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Since the advent of mass media, scholars and media institutions alike have sought out information about the relationship between media producers and the audience. This chapter interrogates the multiple perspectives on this relationship, framing it as interactions between active, meaning-seeking entities (e.g., persons, groups) and meaning-generating systems (e.g., the media, cultures). This framework explains how media, audiences, and culture interact in an orderly but often unpredictable fashion.
After some initial discussion of the historical development of media audiences, the chapter addresses various theoretical approaches that focus on different elements of these interactions between media, audiences, and culture. For instance, focusing on the relationship between individuals and media content, effects research, as well as agenda-setting and cultivation analysis, considers the direct impact of the media on the behaviour of audience members. In contrast to effects research, uses and gratification research focuses on what audience members tend to do with media content. Marxist research and the Frankfurt School explore how the production of media and cultural products has the potential to advance the interests of the producers and the elites in society, often at the expense of audiences. Cultural studies accents the agency of individuals and the multiplicity of social factors that come to bear on how audience members draw upon media to make meaning. Feminist research offers a critique of the gendered nature of narratives and media dis-courses in order to explore how this impacts audiences both individually and societally. Reception analysis emphasizes the interpretive structures of audience members, influenced by factors such as personality, content, situation, or other variables.
Industry research examines audiences from a different perspective than academic research, with economics as one of the primary motivators of the information sought out. Quantitative data is generated on the nature of audiences, their size, age, location, education, family income, use of certain products, use of leisure time, and other demographic measures. A limitation of industry audience research, however, is its inability to understand and meet audience needs with respect to enlightening and socially fulfilling programming. Taken together, both academic and industry research offers a wide variety of insight into audience relationships with media.
The chapter concludes by focusing on the nature of audiences’ interactions with digital and new media, as advertising is the primary revenue model across almost all media sources, how this model can be appropriately applied in an online context is a chief area of both investigation and concern. Meanwhile, the growing convergence between broadcasting and the World Wide Web dramatically impacts notions of audience and the role of media in identity formation, as does increased opportunity for media audiences to expand their role into content production.