The public manifestations of the audience

Abstract

Mobile communication has confirmed our entry in the Post-Network Era (in particular, but not exclusively, through television programming). This state of affairs has not only challenged the economics of the television industry by rendering the “capture” of audiences (principally through programming) more complex, and random, but also the basic notion of audience itself. In so doing, this Post-Network Era has re-activated, but in a more dialectical fashion, the earlier debate that accompanied the spread of cultural industries and the introduction of the Network Era, when and where “audiences” became a substitute for “publics”, “ratings” for “popular approval”, and “opinion polls” for “public debates”. The present Era offers the occasion to reflect on how “audiences” were and are constructed, how they manifest themselves, and what impact these constructions and manifestations have held on our conception, and research, of “publics” (as in the French tradition of “les publics” and “auditoire”), of “mass” and “mob”.