Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

blamed for the ‘severe social dislocations and polarizations that have

taken place in American society’ (640). The ‘nation-as-audience’ is seen to

be overcome by a ‘nation-of-audiences’. It is true that cable television, or

narrowcasting, does not, by definition, have such large mass audiences,

but they are just as capable of constituting a mass, just as free-to-air tele-

vision is. This can happen over time, or by the fact that narrowcasting

content is seldom produced just for a particular channel, but is generally

reproduced and reproducible on potentially global scales, in duplicate

narrowcasts or broader broadcasts. ‘Indiscrimination’, Marc (2000) insists,

is the characteristic which distinguishes broadcast from cable (640).

However, as more recent paradigms in audience studies demonstrate, dis-

crimination is the preserve not of the broadcaster, but of the audience.

Whether audiences discriminate between spatiallocations on the cable

dial, or between temporal slots in broadcasting programming, is not nearly

as significant as the fact that, in each case, a mass is constituted by radial

transmission. Structurally, whatever the mix of broad versus narrow

transmission, the nation-of-audiences will always prevail, and whatever

the mix, the nation-as-audience will always be possible should a spectacle

arise that is presupposed by such a form. A day in September 2001 made

this plain... and not just for a nation.

Broadcasts that have regular and stable visibility can become points

of ritual attachment, be this a weekly soap opera, the nightly news, or a

once-a-year fix on a sporting tournament. Where the performativity of a

broadcast event is at its highest intensity, it is even possible for the media-

generated fields which atomize audiences at a face-to-face level to

momentarily disappear.

When Princess Diana’s death was announced in 1997, numerous

reports were made of persons who never even followed the life of the

Princess but were overcome by spontaneous grief, whatever they were

doing and wherever they were. At the moment the news was received

of the death of the most photographed person in the world, the local con-

texts of association which would otherwise occupy them were rapidly

dissolved, as the most binding field of recognition became the calling of

global media.

However, typically, the synthesis produced by broadcast media

rarely produces such affective horizontal attachments, as audiences need

only look to ongoing media narratives to consummate a sense of belong-

ing to a telecommunity.

Audiences without texts

There is no audience outside of broadcast. The performativity of a broad-

cast event – whether it is synchronous or asynchronous – and its instan-

taneity are much more important factors in the formation of an audience

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