Past, present and future of the media audience

The origins of the present-day audience for mass media are presumably to be found in the public theatrical and musical performances as well as games and spectacles of ancient times. Greek and Roman cities of any size would have a theater or arena for such purposes. No doubt these were preceded by various kinds of more informal gatherings for similar purposes. The significance of the Greco-Roman invention lies in heralding numerous features of present-day media audiences, especially:

• the planning and organization of viewing and listening

• the public character of the events

• the secular content of performance and display — the main purpose was enjoyment, entertainment and education

• the voluntary and individual acts of choice involved in attending.

According to this view, the audience, as a set of spectators for public events of a secular kind, was already institutionalized more than two thousand years ago, with its own customs, expectations and rules about the time, place and content of performances, conditions for entry, etc. It was a typically urban phenomenon, often with a commercial basis and with a differentiation of content based on differences of class and status. The audience was one element in a larger institution, which included professional writers, performers, producers and entrepreneurs. The phenomenon of public entertainment and display attracted sponsorship, could serve political ends and was an object of public surveillance.

Several features, nevertheless, distinguish the early form of audience from the modern media equivalent. Most important is the fact that the original audience was localized in one place and time — they were the occupants of the 'auditorium', the space in which they could hear and see what was going on. Their interlocutors spoke directly to them, and performances were always 'live' and open to view. This means that the audience was always relatively small (though it could be many thousands) and also potentially active within itself and interactive with performers. The original audience had a potential collective life of its own. These same conditions still prevail in many circumstances of public display and spectatorship — in theaters, stadiums, race-tracks, etc. What has happened is not really a continuous development from an early form to that of the media audience, but the social invention of a new variant, which overlaps with the earlier 'audience' and borrows its name, sometimes with misleading results.

The rise of a reading public

The line of development of the media audience was based on a new invention — the printed book — and along with it the phenomenon of a reading public. The printing of books, starting in the mid-fifteenth century, gradually led to an organized arrangement for the supply of non-religious written texts which could be bought by individuals and were used for practical purposes as well as for instruction, entertainment and enlightenment. Only by the late sixteenth century does it make much sense to speak of a reading public in the sense of a set of individuals keen and able to buy, read and collect books for their private purposes. Such publics were localized in cities and states, limited by social class and language (although served by translations), and supplied by a growing number of printer-publishers and authors, sometimes supported by sponsors and patrons.

Within a larger literary cultural institution, the reading public became identifiable as those who could and did read books and followed the work of particular authors or on particular subjects. Its emergence was a very gradual and slow process, extending from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The book was not the only print form involved, since from at least the early eighteenth century many periodical magazines and newspapers were also likely to have a regular following. The print media industry was large and ramifying and also in many places the object of censorship or control. In advance of the nineteenth-century inventions which made printed media products cheap and plentiful, the reading public or audience for printed matter was already subject to a variety of divisions and social definitions, especially with reference to content (genres) and social categories of reader.

The use of the term 'audience' to refer to these different sets of readers, with its implication of shared social and mental space, is not so inappropriate, even if the boundaries of physical space were largely broken. It was possible to belong to an 'audience' (a circle of listeners) for a certain author or for a particular topic or set of ideas without belonging physically to a particular social group or being in a particular place (the city, for instance).

This view of the early audience was soon made obsolete by a series of changes of technology and society, especially by the great increase in urban population, improved land communications and increasing literacy, together with other social and economic changes which had, by the end of the nineteenth century, transformed the rather small world of book and periodical production into large-scale industries serving millions. These media industries sought to recruit and shape audiences according to their own plans and interests. In tum this helped to establish the concept of the audience as an aggregate defined by its preferences and social-economic standing and also as a paying public — a new consumer market.