Definition of Audience

Definition of Audience

Audience is an individual or a group of people who intended to receive the message. Audience is also a group of spectators and listeners, especially at a public event such as a concert. Besides that, audience is the devotes or followers of a public entertainer, lecturer and so on.

Andrew Hart is among many writers, theorists and researches that identify and determine the existence of the audience in relation to the media. According to Andrew Hart, texts need audience in order to realize their potential for meaning. So a text does not have a single meaning but rather a range of possibilities which are defined by both text and by its audience. The meaning is not in text, but in the reading.

According to Nicholas Abercrombie, audiences are not the blank sheets of paper on which media messages can be written; members of an audience will have prior attitudes and beliefs which will determine how effective media messages are.

The theorist in Uses and Gratifications suggested that audience had specific needs and actively turned to the media to consume various texts to satisfaction of these needs. Uses and Gratifications acknowledge that the audience had a choice of texts from which to chose and satisfy their needs.

Blumler and Katz (1974) suggested that there were four mains needs of television audiences that are satisfied by television such as Diversion, Personal Relationships, Personal Identity, and Surveillance. Diversion is a form of escaping from the pressures of everyday. Personal Relationships is where the viewer gains companionship, either with the television characters, or through conversations with others about the television. Personal identity is where the viewer is able to compare their life with the lives of characters and situations on television. Surveillance is where the media are locked upon for a supply of information about what is happening in the world.

There are no effective ways to measure audiences or