Audience (auditorium) is a term used as a collective name for recipients of messages and is also used to refer to entities receiving media communications. However, it has certain specific characteristics that distinguish it from the traditional ancient theatrical audience from which it originates. The mass media audience is a theoretical construct that cannot be observed and understood directly, but only through appropriately prepared methodology and research apparatus, e.g., telemetry studies, surveys, etc. [1]. As a result, the term audience, when used to describe recipients of mass media, is problematic when we try to define it. By adopting the technical and organizational criterion, we define this term as the recipients of a specific type of medium or channel, and thus we speak, for example, of a television audience, radio audience, or the TVN audience. We can also distinguish the audience based on time, e.g., daily, nightly, or those active during prime time, and based on content as viewers of specific media genres. The audience can also be distinguished by place, e.g., in the case of local media, or by people, when a program is addressed to specific categories of recipients, e.g., a bedtime show for children, etc. [2].

Different types of audiences can be defined differently, depending on the adopted criteria. One proposal is the typology of audience definitions by Virginia Nightingale (2003)[3].

Definition 1: Virginia Nightingale’s Concepts of Audience

Virginia Nightingale’s Concepts of Audience (2003)

Audience as gathered people: a group of individuals who have paid attention to a specific program offer;
Audience as intended recipients: a group imagined by the broadcaster, to whom the content is tailored, also known as the inscribed audience;
Audience as event: the experience of reception alone or in company as an interactive event, being part of everyday life;
Audience as hearing: the experience of a participating audience, when it is part of the program or has the possibility to participate in it [3].

Audience (auditorium) vs. public

The first term for recipient collectives was ”public”. It was introduced in 1901 by Gabriel Tarde, who used this term for new forms of social collectives different from earlier focused gatherings (e.g., a crowd or a theater audience)[4]. This was the period of the emergence and popularization of the press, which allowed for large-scale long-distance contact and enabled the creation around certain press titles of collectives of recipients who discussed political, social, and economic issues. Although newspaper readers were dispersed and physically distant, they felt a spiritual bond that made them a social group. However, a necessary condition for the existence of such a community was the occurrence of events that became the subject of discussion and caused controversy.

This concept arose at the end of the 19th century in the first phase of the massification of the press and still had a certain level of elitism. At that time, newspapers still attracted a specific type of reader, who was selected and wanted to maintain their distinctiveness from recipients of other press titles. Further improvements in printing and the emergence of other mass media—radio and television—caused the reading public described by Tarde to become divided, and by the end of the 19th century, the world of books and press had become branches of industry and served millions of diverse recipients. During this period, the public was replaced by the auditorium (audience), which never developed such a socially or psychologically selected collective as the reading public [1].

Table 1: Types of recipient collectives. Own elaboration based on Mrozowski M., Media masowe. Władza rozrywka i biznes, Oficyna Wydawnicza ASPRA-JR, Warszawa 2001, pp. 76-79


type of recipient collective	audience (auditorium)	public

scope of reception	recipients of a specific message	recipients of a certain number of messages

approach to the recipient	recipients treated as consumers	recipients treated as citizens

activity of recipients	recipients gathered to receive a message (synchronous audience) or those who have familiarized themselves with the message in a given period of time (asynchronous audience)	recipients exchanging views and information on an interesting issue

Audience typologies:

a) In terms of reach, we distinguish:

Available (potential) audience: all those who have the basic skills allowing them to use the given medium and possess a receiver and remain within the range of the network or transmitter.
Actual (engaged) audience: viewers watching, listeners listening to specific stations or programs, readers of newspapers, books, etc.
Paying audience: people paying for a given media product, e.g., a newspaper, cinema ticket, subscription, etc.
Cumulative audience: the percentage of the potential audience that is reachable by the medium within a given time frame.
Internal audience: those paying attention to individual elements of message content.
Target audience: a fragment of the potential audience distinguished for a specific purpose, e.g., advertising [1].

b) In terms of factors conducive to the formation of an audience:

Social factors:

Social group – a relatively autonomous collective, distinguished by similar social characteristics, e.g., local, ethnic, political, religious community, characterized by a strong sense of identity and distinctiveness. Selectively uses media.
Taste culture – a collective of individuals with similar needs, preferences, who seek content in the media that allows them to satisfy them.

Medium-dependent factors:

Channel or medium audience – arises spontaneously under the influence of habits or marketing activities and is based on habit or loyalty to the broadcaster. This favors the emergence of distinct audiences for a given medium but has a consumer character.
Fan group – a loose or organized collective very interested in a specific person popular in the cultural world, genre, or type of creativity with which they identify [5](more on this topic in chapter Media fans (ext.)).

Changing ways of perceiving the audience

The classical audience arose about 2,000 years ago. Every major city in ancient Greece and Rome had an amphitheater or arena where performances were held, and for many centuries it developed, encompassing subsequent European cities, with special buildings and spaces being constructed for shows, public performances, and presentations. Only the invention of printing created the conditions for a new type of collective reception of content and led to the emergence of the reading collective. In a certain sense, due to the very nature of the activity—receiving a message—it was similar to the audience of theatrical performances, lectures, and public readings. This caused this new type of recipient collective to also be described by this term. However, to emphasize its difference from the traditional audience, it was called the media audience [1].

Table 2: Historical perception of the audience. Own elaboration based on McQuail, D.: Teoria masowego komunikowania, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa 2007, pp. 391-395


Classical audience	Audience as mass	Audience as market

audience size relatively small	large numbers of anonymous recipients	recipients as an aggregate of consumers

concentration in time and space	great dispersion of recipients	determined based on socio-economic criteria

voluntary and individual acts of participation	heterogeneity of recipients	lack of identity and awareness of membership

the audience was capable of collective action	lack of its own organization and activity	lack of social and normative relations with the broadcaster

public character	object of management and manipulation	research concerns individual behaviors and the possibility of influencing them

The next stage began with the invention of film and cinema screenings, which led to the emergence of the first mass audience. A film screening was always the same and therefore provided a very large number of recipients with identical aesthetic and emotional experiences. This allowed the limitation of time and space of message reception to be overcome. It showed that mass media could reach a very large number of recipients, dispersed almost throughout the country and even the world. In response to this phenomenon, Herbert Blumer (1939) created a theoretical framework in which he defined the media audience as a mass [2].

At that time, it was commonly believed that society was of a mass character, just like recipient collectives. It was emphasized that society was made up of masses of atomized, isolated individuals who were mutually dependent but had no unifying goals and values. Recipient collectives were also defined in this way during this period. However, it was quickly noticed that in relation to media messages, it is difficult to speak of mass audiences, because the reception and use of media is always mediated by the social environment, shared patterns and values, as well as our previous experiences and preferences, which means that the reception of mass messages always has a certain individual character. This led to the concept of the audience as mass being questioned and replaced by the concept of the audience as market. Such thinking about recipients of media messages is still present despite ongoing changes in the media. Even fragmented recipient collectives, who receive messages tailored to their needs, are still defined as entities dependent on broadcasters, who address their offers to them based on individual research and socio-economic profiles [6].

Contemporary trends

The development of mass media has shown that on the one hand, they evolve towards the constant enlargement of recipient collectives and fit into the trend of globalization, while on the other hand, it can be observed that we simultaneously witness processes of de-massification and fragmentation of media [5]. This is compounded by phenomena such as the commercialization of the Internet and the development of information technologies. This causes significant changes regarding recipient collectives (more on this topic in chapter (ext.)).

Exercise 1:

Exercise content:

How would you name an audience that has been distinguished for a specific purpose indicated by the advertiser?

Solution:

Target audience

Bibliography

[1]: Goban-Klas T. Media i komunikowanie masowe. Teorie i analizy prasy, radia, telewizji i Internetu. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1999.
[2]: McQuail D. Teoria masowego komunikowania. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2007.
[3]: Nightingale V. “The Cultural Revolution in Audience Research”. In: A Companion to Media Studies. Ed. by A. N. Valdivia. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 360–381.
[4]: Tarde G. Opinia i tłum. Warszawa: Nakład Gebethnera i Wolffa, 1904.
[5]: Mrozowski M. Media masowe. Władza rozrywka i biznes. Warszawa: Oficyna Wydawnicza ASPRA-JR, 2001.
[6]: Castells M. Władza i komunikowanie. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2013.