ABSTRACT
So, then, to our elusive protagonist, the audience. In contemporary Russia, as we have seen in earlier chapters, the elitist view of television audiences is widespread. Aleksandr Oslon describes viewers as people who ‘gobble down’ (khavaet) whatever they are offered (Oslon 2003: 12). Marina Davydova portrays the viewer as a drug addict incapable of selectivity. Olessia Koltsova completely writes off the influence of viewers on the mass media:
The … ’common people’ hardly have any strategies of influence on mass media at all, since its only resource – information – is temporary, casual. These agents are the weakest; they cannot get access to the mass media on their own, to say nothing of influencing the interpretation of the situation created by them.
