The Positive Study of Audiences

Abstract

The central problem in studying the implications of processes of mass communication is to avoid placing too great an emphasis on purposes or intentions. Early work on media effects concentrated on the manifest intentions of communicators. Later work has emphasised the latent or manifest purposes of audience members. In both cases the relevant theory has proved insufficient because neither the existence of motives nor their satisfaction can be adequately established. An alternative approach is to take a mass media performance or a set of performances as a description or expression of experience. The research question then becomes: under what circumstances and to what degree do certain groups or audiences find some ways of describing the world more amenable or involving than comparable alternatives ? This means that a researcher is interested in the consistent taste of an individual, or a small group, or indeed any sized collection of people who qualify as an audience from their interpretations of a range of performances. Mass communications are likely to have some minimal appeal to most potential audiences; it is the degree of appeal and the context of taste that make performance-audience interaction unique.