Audience

The etymological root of the word audience can be found in the Latin verb audere, which means “to listen” and “to hear.” The contemporary use of the word audience refers to a collective of people who may attend, witness, experience, and participate in a communicative event. There are several competing definitions of communication; still, no matter which meaning of communication is considered, “audience” represents its necessary condition of possibility, its ontological and epistemological foundation. Not surprisingly then, parallel to the noticeable conceptual development of communication in the last century, the idea of audience has become a powerful aspect of the communication metaphor, describing important aspects of social reality: an audience's activity as metaphor of people's political agency, an audience as the producer of public opinion, and an audience as creator and [Page 46]manipulator of media content. Equally not surprising, if the notion of audience has been intimately connected with the idea of communication, and lying and deception are instances of it, then audience becomes a quintessential aspect of lying and deception as well.

Deception can take place and succeed only by assuming the presence of an audience; however, its significance may vary according to the way that the audience is conceptualized. An audience can be thought as a “particular” audience, the specific audience targeted by rhetoric and, therefore, the specific target of deceptive and manipulative attempts of persuasive communication. It may be treated as an “immediate” audience involved in face-to-face communication, or as a “mediated” audience, when the audience receives, consumes, or reads the message in a time and place different than that of the speaker.

Traditionally, mediated communication, because of both the physical and structural distance separating production and reception of messages, has been considered the most concerning level for deliberate lies and deception. The audience can be treated as “theoretical” or “imagined,” assumed to be present in any act of communication; an “audience of self-communicating;” and an “idealized” audience, such as the “universal” audience, composed of all demographics.

According to Jan Bordewijk and Ben Van Kaam, audiences can also be distinguished according to the different kind of medium of communication involved or through which they receive the information. The audience of transmission media, such as radio and television, has control over neither content production nor reception. Audiences of consultation media such as print, on the other hand, actively choose when to access the centrally provided content, and what content to access. Finally, the audience of conversational media relies on a communicative relationship characterized by the genuine, dialogical coproduction of meaning in which the roles of sender and recipient alternate.