convulsions in their life, are always with you Monday to Friday. Thus
the ritual involves a constancy of participation, not just the consumption
of texts.
As Baym (2000) suggests, ‘Being a member of an audience commu-
nity is not just about reading a text in a particular way; rather, it is about
having a group of friends, a set of activities one does with those friends,
and a world of relationships and feelings that grow from those friend-
ships’ (207). Such friendship may be with the characters as much as with
other ‘audience friends’ who are enveloped by the same form of virtual
participation.
This densely textured world of participation provides a standing
reserve of sign-values, a reserve which is at its richest in the wider band-
width of broadcast, which is, ultimately, television. Television is able to
convey complexity but with a remarkable uniformity across a popula-
tion.^28 Never have so may complex meanings – whether these be readerly
or writerly in the Barthesian sense, hot or cool in the McLuhanist sense –
been available to such large audiences.
Following our earlier discussion, the definition of the flâneur,
whether embodied or electronic, as one who bathes in the crowd can be
satisfied within both audience and network environments. However, it
can be observed that audience–medium interactions offer much more to
virtual flâneursthan do network–medium interactions.
As we saw with the rise of the flâneur, the excitement of flâneriewas
not a return to Gemeinschaftand community organized around interaction
between members of a speech community. Rather, it was about interaction
with a crowd of some form. Few physical forms of mutual association
outside of broadcast assemblies offer this effect today save for the specta-
cle of the large sporting event.
The media offer the opportunity for people to come together to
understand the central questions of life, from the meaning of art to the
meaning of death, of sickness, of youth, of beauty, of happiness and of
pain (see Martin-Barbero, 1997).
But audience communities which are organized around texts do not
fully account for the kinds of social integration that are possible within
broadcast. We have seen already how practices of media usage are com-
mon to network and broadcast dynamics alike. Broadcast, which may be
said to ‘influence consciousness’, is also an environment for practices and
rituals which are not simply semiotic.Symbolic inequality in broadcast communities
The constancy that is provided by media genres to provide a common cul-
ture over time points to media as a mythological ‘centre’ of social life in
modern societies, to use Couldry’s (2003) phrase, but it is a constancy210 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 210