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Media users: from readership to co-creators
“media audience” 8 became used, since new electronic media created a need for an
extension of the commonly understood concept of “audience” defined as a “group of
people before whom a performance of one kind or another takes place”. With the
emergence of electronic media, the performance was no longer displayed in a
common space, it was now mediated and moved from public to private space; in other
words, the “direct” audience was substituted with an audience to whom a
performance was mediated through media technology. The audience did not share the
same physical space, nor did they usually receive the performance act in a public
space (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 2007) but usually in the private spheres of their
homes. Habermas argued that the public sphere and the rational critical debate that
once had existed became reduced to debates behind closed doors in front of the
television. This type implies a new type of public sphere and a passive role of
audience members, not in the sense of interpreting the messages received, but in the
sense of participating and co-creating the content of the performance (something that
will appear with new digital media).
A pessimistic view of media audiences was also held by the other members of the
Frankfurt School 9 . According to their opinion, mass production of cultural products
eroded the public sphere based on rational public debates and initiated the making of
passive consumers. The new electronic media transformed the public sphere so that it
became generally accessible to the masses, but lost its political character. At the same
time, new electronic media were used by a broad public but did not give an
opportunity to react or reply to the content shown to the spectators. This was a
one-way communication that did not allow for a critical response. The quality of the
content presented through media was lost: instead of dealing with the common good,
and issues relevant to the citizens, the media took over roles of ideology formation of
the uncritical spectator, as well as of advertising to a consumerist viewer. The role of
the citizen was transformed into the role of consumer. A re-feudalization of society
emerged; again the public actors provided a show to the spectators that obeyed a
“supernatural” authority. “The aura of personally represented authority returns as an
aspect of publicity” (Habermas, 1989: 201). The vision Habermas had of the public
sphere that emerged with the new electronic media was best represented in the
well-known sentence: “The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in
appearance only” (Habermas, 1989: 171).
This pessimistic view of mass culture, mass media and mass audiences provoked
an intensive debate in the field, connected to the public sphere, electronic media, the
8 At the time, in the 1930s, public opinion polls started to be more utilized, only to become an
accustomed practice by the 1950s.
9 Members like Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin,
associated with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, established at the Institute for
Social Research founded at the University of Frankfurt in 1923.
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