Audience

Origins

The concept of the audience is as old as theorizing about communication; indeed, Aristotle's rhetoric with its emphasis on the pathos or impact on the intended audience, was a first effort at establishing its primacy in the West. But the audience for mass media in general and journalism in particular is at great remove from the living, breathing, present and public audience of ancient Greece. For much of human history, “the audience” was aural, and the word itself derives from the Latin audire, to hear. Assembled audiences were necessarily ephemeral, active, and interactive.

While such audiences continue to exist, the dominant characterization of audience was shaped first by the technology of writing, amplified by that of printing, and then transformed by newer technologies of electronic communication. [Page 127]Writing and then printing fundamentally altered the nature of communication, from being spontaneous and transitory to being fixed; the nature of the communicative relationship from taking place solely between speakers and listeners to also involving writers and readers; and the nature of modes of reception from essentially public and social to primarily private and individual. As part of that process, the relationship between message producer and receiver changes fundamentally. The audience becomes separated in time and space from the producer; it is literally anonymous and unknown to that producer (and much of the time, elements of the audience are likewise unknown to each other), and whatever feedback is available to the producer is delayed, fragmentary, and, in the modern era, industrialized and institutionalized, through, for example, audience research.

...