McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (6th edition) – CH 15-20
15. Audience theory and research traditions
The audience concept as “receivers” in the simple sequential model of the mass communication
process (source, channel, message, receiver, effect);
- Implies attentive, receptive but relatively passive listeners/spectators in a more or less
public setting actual reception of MM is however varied; messy; little regularity
- Rise of new media introduces news forms of behaviour (interactivity + searching)
- Line between producer and audiences has become blurred
Audiences are both a product of social context (shared cultural interests, understandings and
information needs) and a response to a particular pattern of media provision. An audience is defined
in different and overlapping ways:
Place (in case of the local media)
People (medium characterized by an appeal to a certain age group, gender etc.)
Particular type of medium or channel involved (technology and organization combined)
Content of its messages (genres, subject matter, styles)
Time (‘daytime’ or ‘primetime’ audience, or fleeting and short term vs. enduring)
Typology that captures key features of new diversity; audience as…
- The people assembled: the aggregate measured as paying attention to a given media
presentation or product at a given time. ‘Spectators’
- The people addressed: the group of people imagined by the communicator and for
whom content is shaped. ‘Inscribed’ or ‘interpellated’ audience
- Happening: the experience of reception alone or with others as an interactive event in
daily life, contextualized by place and other features.
- Hearing/audition: participatory audience experience, when audience is embedded in a
show / enabled to participate by remote means to provide a response at the same time
Characteristics of the original audience; typical urban phenomomen; often commercial basis and
content varied according to social class and status. Subject to surveillance and social control.
- Planning and organization of viewing and listings as well as the performances themselves
- Events with a public and ‘popular’ character
- Secular (not religious) content of performance; for entertainment, education and
vicarious emotional experience
- Voluntary, individual acts of choice and attention
- Specialization of roles of authors, performers and spectators
- Physical locatedness of performance and spectator experience
MM audience is more diverse (available content and social behaviour involved); more continuous.
In 1939, the audience could be exemplified as a new form of collectivity made possible by the
conditions of modern societies. It was called “mass” as a phenomenon that differentiated from older
social forms (group, crowd, public). The mass audience was large, heterogeneous, and widely
dispersed, members didn’t + couldn’t know each other. When used by early commentators, the term
generally had a pejorative connotation, reflecting a negative view of popular taste and mass culture.
While impersonality, anonymity, and vastness of scale might describe the phenomenon in
general, much actual audience experience is personal, small scale, and integrated into social life and
familiar ways. Many media operate in local environments and are embedded in local cultures. Since
most people make their own media choices freely, they do not typically feel manipulated by remote
powers. The social interaction that develops around media use helps people to incorporate it into
everyday life as a friendly rather than an alienating presence. Communal + social group character of
audiences (networks of social relations; locality; common interest).
Audience as a market; main theoretical features:
, - Audiences are aggregates of many potential or actual consumers
- Members are unrelated to each other and have no shared identity of their own
- Boundaries assigned to audiences are based mainly on socio-economic criteria
- Audiences are objects of management and control by media providers
- The formation is temporary
- Public significance is subordinate
- Relations of audience with media are mutually calculative, not moral
Market = aggregate of actual or potential consumers of media services and products, with a known
social-economic profile; value laden; treats audience as set customers instead of as group/public;
relation consumer-producers as ‘calculative’ (cash) rather than communication; focus on
consumption rather than reception. Media needs audience more than vice versa.
We can classify research goals in terms of the main uses to which information about the audience
can be put.
Media-centred goals:
o Sales and ratings: measuring actual and potential reach for purposes of book-keeping
and advertising
o Managing audience choice behaviour
o Looking for new audience market opportunities
o Product testing and improving effectiveness from the perspective of the sender
Audience-centred goals
o Meeting responsibilities to serve the audience
o Evaluating media performance from an audience perspective
o Uncovering audience interpretations of meaning
o Exploring the context of media use
o Assessing actual effects on audiences
Clearest line of development in audience research is move away from perspective of media
communicator towards receiver (choise, interpretation and response of receiver rather than sender)
Alternative Traditions of Research 3 main traditions of research
1. The structural tradition of audience measurement: were designed to obtain reliable estimates of
what were otherwise unknown quantities; especially size and reach of radio audiences + reach of
print publication (number of potential readers opposed to circulation or print run); also important to
know about the social composition of audiences (who and where); interconnected with advertising
2. The behaviorist tradition: media effects and media uses: audience is conceptualized as exposed to
influence or impact, whether of a persuasive, learning or behaviour kind. Typical effects model was a
one-way process (audience as unwitting target/passive recipient of media stimuli). Second type of
behavioural audience research media use central; audience more active and motivated set of
media users/consumers in charge of their experience Research focused on the origin, nature, and
degree of motives for choice of media and media content.
3.The cultural tradition and reception analysis: occupies a borderland between social science and the
humanities; concerned with works of popular culture; emphasizes media use as reflection of a
particular social-cultural context and as a process of giving meaning to cultural products and
experiences in everyday life; rejects stimulus-response model of effects and notion of an all-powerful
text/message.; media as aspect of every day life; audiences as interpretative communietie. Audience
etnography: (1) looks at a group of people rather than the media or content; (2) follows the group in
different locations; (3) stays long enough to avoid preconceptions.
Main features of culturalist (reception) tradition of audience research:
, - Media text has to be ‘read’ through perceptions of its audience, which constructs
meaning and pleasures from the media texts offered (never fixed/predictable)
- Process of media use + way in which it unfolds in particular context = object of interest
- Media use is typically situation-specific and oriented to social tasks which evolve out to
participation in interpretative communities
- Audiences for particular media genres often comprise separate interpretative
communities which share much the same forms of discourse and frameworks for making
sense of media
- Audiences are never passive, nor are members equal (some more experiences/active)
- Methods have to be qualitative and deep, often ethnographic, taking account of content,
act of reception and context.
Audience issues of Public concern:
- Media use as addiction
- Mass audience and social atomization (fragmentation = losing cohesion)
- Audience behaviour as active (good) or passive (bad; mindless; escapism; diversion from
social participation)
- Manipulation or resistance
- Minority audience rights (mass comm. against interest of small + minority audiences)
- Implication of new media technology (abundance and interactivity; more fragmented
and atomized audience; losing national, local or cultural identity; also possibilities;
shared interest and freedom of choice)
Audiences originate both in society and in media and their contents: either people stimulate an
appropriate supply of content (media as responding to the needs of certain group), or the media
attract people to content they offer (audience created by media; defined by media source (television
audience) rather than shared characteristics).
The media are continuously seeking to develop and hold new audiences, and in doing so they
anticipate what might otherwise be a spontaneous demand, or identify potential needs and interests
which have not yet surfaced.
15. Audience theory and research traditions
The audience concept as “receivers” in the simple sequential model of the mass communication
process (source, channel, message, receiver, effect);
- Implies attentive, receptive but relatively passive listeners/spectators in a more or less
public setting actual reception of MM is however varied; messy; little regularity
- Rise of new media introduces news forms of behaviour (interactivity + searching)
- Line between producer and audiences has become blurred
Audiences are both a product of social context (shared cultural interests, understandings and
information needs) and a response to a particular pattern of media provision. An audience is defined
in different and overlapping ways:
Place (in case of the local media)
People (medium characterized by an appeal to a certain age group, gender etc.)
Particular type of medium or channel involved (technology and organization combined)
Content of its messages (genres, subject matter, styles)
Time (‘daytime’ or ‘primetime’ audience, or fleeting and short term vs. enduring)
Typology that captures key features of new diversity; audience as…
- The people assembled: the aggregate measured as paying attention to a given media
presentation or product at a given time. ‘Spectators’
- The people addressed: the group of people imagined by the communicator and for
whom content is shaped. ‘Inscribed’ or ‘interpellated’ audience
- Happening: the experience of reception alone or with others as an interactive event in
daily life, contextualized by place and other features.
- Hearing/audition: participatory audience experience, when audience is embedded in a
show / enabled to participate by remote means to provide a response at the same time
Characteristics of the original audience; typical urban phenomomen; often commercial basis and
content varied according to social class and status. Subject to surveillance and social control.
- Planning and organization of viewing and listings as well as the performances themselves
- Events with a public and ‘popular’ character
- Secular (not religious) content of performance; for entertainment, education and
vicarious emotional experience
- Voluntary, individual acts of choice and attention
- Specialization of roles of authors, performers and spectators
- Physical locatedness of performance and spectator experience
MM audience is more diverse (available content and social behaviour involved); more continuous.
In 1939, the audience could be exemplified as a new form of collectivity made possible by the
conditions of modern societies. It was called “mass” as a phenomenon that differentiated from older
social forms (group, crowd, public). The mass audience was large, heterogeneous, and widely
dispersed, members didn’t + couldn’t know each other. When used by early commentators, the term
generally had a pejorative connotation, reflecting a negative view of popular taste and mass culture.
While impersonality, anonymity, and vastness of scale might describe the phenomenon in
general, much actual audience experience is personal, small scale, and integrated into social life and
familiar ways. Many media operate in local environments and are embedded in local cultures. Since
most people make their own media choices freely, they do not typically feel manipulated by remote
powers. The social interaction that develops around media use helps people to incorporate it into
everyday life as a friendly rather than an alienating presence. Communal + social group character of
audiences (networks of social relations; locality; common interest).
Audience as a market; main theoretical features:
, - Audiences are aggregates of many potential or actual consumers
- Members are unrelated to each other and have no shared identity of their own
- Boundaries assigned to audiences are based mainly on socio-economic criteria
- Audiences are objects of management and control by media providers
- The formation is temporary
- Public significance is subordinate
- Relations of audience with media are mutually calculative, not moral
Market = aggregate of actual or potential consumers of media services and products, with a known
social-economic profile; value laden; treats audience as set customers instead of as group/public;
relation consumer-producers as ‘calculative’ (cash) rather than communication; focus on
consumption rather than reception. Media needs audience more than vice versa.
We can classify research goals in terms of the main uses to which information about the audience
can be put.
Media-centred goals:
o Sales and ratings: measuring actual and potential reach for purposes of book-keeping
and advertising
o Managing audience choice behaviour
o Looking for new audience market opportunities
o Product testing and improving effectiveness from the perspective of the sender
Audience-centred goals
o Meeting responsibilities to serve the audience
o Evaluating media performance from an audience perspective
o Uncovering audience interpretations of meaning
o Exploring the context of media use
o Assessing actual effects on audiences
Clearest line of development in audience research is move away from perspective of media
communicator towards receiver (choise, interpretation and response of receiver rather than sender)
Alternative Traditions of Research 3 main traditions of research
1. The structural tradition of audience measurement: were designed to obtain reliable estimates of
what were otherwise unknown quantities; especially size and reach of radio audiences + reach of
print publication (number of potential readers opposed to circulation or print run); also important to
know about the social composition of audiences (who and where); interconnected with advertising
2. The behaviorist tradition: media effects and media uses: audience is conceptualized as exposed to
influence or impact, whether of a persuasive, learning or behaviour kind. Typical effects model was a
one-way process (audience as unwitting target/passive recipient of media stimuli). Second type of
behavioural audience research media use central; audience more active and motivated set of
media users/consumers in charge of their experience Research focused on the origin, nature, and
degree of motives for choice of media and media content.
3.The cultural tradition and reception analysis: occupies a borderland between social science and the
humanities; concerned with works of popular culture; emphasizes media use as reflection of a
particular social-cultural context and as a process of giving meaning to cultural products and
experiences in everyday life; rejects stimulus-response model of effects and notion of an all-powerful
text/message.; media as aspect of every day life; audiences as interpretative communietie. Audience
etnography: (1) looks at a group of people rather than the media or content; (2) follows the group in
different locations; (3) stays long enough to avoid preconceptions.
Main features of culturalist (reception) tradition of audience research:
, - Media text has to be ‘read’ through perceptions of its audience, which constructs
meaning and pleasures from the media texts offered (never fixed/predictable)
- Process of media use + way in which it unfolds in particular context = object of interest
- Media use is typically situation-specific and oriented to social tasks which evolve out to
participation in interpretative communities
- Audiences for particular media genres often comprise separate interpretative
communities which share much the same forms of discourse and frameworks for making
sense of media
- Audiences are never passive, nor are members equal (some more experiences/active)
- Methods have to be qualitative and deep, often ethnographic, taking account of content,
act of reception and context.
Audience issues of Public concern:
- Media use as addiction
- Mass audience and social atomization (fragmentation = losing cohesion)
- Audience behaviour as active (good) or passive (bad; mindless; escapism; diversion from
social participation)
- Manipulation or resistance
- Minority audience rights (mass comm. against interest of small + minority audiences)
- Implication of new media technology (abundance and interactivity; more fragmented
and atomized audience; losing national, local or cultural identity; also possibilities;
shared interest and freedom of choice)
Audiences originate both in society and in media and their contents: either people stimulate an
appropriate supply of content (media as responding to the needs of certain group), or the media
attract people to content they offer (audience created by media; defined by media source (television
audience) rather than shared characteristics).
The media are continuously seeking to develop and hold new audiences, and in doing so they
anticipate what might otherwise be a spontaneous demand, or identify potential needs and interests
which have not yet surfaced.
