Is The Term Audience Still Relevant?

As McQuail (1997) acknowledged, the audience concept is in many ways outdated and its traditional role in communication models has been called into question. However, while suggesting that new terms may need to be developed "for some genuinely new kinds of communication participant groups, perhaps differentiated according to types of new media use" (p. 149), the scholar was in favor of keeping the old concept audience and addressing its different dimensions. These include, for example, the degree of activity or passivity, the degree of interactivity and interchangeability, and the simultaneity of contact with sources.

These dimensions seem useful and can lead to new terms. A team of journalism scholars

who focused on websites affiliated with leading newspapers in ten countries suggested that users were "active recipients" (Hermida, 2011). These users discussed the news and sometimes contributed eyewitness accounts and audio-visual materials, but they had relatively little impact on the selection and processing of news.  Nevertheless, users of social media can be more than active recipients. For example, Papacharissi (2014) showed how journalists and users, including elite and non-elite actors, co-curated and co-created flows of information on Twitter. Professional journalists still have an important role in communication models, but maybe we should talk less about their interactions with the audience and more about an ecosystem where there are different types of actors and interactions.

References

Hermida, A. (2011). Fluid spaces, fluid journalism: The role of the "active recipient" in participatory journalism. In J.B. Singer, A. Hermida, D. Domingo et al. (eds.). Participatory journalism: Guarding open gates on online newspapers. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. New York: Oxford University Press.