Constructing Reality Through Audiences

Abstract

The media played an essential role in moving linearly the message to a set of receivers unified in audience. They represented the “mirror” to reflect the mediated reality. Technologies, those that have given rise to the digital arena, have transformed the relation transmitter-receiver, through a process of networked simultaneous communication, where media-mediation is contingent. At the same time, technologies have provided a space where the interaction and proactivity of the receiver prevail, making themselves up as issuers through the spreading of a message. In the digital universe, the interaction of receivers, constituted in “liquid audiences”, define the new reality, where the truth is transmuted and propagated without the “before” deviating the “now” and, without this, is an amendment to the former. In the digital society, subjected to immediacy, reality is not grounded, projected and reflected; it is constructed “at the moment” by audiences, without “truth” being a necessary element, since it can be dispensable. Hence the “collective imaginary”, catalysed in audiences, transcends unreality to be “true” and become a new construct of reality.