise ‘an
  indefinite range of recipients’. Audiences are specific to definite genres
  and times, and constitute a remarkably high degree of solidarity. This
  solidarity is channelled totemically and ritually through ‘media
  agents’ – the characters, the presenters, the hosts and the media workers
  who facilitate the structural architecture of broadcast. It is through these
  agents that individual members of a given audience indirectly ‘inter-
  act’ with each other.^12 Instead of having a directly horizontal commu-
  nicative relationship with others, a detour is taken via these media
  agents. It enables a form of the many speaking to the many via the
  performative quality of the apparatus proving itself in every act of
  broadcast.^13


• As Thompson points out, the peculiar form of quasi-interaction con-
  summates itself directly between audience members when they find
  themselves in a face-to-face interaction. In fact the reason they may
  associate is because of the common bond they feel with media agents
  who have already brought them together. They may otherwise routinely
  associate face-to-face, but make of broadcast media a primary basis for
  mutual conversation.

Interaction versus Integration 147

Figure 5.1 Ritual model: high integration/high reciprocity

Media producers as agents of cultural consensus

Media consumers as divided and unified

Holmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 147