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MEDIA AUDIENCES -MEDIA PRODUCTS?
Virginia Nightingale
The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities of a structuralist way of thinking about media audiences. Mass Media audiences are most often discussed as the destination, the receiver, in a sender-message-receiver system of mass communication in society. This location of audiences seems to hold whether the particular problematic is thought to be the effects of the media, the uses to which media messages are put by media audiences, or the way audiences create meaning from texts (cf. Morley 1980: 9). As receivers, the audience has been thought of as the masses, the general public, marketing targets, commodities, or individuals differing in significant characteristics (e.g., age, sex, ethnic origin, self-esteem). None of these ways of thinking about media audiences actually locates them in the contexts of their relations to the means of cultural production, to the "mass media". In other words I am arguing for a structuralist theorisation of mass media audiences which are capable of exploring the interaction of people with the means of mass cultural production in modern society. The following is, then, a tentative exploration of some of the possibilities of such a theorisation. As such it, inevitably, exhibits certain arbitrariness in the identification of the structuring elements. In attempting to reinstate the audience within the system of mass communication in society, it seems sensible to start by thinking about what is known about the relations between audiences and the "mass media", the industries, the media technologies and the messages/texts, for which they aggregate into being. Initially, then, three relations are proposed as essential for understanding media audiences: audience-industry, audience-medium, and audience-text relations. This classification is a beginning point only for an understanding of the complex issues of audience consciousness (of itself, the media and the nature of
Virginia Nightingale
The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities of a structuralist way of thinking about media audiences. Mass Media audiences are most often discussed as the destination, the receiver, in a sender-message-receiver system of mass communication in society. This location of audiences seems to hold whether the particular problematic is thought to be the effects of the media, the uses to which media messages are put by media audiences, or the way audiences create meaning from texts (cf. Morley 1980: 9). As receivers, the audience has been thought of as the masses, the general public, marketing targets, commodities, or individuals differing in significant characteristics (e.g., age, sex, ethnic origin, self-esteem). None of these ways of thinking about media audiences actually locates them in the contexts of their relations to the means of cultural production, to the "mass media". In other words I am arguing for a structuralist theorisation of mass media audiences which are capable of exploring the interaction of people with the means of mass cultural production in modern society. The following is, then, a tentative exploration of some of the possibilities of such a theorisation. As such it, inevitably, exhibits certain arbitrariness in the identification of the structuring elements. In attempting to reinstate the audience within the system of mass communication in society, it seems sensible to start by thinking about what is known about the relations between audiences and the "mass media", the industries, the media technologies and the messages/texts, for which they aggregate into being. Initially, then, three relations are proposed as essential for understanding media audiences: audience-industry, audience-medium, and audience-text relations. This classification is a beginning point only for an understanding of the complex issues of audience consciousness (of itself, the media and the nature of
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