Audiences

An audience is a group of people who are receiving or have received a particular mass communication message. In some cases all members of the audience are paying attention to the medium at the same time – as, for example, the television audience that tuned in just after the space shuttle Challenger exploded.

In other cases, however, the attention of the audience is spread out over time – the audience for a particular magazine, for example, may consist of people who read copies of the magazine at various times over the period of a month or more.

And, in some cases, the attention of the audience may be spread over a very long period of time. The audience for Shakespeare’s plays, for example, is very large and hundreds of years in duration.

In the early days of mass communication research, the audience was believed to be very passive and innocent. It was supposed that members of the audience believed whatever they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio.

As studies of the relationship between the audience and the mass communication organizations have progressed, the researchers’ view of the audience has changed. Nowadays, the audience is believed to be active and sophisticated. That is, the audience chooses the media that it attends to, and the audience is critical of the messages that are delivered to it by the media.