Audience

Audience

An audience is the actual gathering of spectators or listeners at a performance and the actual readers of a message as well as the potential users of a source of information. In the last sense "audience" is related to the target group for a given message.

"The notion of audience in social research has been largely derived from the image media producers have of the actual, or the intended, people or groups of people that they imagine as the main recipients of their products. Media products–newspapers, television shows, films, radio broadcasts–are for the most part manufactured with the aim of capturing the attention of certain of these people, the audience members. Often this interest is commercial: When media can capture the attention of particular audiences, their producers can sell this attention to various advertisers who may profit from this exposure.

While a long tradition of scholarship has accepted this idea of the audience, other thinkers have been rancorous in their disapproval of the commercial nature of the very concept. According to Ang, the ```television audience'' only exists as an imaginary entity, an abstraction constructed from the vantage point of the institutions, in the interest of the institutions' (Ang, 1991, p. 2). " (Press, 2001).

Of relevance for information science is that some databases (e.g. PsycINFO) use "Audience Intended" as a searchable field (for books and chapters).

Literature:

Ang, I. (1991). Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge.

Press, A. L. (2001). Audiences. IN: Smelser, N. J. & Baltes, P. B. (eds.) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford. (Pp. 926-931).

Webster, J. G. (2001). Audience measurement. IN: Smelser, N. J. & Baltes, P. B. (eds.) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford. (Pp. 923-926).