ABSTRACT
To whom do scholars refer when talking about “the audience”? What is implied about the audience when it is talked about? Whether active or passive, resistant or controlled, sovereign or dominated, “the audience” is often nothing more than the “subject-effect” of institutional discourses on the audience. Scholars, journalists, and policy-makers have much to write and say about the audience. The audience of global entertainment media is often a blank screen that policy-makers, scholars, and others project their own image of an audience upon. The actual audience—the millions of people that watch, consume, and live with and through entertainment media—rarely gets to speak. It is spoken of and spoken for. The “audience”—what it is, who it refers to, what its relationship to entertainment media is—is fluid and objectified (Butsch 2003; Livingston 2004). An audience is constructed through discourses—ways of talking about and representing—about “the audience.” When we talk about the audience, we construct “figures of the audience” (Allor 1996: 209) or ideal type models of relations between global entertainment media and local audiences. Miller et al. (2005) say that the “audience is artificial, a creature of the industry, the state and academia, which proceed to act upon their creation” (32).
