Media Audience
Theory

Who becomes an audience, and what holds that audience together?

Suppose a short documentary follows the closing of a neighbourhood cinema in Kolkata. Some people watch because they live nearby. Others follow the director, enjoy films about cities, or encounter a recommended clip. A distributor counts viewers. A local association debates what the cinema meant to the neighbourhood.

These people can belong to several audiences at once. Their shared encounter with the film draws together different interests, histories and situations. Media Audience Theory helps explain how such collectivities form, how institutions describe them, and how people use and interpret media.

The definition chosen shapes the investigation. An advertiser asks who can be reached. A reception researcher asks how viewers make sense of a story. A community organisation asks whether a programme strengthens shared discussion. Each question brings a different audience into view.

A field of related approaches

Media Audience Theory brings together several traditions of inquiry. These examine audience formation, media effects, needs and gratifications, cultural interpretation, everyday practices and commercial organisation. Their questions connect, and each requires suitable evidence.

Think of a map of a city. A transport map traces routes; a population map shows where people live; a heritage map marks places of memory. The city remains the same, while each map highlights a relationship. Audience concepts work in a similar way.

Three questions to carry through the chapter

• Formation: which circumstances bring people into a relationship with this medium or content?
• Experience: what do they select, understand, feel and do within that relationship?
• Power: who defines the audience, measures it and benefits from its attention or participation?

In my lecture, I begin with the many ways an audience can be defined and move towards the question of audience activity. This chapter follows that route and develops its implications for research, commercial media and digital communication.

Media connect dispersed people with a shared object of attention.

An audience can gather around a performance, a speech or a sporting event. Its members share a place and can often see or hear one another respond. Print and broadcasting extend the audience relationship across distance, while recorded and on-demand media also stretch it across time.

One household may hear a broadcast as it happens. Another may watch a recording later. A reader may encounter the story through a newspaper, an archive or a shared image. The audience relationship can continue through recurring habits and institutions, even as individual members enter and leave.

Blumer’s contribution

Herbert Blumer’s writings on mass behaviour in the 1930s helped distinguish the dispersed mass from other collective formations. His 1935 essay on motion pictures already described participants drawn from varied social backgrounds, oriented towards a common object beyond their immediate local setting. His 1939 work on collective behaviour became a landmark in this discussion.

For audience analysis, the useful questions concern distribution, interaction and organisation. Ask whether people meet, know one another, debate an issue, or simply attend to the same material.

The cinema documentary could attract each formation. A public screening assembles a crowd; a local association supplies group relationships; a redevelopment dispute helps form a public; distributed viewing creates a dispersed audience.

The historical concern about influence

The mass audience concept developed alongside questions about propaganda, commercial persuasion and the weakening of local ties. Later research examined interpersonal networks, selective use and socially situated interpretation, adding evidence about the relationships through which influence operates.

These strands continue together. A widely distributed message can reach people through personal recommendations, household routines and organised communities. Its scale and its social setting both deserve investigation.

Historical foundation: Blumer (1935). For the changing audience concept, see McQuail (1997).

The boundary changes when the question changes.

Audience definitions specify whom a claim concerns. Begin by naming the relationship, the unit of analysis and the period. This makes an apparently simple phrase such as “the film’s audience” clear enough to investigate.

People assembled, people addressed, people reached

People assembled directs attention to attendance or an aggregate encounter at a particular moment. People addressed identifies the audience imagined or positioned by a communicator. People reached refers to the people estimated or recorded as encountering the material under stated measurement rules.

Suppose the documentary’s trailer addresses young film enthusiasts, while a local newspaper story attracts retired residents. The intended and observed audiences can overlap while also differing. Comparing them helps explain distribution and communication choices.

The audience inscribed in a message

A text offers clues about the viewer or reader it imagines. Its vocabulary, assumed knowledge, humour, images and direct address invite a particular relationship. A phrase such as “remember our old balcony seats” addresses someone through a shared local memory.

Researchers can examine that invitation through textual analysis and then investigate how actual viewers respond. Some may recognise themselves in it; others may feel excluded, learn the background, or reinterpret the invitation.

A precise boundary also improves comparison. A seven-day audience estimate and a single screening’s attendance answer different questions. Record the period and the counting rule before comparing their size.

Audiences grow from social ties, needs, habits and attachments.

Audience formation connects what people bring to media with what media institutions offer. A pre-existing community may support a local station. A recurring need may bring otherwise unconnected people to an information service. A programme can also gather followers who later build relationships with one another.

McQuail’s audience typologies distinguish a social group or public, a gratification set, an audience attached to a medium or channel, and an audience organised around particular content. These concepts identify different sources of continuity.

A community that uses media

Suppose a neighbourhood association already meets about public spaces. Its members begin listening to a weekly programme on local history. Existing relationships help organise the listening, and the programme may supply fresh material for the association’s conversations.

Investigate both directions. Community ties can guide media choice; repeated media encounters can strengthen, stretch or challenge those ties. Ask whose experiences enter the programme and whose remain difficult to hear.

A need that gathers strangers

A student seeking examination guidance and another seeking a quick explanation may watch the same educational video. Their immediate purposes converge. They can form an audience without sharing locality, friendship or a lasting collective identity.

A gratification set therefore starts with a purpose or need. Examine how that purpose is recognised, which media or interpersonal alternatives are available, and whether the encounter supplies what was sought.

Taste cultures and shared evaluation

Herbert J. Gans’s work on taste cultures helps examine patterned preferences and standards of evaluation. People may share ideas about what makes a film moving, a news programme credible or a performance enjoyable. These standards develop within social experience.

Consider what viewers praise and criticise. One may value careful historical reconstruction; another may favour a personal account that brings a place to life. Such differences can organise recurring choices and disagreements.

Overlapping memberships

A local resident may also be a film enthusiast, a regular channel subscriber and someone seeking information about redevelopment. Treat these as connected relationships. An interview or diary can establish which relationship matters during a particular encounter.

Conceptual guides: McQuail (1997); Gans (1974).

Attention acquires commercial value through organised relationships.

A media market brings together actual or potential users whose characteristics matter to an institution. Location, language, purchasing capacity, interests and patterns of use can all shape the way that market is described.

A cinema sells tickets to spectators. A subscription service sells access to content. An advertising-supported outlet also offers advertisers opportunities to reach audiences. These arrangements give institutions different reasons to learn about users.

Smythe’s audience commodity

Dallas W. Smythe’s 1977 essay redirected attention towards the economic role of audiences in advertiser-supported media. He argued that media industries produce audiences for advertisers and that audience activity helps perform marketing work. This connects media use and leisure time with the reproduction of commercial demand.

The argument asks who organises the encounter, who benefits from it, and how the resulting audience is specified for exchange. It makes the audience’s economic role a central research problem.

Ratings as commercial information

Ratings and related estimates translate selected aspects of use into information that organisations can compare and trade against. Their authority depends on accepted methods, definitions and institutional agreement. Webster, Phalen and Lichty examine this audience information system in Ratings Analysis.

Suppose two programmes have similar estimated audience size but different age profiles or patterns of repeat viewing. An advertiser may value their audiences differently. A producer may then adjust scheduling, promotion or programme choices in response.

The audience institutions seek

Ien Ang’s Desperately Seeking the Audience examines how broadcasting institutions construct knowledge about viewers. The audience appears through categories and research practices that help institutions manage an uncertain relationship.

Ask how an institution’s categories illuminate some experiences while leaving others difficult to describe. A category such as “urban young adults” may be useful for planning, while interviews reveal differences in language, household obligations, accessibility and trust.

Read Smythe (1977), Ang (1991) and Webster, Phalen and Lichty (2014).

Every audience number needs a unit, a period and a counting rule.

Audience measurement estimates or records selected relationships between people and media. Begin with the population of interest, the unit counted, the qualifying encounter and the period. Then explain how the evidence was collected.

Panels follow selected participants over time. Surveys ask people to report use. Diaries record encounters near the time they occur. Digital logs record events generated within a service. Each approach offers particular information and faces particular gaps.

Work through a simple example

Suppose a study defines a universe of 1,000 people. During one specified minute, 400 use television and 100 watch Programme A. Its rating for that minute is 100 ÷ 1,000 × 100 = 10%. Its share is 100 ÷ 400 × 100 = 25%.

Now suppose a digital campaign records 600 qualifying impressions among 200 distinct measured accounts over a week. Average frequency is 600 ÷ 200 = 3 impressions per reached account. Keep the unit as accounts until a justified method connects them to people.

Sampling and representation

A sample estimate depends on recruitment, coverage, participation, weighting and the quality of records. Inspect which people are represented and whose use is difficult to capture. A large dataset can still omit offline encounters or people sharing devices.

Explain uncertainty where it can be estimated. Where the data come from a platform’s own logs, establish what the event definition includes, how repeated use is handled, and which parts of the audience remain outside the system.

Choosing a measure for a purpose

A community station may value local recognition and discussion. An educational service may examine comprehension and application. An advertiser may examine qualified reach. Choose indicators that connect with the purpose, and gather additional evidence where the outcome requires it.

Measurement foundation: Webster, Phalen and Lichty (2014). Institutional change: Napoli (2011).

Ask what people actively do before, during and after an encounter.

Audience activity takes several forms. A person can choose a programme carefully, use it for a purpose, think through its claims, challenge its message or become absorbed in its story. Examine these dimensions separately to understand the encounter.

The five dimensions used in my lecture bring together major meanings of activity reviewed by Frank A. Biocca. They help turn a broad description into questions that can be investigated.

Dimensions can combine in different ways

Suppose a viewer discovers the film accidentally and becomes deeply absorbed. Another deliberately selects it for research and watches with emotional distance. The first encounter shows strong involvement; the second shows purposeful selection and processing.

Investigate each pattern on its own terms. Emotional involvement can accompany thoughtful evaluation. A person can also enjoy a film while disputing its central claim.

Activity across time

Levy and Windahl’s 1984 framework links audience orientations with three phases: before exposure, during exposure and after exposure. This adds a temporal dimension to the investigation.

Before watching, ask how the person found and selected the film. During watching, examine attention, conversation and interpretation. Afterwards, ask what was recalled, discussed, reused or acted upon. Diaries and follow-up interviews can connect these moments.

Purposeful use and familiar routines

Rubin’s distinction between instrumental and ritualised television use examines purposeful, selective viewing alongside more habitual orientations to the medium. A routine can provide companionship, structure a day or create a shared occasion.

Suppose family members watch a familiar programme while preparing dinner. Their attention moves between the screen, cooking and conversation. An observation can show what the programme contributes to that situation, while interviews explain the meanings participants attach to the routine.

Turn “active” into a researchable description

Choose an activity, define observable indicators and specify when it occurs. “Compared two accounts before sharing” is more precise than assigning an overall activity label. Combine participants’ explanations with records or observations where access and consent allow.

Key discussions: Biocca (1988); Levy and Windahl (1984); Rubin (1984).

Different theories illuminate different parts of the encounter.

Audience research becomes stronger when its theoretical question is explicit. An investigation may ask why people choose media, how they interpret it, how their experience changes, or how their attention enters commercial exchange.

These approaches can inform one another. A need may guide selection; selection may alter exposure; interpretation may shape what is learned; commercial arrangements may influence what is available.

Uses and gratifications

Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch connect media use with needs, expectations and the gratifications people seek. Information, enjoyment, social connection and relief from everyday pressures can guide choice. Media also compete with interpersonal and other activities that can serve similar purposes.

Suppose a viewer watches the cinema documentary to understand a planning dispute. Another watches to revisit childhood memories. Ask what each hoped to obtain and what the experience actually supplied. That comparison helps distinguish gratifications sought from gratifications obtained.

Effects and interpretation

An effects question specifies an outcome: factual knowledge, an attitude, an emotion, a perception or a behaviour. A reception question examines how the material was understood. A combined design can investigate how different understandings are associated with different outcomes.

Suppose some viewers interpret a film as a defence of local heritage, while others read it as a story about unequal access to urban space. Measure the relevant outcomes and investigate how those readings developed. Social experience, prior knowledge and exposure to other accounts may also enter the explanation.

Motives in context

People’s purposes develop within schedules, resources, relationships and available choices. A commuting student with limited data and an archivist using a large screen encounter different practical possibilities. Ask how those conditions shape selection and experience.

Blumler’s work on uses and gratifications emphasises the theoretical questions around activity, needs and the social origins of media use. This provides a bridge between individual purposes and the situations that make them meaningful.

Foundations: Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch (1973); Blumler (1979).

People make meaning with texts and socially acquired resources.

Reception analysis investigates the meeting between a media text and its interpreters. Language, narrative, images and conventions offer meanings. Viewers draw upon knowledge, experience and shared ways of understanding to make sense of them.

Hall’s encoding/decoding approach

Stuart Hall examines how institutional production and audience interpretation operate through codes. Producers organise a preferred meaning, while audiences can decode it through dominant-hegemonic, negotiated or oppositional positions. These positions describe relationships to the encoded framework.

Interpretive communities

An interpretive community shares resources and practices for making sense of media. Members may recognise particular references, trust certain sources or use familiar standards when discussing a text.

Suppose former cinema employees discuss the documentary together. They may recognise details about work that casual viewers overlook. A group of architects may focus on building design. A neighbourhood youth group may debate who could afford to attend. Their discussions reveal resources used in interpretation.

Morley’s audience research

David Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience (1980) investigated how differently situated groups interpreted a television current-affairs programme. It connected textual analysis with empirical research into decoding and helped develop socially grounded reception studies.

Its research problem remains productive: examine how positions and experiences enter interpretation. Compare responses to the same passage, ask participants to explain them and look for differences both across and within groups.

Pleasure, identity and contradiction

A viewer may enjoy a familiar story while criticising its account of gender or class. Another may identify with one character and question another. Follow the particular passage and the reasoning offered. Such combinations reveal how media become meaningful in lived experience.

Textual analysis contributes by identifying the cues, omissions, conventions and assumptions that organise an invitation to read. Audience research contributes evidence about the meanings people actually articulate and use.

Core texts: Hall (1973); Morley (1980).

Follow media use into the relationships and routines that give it meaning.

Audience ethnography studies people’s media practices within their everyday settings. It follows the circumstances of use: who is present, what else is happening, which choices are available and how participants understand the encounter.

A programme can organise family time, supply a conversation topic, fill a quiet room or become a resource for disagreement. Sustained engagement helps the researcher observe how these uses develop and change.

Three commitments

1. Begin with people and practices. Define the group, setting or relationship you are investigating and examine the place media occupy within it.
2. Follow relevant contexts. Connect home, travel, work, study and online discussion where the question warrants it and access is agreed.
3. Keep interpretations open to revision. Record assumptions, seek participants’ explanations and examine episodes that challenge the emerging account.

These commitments guide inquiry. A study can remain focused on one setting if that setting answers its question. Depth comes from contextual understanding, repeated observation and the testing of interpretations.

Lull: television as a social resource

James Lull’s research on the social uses of television drew upon participant observation to examine its role in interpersonal life. Television can structure time and provide resources for communication within households.

Suppose a family’s regular news viewing creates an occasion for discussing work and neighbourhood events. Observe how the discussion begins, whose comments receive attention and how the broadcast becomes part of the exchange.

Radway: reading as an event

Janice A. Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) examines readers, popular fiction and the circumstances of reading. The study directs attention towards the social event through which books acquire significance.

For an audience project, ask how a person creates time to read or watch, what that time means and how the experience enters other relationships. This can reveal needs and negotiations that a content analysis alone would leave unexplored.

Researcher reflexivity and care

Explain your presence and seek informed consent for observation or recording. Agree which spaces, people and messages are included. Keep identifying details secure and distinguish observed events from your interpretation of them.

Write a reflexive memo about access, familiarity and expectations. A researcher’s presence can shape conversation, and participants may present different accounts in a group and an individual interview. Treat these differences as evidence to investigate.

Empirical foundations: Lull (1980); Radway (1984).

Audiences move across platforms, while platforms organise visibility.

Digital media allow audience members to watch, search, respond, circulate, annotate, remix and create. A person may read silently in one setting, organise a discussion in another and publish a response elsewhere. Study the changing role and the conditions that support it.

Fragmentation, overlap and repertoires

Fragmentation describes the distribution of attention across more outlets or content options. Audience duplication concerns the overlap of users across those options. A media repertoire is the combination of media a person uses within everyday life.

Webster and Ksiazek’s work on fragmentation encourages audience-centred analysis of how attention is allocated across media. Looking at one outlet’s audience leaves the pattern of overlap open; following users across outlets helps investigate it.

Suppose a student watches a documentary clip, reads a local report and discusses the issue in a messaging group. Those encounters span several services but remain connected through one person’s interests and relationships.

Participatory culture

Henry Jenkins’s work on convergence culture examines interactions among audiences, media industries and participatory practices. Fans and other communities can circulate interpretations, combine knowledge and create new work around media.

Suppose viewers organise an archive of local cinema memories. Some upload photographs; others identify dates, translate captions or interview former staff. Participation takes several forms, and the group’s rules influence which contributions are recognised.

Agency within institutional arrangements

Platform interfaces, recommendation systems, moderation and commercial incentives shape the opportunities audiences encounter. Napoli’s account of audience evolution connects changes in technologies with changes in audience information systems and institutional interests.

Investigate how user activity becomes consequential. A comment can express a reading, attract responses or disappear within a large thread. A collective campaign may gain visibility, while an equally committed group struggles with access or recognition.

Shared attention and public life

Fragmentation raises questions about common reference points and civic discussion. Examine which issues cross communities, which remain concentrated and how people encounter alternative accounts. Overlapping repertoires and shared events provide evidence about these connections.

Livingstone’s work on changing audiences helps frame the relationship between established audience questions and interactive media. Carry forward the investigation of interpretation, power and everyday practice as media environments change.

Read Webster and Ksiazek (2012), Jenkins (2006), Napoli (2011) and Livingstone (2004).

Take one encounter through definitions, experience and evidence.

Work through each situation before opening the discussion. Name the audience you would investigate, the theoretical question and the evidence needed to answer it.

Case 1 · A community station and a wider public

Suppose a community radio station broadcasts a series on the history of a local market. Traders listen in their shops. Former residents hear recordings online. Students use an episode in a project, and a residents’ association discusses the market’s future.

Your task: identify at least three audience definitions. Explain which pre-existing relationships help form an audience and which connections may develop through the programme.

Case 2 · One campaign, several responses

Suppose a college shares a short film encouraging students to reduce food waste. One student watches to learn practical steps. Another enjoys the storytelling but questions the campaign’s emphasis on individual responsibility. A third leaves it playing while preparing a presentation.

Your task: identify the dimensions of activity present. Propose a way to investigate learning and a way to examine interpretation.

Case 3 · A streaming success and its audience

Suppose a streaming documentary records 10,000 qualifying plays from 4,000 measured accounts in a month. Fans create discussion threads and translate short excerpts. The service promotes it to advertisers as a way to reach viewers interested in urban culture.

Your task: explain what the figures establish, how audience activity acquires commercial value, and which further evidence would reveal the social experience.

Listen for the changing meaning of “audience”.

Watch my lecture on Media Audience Theory. Follow how each definition directs attention towards a different relationship: a dispersed collectivity, people assembled or addressed, consumers, interpretive communities and active users.

Watch my Media Audience Theory lecture on YouTube ↗

After watching, write a 200-word explanation of one media encounter using two audience definitions. Identify what each definition reveals and the evidence needed to investigate it.

Use the concepts to choose an explanation.

Choose one answer for each question before opening the explanation. Return to the relevant section whenever the distinction remains unclear.

Build a study around the relationship you want to explain.

Activity 1 · Map one encounter

Choose a programme, publication, film or media service that you use. Define two possible audiences for it and examine how those definitions change the study.

1. Draw the boundary. Specify the people or units, the relationship and the period.
2. Explain formation. Investigate community ties, needs, routines, channel attachment or content interest.
3. Identify activity. Describe one form of selection, utility, intentional processing, resistance or involvement.
4. Follow interpretation. Select one passage and explain the reading you would investigate.
5. Choose evidence. Match the claim with observation, interviews, measurement or an appropriate comparison.
6. State the limits. Identify whose experience your evidence covers and which questions remain open.

Suggested output: an 800-word audience profile, a boundary statement and three interview questions. Explain how the evidence would connect the definitions with lived experience.

Activity 2 · A seven-day media diary

Record your own media encounters for seven days. Note the medium or content, approximate duration, setting, companions, route of discovery, purpose and what followed. Include background use and encounters initiated by other people.

Review the diary for recurring combinations. Which encounters are planned? Which enter through recommendations? Which become conversation? Identify two episodes that challenge your initial account of your own media habits.

Suggested output: a diary summary and a 600-word reflection connecting repertoire, routine and activity. If other people participate, obtain their informed consent and agree how their accounts will be used.

A combined research design

Research question: how do local residents and film enthusiasts interpret a documentary about a closing cinema, and how does viewing enter subsequent discussion?

Analyse the film’s account of the closure and its preferred explanations. Recruit participants with relevant differences in experience, allowing for people who belong to both categories. Ask them to discuss selected passages and keep a short diary of related encounters and conversations.

Compare the articulated readings with participants’ histories and the situations of viewing. Follow up on a diary entry to understand what happened in the conversation. Explain the recruitment route and the boundaries of the evidence.

Strengths and limits of the main methods

Surveys can compare reported patterns across a suitable sample, while recall and question wording shape the account. Logs offer detailed records of defined events, while the meaning of those events requires investigation. Interviews provide reasons and interpretations, while the interview situation shapes what is said.

Ethnography reveals context and unfolding practice, while access, duration and researcher presence delimit the account. Experiments can strengthen causal inference about a defined intervention, while the setting and sample affect how far findings travel. Combine methods when they address a clear relationship.

Examination and seminar prompts

• Explain how place, people, medium, content and time define different audiences.
• Compare the audience as a social group, gratification set, market and interpretive community.
• Discuss five dimensions of audience activity with examples.
• Examine the contribution of Smythe’s audience commodity argument.
• Explain Hall’s reading positions and the evidence needed to identify them.
• Assess what audience ethnography contributes to the study of digital media.
• Design a study of fragmentation that examines cross-outlet overlap.

Keep the definition, the experience and the evidence connected.

Key terms

Media audience

A collectivity defined through a specified relationship with media.

Audience formation

The processes through which media relationships develop and acquire continuity.

Target audience

The people a communicator intends to address or reach.

Inscribed audience

The viewer or reader position invited through a text’s language, assumptions and form.

Mass audience

Dispersed and socially varied people attending to a common media object.

Public

People oriented towards an issue through discussion, disagreement and judgement.

Group

People connected through interaction, expectations or recognised membership.

Gratification set

An audience defined through similar needs or purposes served by media use.

Taste culture

Patterned preferences and evaluative standards shared within social experience.

Content audience

People connected analytically through interest in particular material, a genre or a creator.

Medium audience

People defined through their use of or attachment to a medium or channel.

Audience commodity

Smythe’s concept for audiences produced for advertisers within commercial communication.

Reach

Distinct units meeting a specified exposure criterion within a stated period.

Impression

A qualifying delivery or display event under a measurement system’s rules.

Frequency

The number of qualifying exposures among the reached units over a stated period.

Rating

Audience expressed as a percentage of a specified total universe.

Share

Audience expressed as a percentage of those using the relevant medium in the specified period.

Circulation

The number of copies distributed under stated reporting rules.

Readership

People estimated to read an issue or publication under a stated definition.

Selectivity

Choice and discrimination in encountering media or content.

Utility

The need or purpose that media use serves.

Intentionality

A deliberate orientation to the media encounter, including purposeful cognitive processing.

Resistance to influence

Questioning, filtering or rejecting a proposed meaning or appeal.

Involvement

Engagement or engrossment in a media experience.

Gratifications sought

The benefits or satisfactions a person hopes to obtain from media use.

Gratifications obtained

The benefits or satisfactions experienced through that use.

Encoding

The production of a meaningful media discourse through codes and institutional practices.

Decoding

The interpretation of a media discourse through available codes and resources.

Preferred meaning

The framework of meaning a text privileges and invites the audience to adopt.

Dominant-hegemonic reading

An interpretation operating broadly within the preferred framework.

Negotiated reading

An interpretation accepting the broad framework while adapting or qualifying it.

Oppositional reading

An interpretation that understands the preferred framework and rejects it through another framework.

Interpretive community

People sharing resources and practices through which they make sense of media.

Reception analysis

Investigation of the meanings audiences produce in relation to texts and social contexts.

Audience ethnography

Contextual study of people’s media practices within everyday life.

Fragmentation

The distribution of attention across media outlets or content options.

Audience duplication

Overlap of audience members across outlets or content options.

Media repertoire

The combination of media a person uses within everyday life.

Participatory culture

Cultural practices through which people contribute, circulate, collaborate or create around media.

Datafication

The transformation of activities and relationships into data for recording, classification and use.

Further reading

Begin with McQuail’s overview, then read across the traditions. Compare what changes when the audience becomes a market, an interpreting community, a set of everyday practices or a participant in cultural production.

1. McQuail, D. (1997). Audience analysis. Sage. Read ↗A guide to audience concepts, formation, practices and research traditions.
2. Blumer, H. (1935). Moulding of mass behavior through the motion picture. Publications of the American Sociological Society, 29, 115–127. Read ↗Read a primary account of mass behaviour and its relationship to varied social backgrounds.
3. Gans, H. J. (1974). Popular culture and high culture: An analysis and evaluation of taste. Basic Books. Read ↗Investigate taste cultures and the social organisation of evaluation.
4. Smythe, D. W. (1977). Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1(3), 1–27. Read ↗Examine the audience commodity and the economic role of audience activity.
5. Ang, I. (1991). Desperately seeking the audience. Routledge. Read ↗Question how broadcasting institutions construct knowledge about audiences.
6. Webster, J. G., Phalen, P. F., & Lichty, L. W. (2014). Ratings analysis: Audience measurement and analytics (4th ed.). Routledge. Read ↗Study audience information systems, measurement and commercial exchange.
7. Biocca, F. A. (1988). Opposing conceptions of the audience: The active and passive hemispheres of mass communication theory. Communication Yearbook, 11(1), 51–80. Read ↗Compare meanings of audience activity and the assumptions attached to them.
8. Levy, M. R., & Windahl, S. (1984). Audience activity and gratifications: A conceptual clarification and exploration. Communication Research, 11(1), 51–78. Read ↗Connect activity orientations with before, during and after exposure.
9. Rubin, A. M. (1984). Ritualized and instrumental television viewing. Journal of Communication, 34(3), 67–77. Read ↗Examine habitual and purposeful orientations to television use.
10. Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1973). Uses and gratifications research. Public Opinion Quarterly, 37(4), 509–523. Read ↗Begin with the audience’s needs, expectations, choices and satisfactions.
11. Blumler, J. G. (1979). The role of theory in uses and gratifications studies. Communication Research, 6(1), 9–36. Read ↗Connect activity and gratification questions with their social origins.
12. Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. Read ↗Study encoding, preferred meanings and differentiated decoding positions.
13. Morley, D. (1980). The “Nationwide” audience: Structure and decoding. British Film Institute. Read ↗Read an empirical investigation of socially situated interpretation.
14. Lull, J. (1980). The social uses of television. Human Communication Research, 6(3), 197–209. Read ↗Follow television into household routines and interpersonal communication.
15. Radway, J. A. (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. University of North Carolina Press. Read ↗Examine reading as a social event situated in readers’ lives.
16. Livingstone, S. (2004). The challenge of changing audiences: Or, what is the audience researcher to do in the age of the internet? European Journal of Communication, 19(1), 75–86. Read ↗Connect established audience questions with changing interactive media.
17. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press. Read ↗Investigate participatory practices and relationships between audiences and industries.
18. Napoli, P. M. (2011). Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of media audiences. Columbia University Press. Read ↗Follow changing audience concepts, technologies and information systems.
19. Webster, J. G., & Ksiazek, T. B. (2012). The dynamics of audience fragmentation: Public attention in an age of digital media. Journal of Communication, 62(1), 39–56. Read ↗Examine fragmentation through audience behaviour and cross-media connections.

My lecture: Media Audience Theory ↗

Six statements to retain

1. An audience definition selects a relationship and draws a boundary for investigation.
2. Audiences form through social ties, needs, routines and attachments to media or content.
3. Institutions measure and classify audiences in ways that can shape commercial and editorial decisions.
4. Activity varies across selection, utility, intentional processing, resistance and involvement.
5. Interpretation takes shape through texts, experiences and socially shared resources.
6. Digital participation and fragmented attention invite investigation of both audience agency and institutional power.