Week 7 
Conceptualising the Audience

Audiences are the target of all media which is produced and distributed so it is useful to conceptualise audiences and how they use these products.

Concerns about audience studies have been made with a much wider debate over whether we are ‘active’ or ‘passive’ audiences for the mass media. For Adorno, passivity makes the act of his listening full of danger. Adorno, a Marxist theorist believes that ‘ the most familiar is the most successful and is therefore played again and again and made still more familiar’ (1991:32-6). This is seen to lull us into a state of tranquillity as we transform into passive listeners. What is more lulls our critical faculties and therefore induces a harmonious view of the world allowing the forces of capitalism to flourish.

The concept of the passive audience is still lively and pertinent. However it has faced with tree main criticisms in terms of its relationship with radio.

First of all it can relate with a particular historical moment of industrialization and urbanization. Secondly, in a pluralistic media landscape it cannot be applied and thirdly it underestimates the freedom of listeners to make of the ‘messages’ what they like or even ignore them. 

Generally audiences influenced by the media products.  According to Hendy’s reading, decipts an audience as lacking imagination and are ‘confined by the limits set by the imaginative and ideological world’. (Crisell 1994:208; Murdock 1981:156). This make the audience look that are stupid enough to realise they are being enticed into buying a product that maybe they don’t really want or need.

When it comes radio it is obvious that there is a power for the audience. As listeners, we are the co-producers of radio and everyone is listening in different ways. But at the same time you notice that it infiltrating our minds generating associations and feelings of intimacy and companiability that we almost underestimate the reliance we place upon it and all this because we take radio so much for granted. We come to the point that the audience is neither a fully ‘active’ nor a fully ‘passive’ for the medium.

References:

·         Hendy, D, (2000). 'Audiences'. In: (ed), Radio in the Global Age. 1st ed. UK: Polity Press. pp.(134-147).