Concepts: Audience

AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT	This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text.
AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS	These are the advance ideas an audience may have about a text. This particularly applies to genre pieces. Don’t forget that producers often play with or deliberately shatter audience expectations.
AUDIENCE FOREKNOWLEDGE	This is the definite information (rather than the vague expectations) which an audience brings to a media product.
AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION	This is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle.
AUDIENCE PLACEMENT	This is the range of strategies media producers use to directly target a particular audience and make them feel that the media text is specially ‘for them’.
AUDIENCE RESEARCH	Measuring an audience is very important to all media institutions. Research is done at all stages of production of a media text, and, once produced, audience will be continually monitored

Source: mediaknowitall.com

Recommended Texts

Links for more information and views on audience theory:

http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/audiencestudies.html – Toward A Framework of Audience Studies
www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/pph9701.html – article on audience by a student at the University of Aberystwyth
www.stevewlb.zen.co.uk/College/Booklets/audiences.htm – Steve Baker’s ‘audience booklet’
www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/efterms.html – a glossary of terms to do with media ‘effects research’
www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/nvdetail.html – a glossary of news values, all of which make assumptions, one way or another, about the audience

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