Definition Of Audience

4 Pages 879 Words

INTRODUCTION
In this essay I will try to define the term »audience«. I will construct the essay on various definitions of many diffrent authors. Certainly, the big amounts of money ploughed into commercial and other research of audience's media usage and behaviour suggest that media producers believe that they know what audience is and how to recognize and measure it. They identify the audience members' socio-economic class, lifestyles, motivation, disposable income, fantasies etc. and that knowledge enables them to "target" their audience precisely. But in fact, their success to persuade consumers to buy products and services is much more questionable. Why is that so? Maybe because of the largeness and diversity of audience, or beacause of very diffused and general tastes,… Do we rally know what audience is, what are its features? The answer to the question, what an audience is and what audience members are, in fact is not only one-dimensional. However, when you look back over the history of the conceptualizations of audiences, it pretty soon becomes evident that audience has always been a rather indefinite concept.

KEY WORDS: audience, media, communication

FOCUSING AUDIENCE
Within the system of culture, audience refers to an individual's or group's viewing, hearing, reading, listening of a culture product or products within communicative action: "An audience ... can be thought of as a number of people who are exposed to a particular text. They can be in the same place (as in a theater or at a football game) or widely scattered, in their homes, as in the case of audiences for radio programs and television programs" (Berger, 1972: 157) and "audience [is understood as] overarching all the reception processes of message sending. Thus there is the audience for theatre, television, and cinema; there is the radio listener. There is the audience for a pop concert or at a public meeting. Communicators shape their messages to fit t...